Christine Barnes

Celebrity Governance: Exploring sites of celebrity power in the UK

Christine's academic interests are in new sites of power and governance in everyday life, specifically on the power of media and celebrity to construct knowledge and connect the public to wider global issues. Her PhD research considers the mediated forms of power celebrity and the media may have to operate as mediated tools of governance within the spaces of food and charitable care. 

Member of the Environment, Politics and Development research group.

Christine graduated from King’s College London with a first class honours BSc in Geography in 2009. She was jointly awarded the Head of Departments prize and was awarded a King’s myScholarship award. Her dissertation, titled ‘The Celebrity experts? Exploring issues of credibility and expertise in celebrity endorsed charity campaigns’ was nominated for the Alfred Steers Essay Prize at the Royal Geographic Society. She then completed an MSc in Environment, Politics and Globalisation at King’s College London in 2010, graduating with a distinction and was granted a Department Bursary. Her dissertation explored the role of celebrity chefs in UK food politics. She has taught extensively throughout her PhD, helps co-ordinate the EPD seminar series, as well as sitting as the Phd rep on several department and school committees. 

The pervasive nature of celebrity is seeping into areas of society from international development to climate change in ways that demand that celebrity is considered as a serious governance actor. This project considers the power of celebrity in two key sites: celebrity chefs and food politics, and celebrity-charity relations and care. The project adds to geographic understandings of agro-food politics, care and affect, which has largely neglected the importance of media discourses. The study conceptualises celebrity as exercising a new form of topological power. The complex and problematic relations between audiences and celebrity are examined, revealing simultaneous moments of possibility and resistance within the politicised spaces of food and care.

This reseach is funded by a King's College London Graduate School Scholarship.

Teaching. 

Department of Geography, King's College London

Undergraduate:

1st Year. Geography Tutorials: Critical Thinking and Techniques. Tutor in Human and Physical Geography. 

2nd Year. Fieldwork in Human Geography. San Franscisco Fieldwork project leader.

3rd Year: Current Research in Geography. Guest Lecturer.

Masters: Consumption, Globalisation and Sustainability. Guest Lecturer.

Department of Geography, London School of Economics.

1st Year. Sustainable Development. Teaching Assistant.