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‘Celebrity Big Brother, Human Rights and Popular Culture’

This special issue grew out of the research activities which Gies coordinated as part of the Law and Culture research cluster of the AHRC Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality (a joint initiative of the Law Schools of Keele, Kent and Westminster Universities) in the period 2005-2009. The special issue emerged in response to the public outcry caused in January 2007 by the Celebrity Big Brother race row involving the reality TV star Jade Goody and the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. The show triggered an unprecedented number of complaints to the regulator Ofcom. The theme of the special issue is ‘Governing Celebrity: Multiculturalism, Offensive Television Content and Celebrity Big Brother 2007’. Its contribution lies in the fact that it brought together leading scholars from the media studies field of celebrity and reality television (Holmes and Redmond) and the socio-legal field of media governance and regulation (Gies, Thomas and Varney). While each of these fields is inherently interdisciplinary, they have remained stubbornly insulated from each other. The special issue facilitated a dialogue across these specific disciplinary boundaries, with contributors approaching the topic from the perspective of the consumption politics of race (Thomas), the issue of class and celebrity déclassement (Holmes), Britain’s elusive human rights culture (Gies), the mediation of the Other through food rituals (Redmond) and the specific regulatory framework in which Ofcom operates (Varney). The special issue provides a very good illustration of the kind of interdisciplinary synergies that are needed to put celebrity on the research agenda across the humanities and the social sciences.