Students on screen: shifting representations of the student on British screens since 2010

As the number of university students in Britain has expanded so has public interest in them, expressed across a range of media. This talk will explore how the idea of ‘the student’ is conceptualised, constructed, and negotiated in recent British television documentary, drama and comedy genres. Conceiving of television as a space in which people experience and engage with complex social understandings, we examine how the representation of the student on the British television screen has shifted in recent years from positioning students predominantly as fun-loving, promiscuous and irresponsible to emphasising the ways in which they are vulnerable and increasingly politically charged subjects, whilst universities themselves have come to be represented as predatory and profit driven enterprises. Please be aware that this talk includes reference to both fictional and factual televisual coverage of the topics of student suicide and sexual assault.