Formerly focusing on ‘populist nostalgia’ (title still in discussion to be altered), my doctoral research is now focused on the nostalgic sentiment that has emerged across the neoliberal world since the onset of the Global Financial Crisis, and how this can be read in the contexts of British film and television. Whilst populism still remains a crucial part of the discussion, I realised that this nostalgic sentiment I was interested in went beyond that. 

Instead, my focus turned to observations around the ‘why’ of this nostalgic upswell – locating it in the “lost futures” and difficulties with approaching non-hegemonic Histories that neoliberal logic has upheld, and likewise has exacerbated since the Global Financial Crisis via austerity measures and the trend towards denationalisation, privatisation, and the commodified ‘individual’. This is an approach influenced by the discussions of Mark Fisher, Jacques Derrida, Zygmunt Bauman, and Svetlana Boym – amongst many others. And whilst nostalgia remains a highly-discussed topic within contemporary film and television, especially in British, there is little general coverage on the phenomenon in specific relation to this post-GFC upswell.

As such, my thesis focuses on three texts – the Downton Abbey franchise (2010-onwards), The Great British Bake Off (2010-onwards), and Bait (dir. Mark Jenkin, 2019) – and how they navigate a relationship to this post-GFC nostalgic sentiment. Though far from the only way to categorise this sentiment, each text is distinguished via a focus on conservative (Downton Abbey), ‘anti-nostalgic’ (GBBO), and radical nostalgia (Bait). Emphasis on conservative and radical nostalgia seeks to place neoliberalism at the heart of this debate, by locating how each text’s nostalgic attachments respectively perpetuate and challenge the neoliberal order. ‘Anti-nostalgic’ nostalgia is covered here as a way to address those sentiments which express nostalgia but in a way that attempts to eschew the falsely negative accusations that nostalgia holds – and as such, perform an act of denialism which aligns it with conservative nostalgia. This approach allows these texts to take on not just a reflective or representational quality, but an actively agentive one. 

This research is grounded in the broader philosophies of post-structuralism and anti-neoliberalism – whilst likewise taking cues from areas such as postcolonial studies, affect theory, formalism, and media archaeology. Within the disciplines, my thesis touches upon the studies of genre and ‘heritage’, reality television, transnational media, media production, aesthetics, and intersectional media.