Academics are increasingly judged by metrics from the amount of external money they bring in to the scores they get from students. Critical among these are journal articles: how many articles, the rankings of the journals in which they are published, the number of times they are cited, and so on. So there is a lot at stake in assigning authorship of articles from collaborative research projects like this one. In this post, Heather and Kim share CelebYouth’s approach to authorship.

Awards ceremonies are fascinating sites of analysis for those studying celebrity. While increasingly staged and manipulated, these ceremonies continue to offer the public the chance to catch a glimpse of famous people ‘being themselves’, promising us a rare insight into who they ‘really are’ behind their star image – from the red carpet interviews or falls (see Jennifer Lawrence) to candid shots of after party revelry. In this post Kim and Heather focus on one of the more rehearsed aspects of Awards shows – the acceptance speech. Here celebrities get a chance to represent themselves – as generous in acknowledging the co-workers, as family men and women, as political – as when Marlon Brando refused to attend the Academy Awards and sent Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American civil rights activist to speak in his place as a protest against the treatment of American Indians by the film industry. Here we focus on a neglected gem of a speech from this year’s Academy Awards, that by Matthew McConaughey, which contained the remarkable revelation that he is his own role model.