Martin Barker

rdf:langString Martin Barker

rdf:langString Martin Barker

rdf:langString Martin Barker

rdf:langString Martin Barker (20 April 1946 – 8 September 2022) was a British scholar of media studies and cultural studies. He was an Emeritus Professor at Aberystwyth University, having previously taught at the University of the West of England and the University of Sussex. Over the course of his career he wrote or co-edited fifteen books. He was known for being one of the pioneers behind the concept of cultural racism, which he termed "new racism". Barker received an undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1967, after which he lectured in cultural studies at Bristol Polytechnic, later renamed the University of the West of England, from 1969 to 1998. Identifying as a committed socialist and anti-racist, during the 1970s, Barker focused his research on racism, in particular its place in British children's comics. Studying growing hostility to migrants in Britain, he coined the idea of "new racism"—later known as cultural racism—and promoted this through his 1981 book The New Racism. His argument was that the concept of "racism", created in the 1930s to describe biological racism, should be extended to take into account prejudices against people on the basis of cultural difference. In 1995 he gained a DPhil from that university. He then worked as reader in media studies at the University of Sussex from 1998 to 2001, before becoming professor of film and television studies at the University of Aberystwyth, where he remained until 2011, when he became professor emeritus. Much of his work in the 1990s and 2000s focused on media audiences, looking in particular at the audiences for fantasy fiction like The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and Game of Thrones.