Welcome to the website for Steve Redhead, Professor of Cultural Studies in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University in Adelaide in South Australia. Steve is a well known international author and Professor and has worked at numerous universities around the world. Steve lives in Adelaide in South Australia with his wife Professor Tara Brabazon. This website showcases Steve’s output to date – books, chapters in books, articles, podcasts, vodcasts, reviews, social media, all freely downloadable – and rolling reviews of all his eighteen books. It features a regular blog on what he has called ‘Theoretical Times’, his label for the contemporary post-crash cultural condition we live in today. Steve’s new book, also called Theoretical Times, is published in paperback by Emerald Publishing. It is distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Footprint Books. Steve is currently working on two new books: Three Coups, a socio-legal/criminology study of the JFK Assassination, Watergate and Trump Election victory, and New Realisms and New Materialisms, a critical look at how new realisms in methodology and philosophy complement the new materialisms in contemporary theory.
Unpopular Cultures is a surprising book. It is the first attempt to articulate the intersection of law and popular culture…it is vibrant, subversive, erratic – exactly like the culture it maps – and reading it is an experience in itself..having now put the field on the map…we look forward to more in-depth studies from this high priest of legal pop.
This savagely entertaining book…has the feel of catching shifts in style and attitudes as the shifts occur – whether the styles and attitudes are those of the Casuals, who, armed with increasingly sophisticated clothes and weapons, are now, says Redhead, taking not only “ends” but seats in the stands as well (the seats make useful missiles); or whether the attitudes are those of the managers who used to tell their hard men to go in the first 25 seconds for clever wingers, and who now tell them to go for clever blacks. Redhead has a sharp eye for the realities behind the vapid moralisings of TV pundits, sports pages hacks and Thatcher talkalikes.
The authors who most significantly influenced the literature of the 1990s took their inspiration as much from pop music and pop culture as from any literary tradition…their views on the cultures which spawned their work cannot fail to interest.
