Write for us!

Contributing to the website

The research team welcome guest contributions to the CelebYouth website from other people who are interested in celebrity and popular culture; young people’s aspirations and educational transitions; inequalities of class and gender; and/or the links between these.

We welcome guest contributions on these topics from anyone – students, doctoral researchers, teachers, academics, writers, artists, parents. They could be informed by your own research in this area or your experiences as a teacher; inspired by a relevant book you’ve read or a film you’ve seen; or you might like to respond to a recent news or policy issue. We also welcome contributions which talk to other posts we have written about our research.

We publish original pieces so please don’t send us anything you’ve published somewhere else first. The only other condition is that what you write needs to fit with the broadly sociological, feminist and critical approach of the website.

If you’re not sure whether your idea would fit then please contact the team through Heather Mendick (at heathermendick@yahoo.co.uk ) before you start writing. We can’t promise to publish anything so this could save you time. And, even if we do like your idea, we may ask for edits before we publish what you’ve written.

Here’s a quick guide to writing a blog entry:

• Make sure your blog opens with a concise and catchy paragraph: this should grab the attention of the reader and contain the key ideas or arguments you make or engage with because that’s all that will appear on the home page with a ‘continue reading’ button which directs readers to the full post.
• Don’t make it too long: somewhere between 500-1000 words is ideal. We accept longer articles too but ask that you use subheadings for these to break them up. Write in short paragraphs where you can.
• Write for a general audience: Try to use a friendly, accessible (even personal) style and avoid sounding too academic. Blog posts are a different beast to journal articles, and while they can provide a sounding board for ideas that might then be developed into an academic paper and can help push your work to a wider or different audience, blogs do different things and need to be accessible to a broader audience – our website is for everyone from school students to academics.
• Keep it simple, avoid jargon and steer clear of references in Harvard / Parenthetical style.  While it’s important to cite other people’s work, instead provide a hyperlink from their name to their homepage, academia page or article/ book.
• Also include hyperlinks throughout when you’re talking about TV shows, news stories, celebrities or other people/ideas/words that might need looking up. We’d also welcome hyperlinks to other blog entries on the CelebYouth website. Please add your hyperlinks to the text document you send us.
• Send images to include with your blog entry: links to online videos are great too.
• Send us keywords to go with your blog: you can see some of the existing and popular ones in the ‘tag cloud’ on the front page.