Martin Barker

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.

In the 70s and 80s Barker was an early scholar to take seriously comic books as cultural artefacts, writing a number of books and articles on the subject and ranging from the US pre-code horror comics of the 1950s (and the campaigns to censor them), to more contemporaneous campaigns to ban the British Action comic in the 70s, and sociological analyses of 'girls' comics/magazines such as Jackie and Bunty, the 'funnys' (Beano, Buster, Shiver and Shake), and action / horror comics (2000 AD, Scream!).

Barker's interest with censorship began with comics but quickly spread to timely early research on 'video nasties', then film more generally (Child's Play, Crash, Human Centipede) and the roots and justifications of media censorship through what he deemed 'common sense' claims of 'media effects'. This culminated in a major audience research project for the British national film and video game censorship body the BBFC in the early 2000s.

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, and moved to the Film and Television department of the University of East Anglia. Much of his work in the 1990s and 2000s focused on media audiences, looking in particular at the audiences for science fiction texts such as Judge Dredd and Alien and fantasy fiction like The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and Game of Thrones.