Dr Karen Ross, Coventry University, UK

Subversions in the boyzone: women, politics and media in Northern Ireland

Guest lecture: Friday 17 December, 2 pm, Unioninkatu 37, Faculty of Social Sciences, room 1055 (tiedekunnan kokoushuone)

This paper focuses on a very particular group of women – Members of the Legislative Assembly in Northern Ireland – and argues that even elite women are targets of the (mostly male) media’s proclivities to trivialize and undermine the contribution they make to society. If news is a commodity and we are all consumers, then how women politicians are ‘sold’ to us in qualitative terms is as important as how often they appear in the news: volume matters but context matters more. Informed by interviews with women MLAs, this paper argues that women parliamentarians are often rendered invisible by the media’s lack of interest in them, that they find it hard to establish casual relations with journalists, but that increasingly, they are developing proactive strategies with which to engage with news media on their own terms. Whilst not downplaying the considerable difficulties which fact women parliamentarians, I argue that being media savvy is a crucial tool in their survive and succeed repertoire.

Dr Karen Ross

Reader in Mass Communication and
Director, Centre for Communication, Culture
and Media Studies
Coventry School of Art and Design
Coventry University
Priory Street
Coventry CV1 5FB, UK
tel +44 (0) 2476 887443
fax +44 (0) 2476 887440
email < k.ross@coventry.ac.uk >

www.coventry.ac.uk/ccmr

Karen Ross is Reader in Mass Communication and Director of the Centre for Media, Arts and Performance. She is currently a visiting professor at the School of Politics, Queens University Belfast (2001-2004). She has written extensively on issues of in/equality in communication and culture and her previous books include: Women and Media (with Carolyn Byerly, 2004) Media and Audiences (with Virginia Nightingale, 2003); Mapping the Margins: Identity Politics and Media (2003); Women, Politics, Media (2002); Women, Politics and Change (2001); Black Marks: Minority Ethnic Audiences and Media (2001); Managing Equal Opportunities in Higher Education (with Diana Woodward, 2000); and Black and White Media (1996). She is currently working on a pan-European project focused on gender and reporting the European Elections 2004, as well as a further study of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition.