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Events

Find out more about staff briefings and events from the Education, Quality and Enhancement team.

Upcoming events

We have no events scheduled at the moment, and will add details when our next events are confirmed.

Past events

The John Hamilton Lifelong Learning lecture programme

John Hamilton bequeathed a fund to the University of Liverpool which came to the University’s Centre for lifelong Learning in 2007, following his death the previous year. The trust was intended to be used to support and promote the education of working-class people.

Supported by the John Hamilton trust, the Centre for Lifelong Learning ran an annual lecture in his name: The ‘John Hamilton Life Long Learning Lecture’.

Past lectures

  • 2012 lecture. 'Being Human. Becoming a Person'. Speaker: Steven Rose
  • 2013 lecture. ‘Inequality: the enemy between us’. Speaker: Kate Pickett.
  • 2014 lecture. ‘Art Galleries Should Be More Like Newspapers’. Speaker: Bob and Roberta Smith
  • 2016 lecture. 'Leaving Reality: The UK and the rest of Europe'. Professor Danny Dorling

The John Hamilton legacy - 2024 and beyond

In reinstituting the John Hamilton Lifelong Learning lecture, we hope to provide a bridge between the University and the people of the city in which it is located. The lecture is a way of celebrating a local figure who made a contribution to education and the University, and a way of demonstrating how much we in the University value our city and the students amongst us who hail from Liverpool.

The John Hamilton Lifelong Learning lecture programme relaunched on 30 October 2024 with a lecture held at FACT Liverpool.

The speaker was Professor Beth Johnson, Professor of TV and Media at the University of Leeds, watch a recording of the lecture below.

Read more about the 2024 lecture

The title of the lecture was ‘Class Dismissed? Work and inequities behind the scenes of British TV and film.’

Beth’s talk was comprehensive, covering the topics of ‘credit crunch commissioning’, the work of the Policy and Evidence Centre, the ‘What’s On? Rethinking class in the television industry 2023-26’ research project looking into representations of class in television and the media (in partnership with the BBC and Channel 4), the research-led film series ‘Industry Voices’ and what the future holds.

Dramatic tropes in television display representations of working life in various ways. In 2014 Channel 4’s Benefits Street was launched onto our television screens, charting the lives of the inhabitants of James Turner Street in Birmingham. Branded as ‘poverty porn’ by a hostile tabloid press, the programme expressed the mood of resentment across the most deprived sections of British society and captured popular narratives about the economic state of the country. Today, BBC 2’s Alma’s Not Normal captures the pathos and humour in the personal and family life of Alma, a working-class woman who aspires to being a successful actor.

Beth talked about research by the national Policy and Evidence Centre that focuses upon the inequalities that continue to mar how class and ethnicity is represented in television and film.

“There are longstanding inequalities in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. It is well known that the workforces and audiences have uneven representations of social classes and ethnic groups.” (Policy and Evidence Centre)

She also shared insights from the ‘What’s On? Rethinking Class in the television industry 2023-6’ research project being undertaken in partnership with Channel 4, the BBC and Candour Productions (Leeds). This work, addressing the questions ‘Who produces television drama?’, ‘What is made?’, and ‘How is class represented and understood?’ uses network ethnographies, fieldwork interviews, textual analysis and audience analysis and data to reveal insights into the interactions of representation, production and reception.

And finally in Industry Voices, Beth shared the recorded testimonies of those working in the UK screen industries, telling their stories of having to struggle against barriers connected to their identity characteristics to find their place in an industry that often keeps them in the wings.

This was a compelling lecture, with important insights into the ways in which our television and film industries continue to reproduce social inequality.

Thank you to Professor Beth Johnson.