Before starting on the CelebYouth project,  Aisha was vaguely familiar with some of our case study celebrities, though she knew very little about them. She had heard of Kate Middleton, Prince Harry, Emma Watson, Will Smith, Katie Price, Tom Daley, Beyonce and Justin Bieber. However, this project introduced her to Kim Kardashian, Nicki Minaj, Mario Balotelli and Bill Gates. Over the course of three months of working closely with the celebrity case studies in coding data including their music videos, newspaper articles about them, their biographies and Twitter feeds she became increasingly familiar with these celebrity personalities and their mediation. In this post Aisha explores her journey as a researcher and the ways in which she responded to specific celebrities. She shares how the process of the research impacted on her perceptions towards celebrities, using Katie Price and Nicki Minaj as examples.

Aisha is an avid footballer and has been capped three times for the British Muslim women’s football team.  Aisha is CEO and founder of an inter-faith sports charity All Sports Women.  The charity was established to encourage cross-cultural dialogue through sports participation, with the hope of using sport as a means to bridge the gap between different faith groups and cultures.  Aisha continues to challenge stereotypical notions of the ‘Asian woman’ through her academic research and community involvement.  In this post Aisha tells us a little bit more about her research.

Recent comments by blogger Brent Blake that Prince Harry is ‘more real than most people you know’ echo sentiments in our interviews with young people that Harry is ‘a normal guy’. But what does it mean for a millionaire British royal to be seen as ‘ordinary’? In this blog post, Laura reflects on initial analysis of our group interview and case study data, arguing that Harry’s performance of ordinariness serves a powerful rhetorical function in erasing oppression and justifying continuing national and international inequality.

On 15th October we held an interim workshop in which we shared our findings so far with practitioners drawn from a range of fields, including teaching, youth work, media and careers education. In the lovely surroundings of C4CC and with delicious food provided by Itadaki Zen, we discussed connections between our work and ways that findings from CelebYouth could be made useful for practitioners working with young people. Above you can see photographs of the event taken by Brunel’s Sally Trussler. You can watch videos of our presentations at the event below…

We’re now about half way through the group interviews with young people aged 14 to 17. When we finish next term we will have talked to about 150 people across six schools in London, the South West and the North West of England. All school names used are pseudonyms. From these data we are going to select 12 celebrities to explore as case studies – delving into the discourses of aspiration that feature in talk about them. In a recent meeting we came up with this list of 12 based on the first half of the interviews…