ӣƵ

Professor Lisa Blackman

Lisa works at the intersection of body studies, media and cultural theory, particularly subjectivity and embodiment.

Staff details

Professor Lisa Blackman

Position

Professor in Media and Communications

School

Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Email

Contact Lisa Blackman

Lisa Blackman works at the intersection of body studies, media psychology, and media and cultural theory. Her research focuses upon the broad areas of affect, subjectivity, the body and embodiment. She also has a keen interest in mental health research and activism and was one of the early pioneers of the Hearing Voices Movement. She has published six books across these areas and has developed modules in the department reflecting these interests. She came to the Department of MCCS in 1994 to develop critical media psychology with Professor Valerie Walkerdine, who she continues to collaborate with as Co-Editor of the journal 'Subjectivity' (also see 'Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies', 2001, Palgrave). Lisa was a Co-Head of Department from 2016-2019.

Her work in the area of embodiment and voice hearing has been recognised and commended for its innovative approach to mental health research and it has been acclaimed by the Hearing Voices Network, Intervoice, and has been taken up in professional psychiatric contexts ('Hearing Voices: Embodiment and Experience', 2001, Free Association Books). She is currently a Co-Investigator on a large interdisciplinary Australian Research Council research project called,  led by Renata Kokanovic.

Her recent research is at the intersection of body studies and affect studies, and she has published two books in these areas: 'Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation', (2012, Sage), and  (2019. Bloomsbury). She is also the Editor of the journal Body & Society (Sage). Her current research project charts the broken genealogy between narcissistic storytelling, military and psychological torture technologies and post-truth communication strategies. It is set within the context of three interrelated pandemics, Covid-19, domestic abuse, and systemic racism, and the politics of Brexit and Trumpism. It will culminate in a forthcoming book titled, 'Abuse Assemblages: Power, Post-Truth and Strategic Deception'.

She has been a member of the Centre for Feminist Research at ӣƵ since its inception and has been a Co-Director since 2016. She was the Principal Investigator on a British Academy funded project, 'Cultures of Consent: Examining the complexity of sexual misconduct and power within Universities' with Dr Yasmin Gunaratnam (Co-investigator) and Chloe Turner (Research Assistant).

Teaching

Lisa is currently the Co-convenor of the MA Media and Communications.

She also developed and teaches a third year/MA option, Embodiment and Experience, that has been running since 1998. The second edition of the book, 'The Body', that accompanies the module is to be published next year with Routledge (2021). The first edition was published in 2008 helping to inaugurate the transdisciplinary field of body studies.

Areas of supervision

Lisa supervises students across a range of interests, which cross media and cultural studies, body studies, and science studies. Currently she supervises students working within the field of affect studies and mediality; documentary film and feminist archives; and Feeling Kinship and Queer Image-Making, a Decolonial Approach. 

She has supervised 13 students to completion, which include theses in the areas of performance and affect; the intergenerational transmission of memory and diaspora; queer theory and transfeminisms; postfeminism and subjectivity; chick-lit - young women and sexualisation; the New Biologies (the microbiome and epigenetics); disaster journalism, suggestion and affect; Fukishima and Hauntological Analysis.

She is interested in supervising students across the broad areas of affect studies, body studies, media psychology, mental health, and hauntological approaches to archives and data analysis.

Publications and research outputs

Book

  • Blackman, Lisa. 2026. Grey Media: A Psychopolitics of Deception. Goleta, California: Punctum Books.
  • Blackman, Lisa. 2021. The Body: The Key Concepts (Second edition). Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 9781350109452
  • Blackman, Lisa. 2019. Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781350047044

Edited Journal

  • Blackman, Lisa, ed. 2010. Affect. Special issue of Body & Society, Body & Society, 16(1). 1357-034X
  • Blackman, Lisa and Cromby, John, eds. 2007. Affect and Feeling (International Journal of Critical Psychology), International Journal of Critical Psychology, 21. 1471 7646
  • Blackman, Lisa, ed. 2003. Spirituality (International Journal of Critical Psychology), Critical Psychology: The International Journal of Critical Psychology, (8). 1471-4167

Book Section

  • Blackman, Lisa. 2025. Hauntological Structures of Communication and Feeling: Making Space for the Non-Rational. In: Bretton Varga, ed. Hauntological Social Studies: More-than-Human Deviances, Imbrications, and Proliferations of Possibility. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, pp. 211-224. ISBN 9783031918780
  • Blackman, Lisa. 2025. Queering Media Suggestion from Mass Hysteria to AI Deception: inventing imaginaries for more just and equitable media futures. In: Annette Hill; Simon Dawes and Joke Hermes, eds. A Critical Media Imaginaries Playbook. Bristol: Intellect.
  • Blackman, Lisa. 2023. Broken Narratives, Listening in and through another's voices. In: Rachel Fensham; Tyne Sumner,; Signe Ravn; Ashley Barnwell and Danny Butt, eds. Small Data is Beautiful. Melbourne: Grattan Street Press. ISBN 9780645481327

Article

  • Seal, Emma-Louise; Kokanović, Renata; Borovica, Tamara and Blackman, Lisa. 2026. Queering the diagnostic trajectory of borderline personality disorder. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness & Medicine, ISSN 1363-4593
  • Borovica, Tamara; Kokanović, Renata; Seal, Emma Louise; Flore, Jacinthe; Boydell, Katherine; Blackman, Lisa and Hayes, Laura. 2026. What does leisure have to do with mental health – arts, creative and leisure practices and living with mental distress. Leisure Studies, 45(1), pp. 1-15. ISSN 0261-4367
  • Blackman, Lisa. 2025. Gaslighting-as-Media. MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, ISSN 2691-1566

Conference or Workshop Item

  • Blackman, Lisa. 2017. 'Carpa5 01.09.2017 Keynote Lisa Blackman'. In: Carpa 5 Keynote Professor Lisa Blackman. University of the Arts, Finland.
  • Reckitt, Helena; Blackman, Lisa; Wakeford, Nina and Fisher, Jennifer. 2016. 'Affect and Curating: Feeling the Curatorial'. In: Affect and Curating: Feeling the Curatorial. Whitechapel Gallery, London, United Kingdom 19 January 2017.
  • Blackman, Lisa. 2016. '“Academia is down at the moment; please try later” (Lisa Blackman)'. In: Affective Relationality. Freie University, Berlin, Germany.

Audio

  • Harris, Adrian and Blackman, Lisa. 2024. Interwoven Embodiment: A Passionate Call to Wholeness.
  • Blackman, Lisa. 2022. What Kind of Body Does Our Current Society Demand? (Podcast).

Digital

  • Blackman, Lisa. 2025. Living in Queer Cancer World: Our Stories.

Film/Video

  • Blackman, Lisa. 1997. ‘Inside Looking Out: Personal Perspectives’.

Research Interests

Her current research interests are in the areas of affect and contagion (particularly in the areas of social media); experimentation across art, science and humanities; media aesthetics; critical neuroscience; mediation. She is particularly interested in phenomena which have puzzled scientists, artists, literary writers and the popular imagination for centuries, including automatic writing, voice hearing, suggestion and automatism. Lisa is part of a Wellcome-funded project, "" and will be specifically collaborating on a subproject "Voices Beyond the Self" to run from 2017-2020.