Staff Profiles

Books

• Goody A, Mackay A, Ed., Reading Westworld, Palgrave Macmillan (2019)
  ISBN: 9783030145149 eISBN: 9783030145156
  Abstract

  Reading Westworld is the first volume to explore the cultural, textual and theoretical significance of the hugely successful HBO TV seriesWestworld. The essays engage in a series of original enquiries into the central themes of the series including conceptions of the human and posthuman, American history, gaming, memory, surveillance, AI, feminism, imperialism, free will and contemporary capitalism. In its varied critical engagements with the genre, narratives and contexts of Westworld, this volume explores the show’s wider and deeper meanings and the questions it poses, as well considering how Westworld reflects on the ethical implications of artificial life and technological innovation for our own futurity. With critical essays that draw on the interdisciplinary strengths and productive intersections of media, cultural and literary studies, Reading Westworld seeks to respond to the show’s fundamental question; “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” It will be of interest to students, academics and general readers seeking to engage with Westworld and the far-reaching questions it poses about our current engagements with technology. 
  

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• Flynn S, Mackay A, Ed., Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture, Palgrave Macmillan (2019)
  ISBN: 9783030003708 eISBN: 9783030003715
  Abstract

  This edited collection examines the culture of surveillance as it is expressed in the built environment. Expanding on discussions from previous collections; Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves (2017) and Surveillance, Race, Culture (2018), this book seeks to explore instances of surveillance within and around specific architectural entities, both historical and fictitious, buildings with specific social purposes and those existing in fiction, film, photography, performance and art. Providing new readings of, and expanding on Foucault’s work on the panopticon, these essays examine the role of surveillance via disparate fields of enquiry, such as the humanities, social sciences, technological studies, design and environmental disciplines. Surveillance, Architecture and Control seeks to engender new debates about the nature of the surveilled environment through detailed analyses of architectural structures and spaces; examining how cultural, geographical and built space buttress and produce power relations. The various essays address the ongoing fascination with contemporary notions of surveillance and control.--Supplied by publisher.

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• Flynn S, Mackay A, Ed., Surveillance, Race, Culture, Palgrave Macmillan (2018)
  ISBN: 9783319779379 eISBN: 9783319779386
  Abstract

  This collection of essays engages with a wide range of disciplines including art, performance, film and literature, to examine the myriad effects of contemporary surveillance on our cultural psyche. The volume expertly articulates the manner in which cultural productions have been complicit in watching, seeing and purporting to ‘know’ race. In our increasingly mediated world, our sense of community is becoming progressively virtual, and surveillant technologies impact upon subjectivity, resulting in multiple forms of artistic and cultural expression. As such, art, film, and literature provide a lens for the reflection of sociocultural concerns. In Surveillance, Race, Culture Flynn and Mackay skilfully draw together a diverse range of contributions to investigate the fundamental question of exactly how surveillant technologies have informed our notions of race, identity and belonging. 
  

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• Flynn S, Mackay A, Ed., Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves, Palgrave Macmillan (2017)
  ISBN: 9783319490847
  Abstract

  In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, watching and being watched are the salient features of the lives depicted in many of our cultural productions. This collection examines surveillance as it is portrayed in art, literature, film and popular culture, and makes the connection between our sense of ‘self’ and what is ‘seen’. In our post-panoptical world which purports to proffer freedom of movement, technology notes our movements and habits at every turn. Surveillance seeps out from businesses and power structures to blur the lines of security and confidentiality. This unsettling loss of privacy plays out in contemporary narratives, where the ‘selves’ we create are troubled by surveillance. This collection will appeal to scholars of media and cultural studies, contemporary literature, film and art and American studies.   
  

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Book chapters

• Mackay A, 'Architecture and American Horror Story: Reading "Murder House" on murderous bodies' in Susan Flynn, Antonia Mackay (ed.), Surveillance, architecture and control : Discourses on spatial culture, Palgrave Macmillan (2019)
  ISBN: 9783030003708 eISBN: 9783030003715
  Abstract Using theories of feminist corporeality, and drawing on the works of Beatriz Colomina (Sexuality and Space), Elizabeth Grosz (Volatile Bodies) and Gilles Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus), this chapter seeks to read American Horror Story’s first season, “Murder House”, through the architecture of the home. In doing so, this chapter intends to read the effect of the haunted house on the bodies who reside within its frames, and therefore the formation of identity. This chapter argues that a reading of the architectural environment in “Murder House” provides the impetus for both seemingly gender normative and also non-normative behaviour (murderous, demonic and disfigured), suggesting it is the architectural space of the renovated Victorian mansion which can maim, morph and manipulate bodies into conforming to familial normality, or else transgress into heterogeneous (and potentially non-human) identities.Website 
• Mackay A, 'Cops and incarceration: Constructing racial narratives in reality TV’s prisons' in Flynn S, Mackay A (ed.), Surveillance, Race, Culture, Palgrave Macmillan (2018)
  ISBN: 9783319779379 eISBN: 9783319779386
  Abstract

  In line with Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacrum, this chapter investigates the hyperconsumerism and commercialisation of bodies in reality television programs, specifically those set in American prisons. Using popular shows such as Cops and Lockup, the analysis contained here examines the manner in which African American male bodies are both framed and objectified by the surveillance of television cameras. With reference to both Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) and Gilles Deleuze’s writings on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1986), the analysis unearths the role of the surveillant gaze in determining racial narratives and framing bodily identity.
  

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