Dr Joshua Bluteau

About

Dr Bluteau is a social anthropologist with a specific interest in men, masculinities, material culture, dress, identity, and social media. He previously devised, developed, and led the MSc Global Public Health at Coventry University and is now course director for the BSc Public Health practitioner apprenticeship.

Within the suite of public health courses at Coventry, Joshua leads a range of modules that span digital communication, medical anthropology, and specialist apprenticeship skills. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and holds fellowships with the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Royal Society for Public Health.

Joshua is currently supervising doctoral candidates in Clinical Psychology (D.Clin.Psych) and is open to accepting PhD students whose research interest intersect with his own.

Career overview

Dr Bluteau joined Coventry University in 2020 following academic posts at the University of Manchester as a Lecturer and the University of St Andrews as a Tutor in their respective departments of Social Anthropology. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews.

Research

Dr Bluteau’s research focusses on employing anthropological analysis and ethnographic fieldwork to explore two distinct, but overlapping strands of ongoing research:

• Digital Anthropology – With a specific focus on social media platforms, digital self-representation, selfie-culture, masculinities online, digital temporalities, hyperreality, the digital lens, construction of multiple selves, mental health & wellbeing online, image manipulation, digital research methods.
• Anthropology of Dress & Fashion – With a specific focus on menswear, tailoring, bespoke, Savile Row, craft & production, notions of Britishness, masculinities, visual anthropology, material culture studies, archival studies, the dandy, heritage, construction of self, performance & performativity.

Employing a lens that focusses on menswear, craft, and masculine self-representation/performance both on and offline, Dr Bluteau explores how men in the 21st century craft their own performance of self through the garments they choose to wear and the way in which they engage with the digital world all around them. This diverse research has allowed Dr Bluteau to develop a set of innovate and engaging research led teaching within the Public Health field that encourages students to explore the oft neglected areas of men & masculinities, and the realities of social media use within the contemporary field of public health.

He is the author of the monograph Dressing Up: Menswear in the Age of Social Media (Berghahn 2022), as well as various articles, reviews, and book chapters.

External activities

Dr Bluteau has been invited to present his scholarly work in a range of high-profile settings including the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford, Manchester Art Gallery, and the Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton. He acts as a peer reviewer for more than 15 international renowned academic journals including American Ethnologist, Social Media + Society, and Men & Masculinities, as well as for various publishers of academic books. He is an active member of the AHRC-funded Locating Menswear Network and has presented at numerous international conferences. He is also an editorial board member of TEXTILE: Clothing and Culture, and has been interviewed as a subject expert for GQ magazine.

Publications and press

Books

• (2022) Dressing Up: Menswear in the age of Social Media. New York: Berghahn

Journal Articles

• (2026) ‘Ethnography is dead, long live ChatGPT!?: An Anthropological experiment with generative AI to find the ‘soul’ of the machine’. Journal of Creative Research Methods.

• (2026) ‘A Fashion Anthropologist on eBay: Locating, Bidding, Collecting,

  and Ethnographically Wearing Second-hand Menswear’. Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion, Special Issues: Locating Menswear 12(1&2), 81-98.

  (2025) ‘Tales from the Field: Giving Voice to my Digital Self’. Ethnography (Online First).

• (2025) ‘Crafting the Digital Self: Exploring Instagram self-portraiture as an Anthropological Endeavor’. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 54(4), 506-533

• (2025) ‘Thick Poetry: Soho after Dark’. Anthropology and Humanism 50(1)

• (2024) ‘Fractal Time in the Digital World of Instagram: A Kaleidoscope of Infinite Presents’. Anthropology in Action 31(3), 18-29.

• (2023) ‘Turning Around the Camera: Self-portraits of an Anthropologist on Instagram’ Ethnography 27(1), 87-101.

• (2022) ‘Uncertain Masculinities: Hyperpolymediation and the Advent of (the) Post-particular Man among well-dressed me on Instagram’. Journal of Bodies, Sexualities and Masculinities 3(2), 32-53.

• (2021) ‘Gazing on invisible men: Introducing the gallery gaze to establish that (in)visibility is in the eye of the beholder at Westminster Menswear Archive’. Journal of Material Culture 27(2), 192-216.

• (2020) with P. Bluteau ‘Call of Interprofessional Duty: An Ethnographically Informed Discussion on Preparing Students to be Digitally Resilient’. Journal of Interprofessional Care 35(5), 662-667.

• (2019) ‘Legitimising Digital Anthropology through Immersive Cohabitation: Becoming an Observing Participant in a Blended Digital Landscape’. Ethnography 22(2), 267-285.

Reviews

• (2026) ‘Tailoring an Image’. Fashion Theory (Online First).

• (2023) ‘The Peacock Revolution: Men’s Fashion from 1966 to 1970’. Fashion Theory 27(5), 745-751.

• (2023) ‘Undercover – From Necessity to Luxury: The Evolution of Face Coverings During COVID-19’. Fashion Theory 27(1), 157-164.

Chapters in Books

• (forthcoming) ‘The hyperreal tailor: Digital Reciprocity and Post-digital Bodies in Instagram’, in Jane Tynan (ed) The Palgrave Handbook of Fashion and the Body (Palgrave Macmillan).

• (2021) ‘The Devil is in the Detail: Why Men Still Wear Suits’, in Shaun Cole and Miles Lambert (eds) Dandy Style: 250 Years of British Men’s Fashion (Yale University Press).

Other Contributions

• (2026) ‘Joshua M. Bluteau on his book, Dressing Up’. Interview by Emerson Yuan-Jhen Lee. CaMP Anthropology Blog, 26 January 2026.

• (2024) ‘Clothing’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Virtual Issue).

• (2024) ‘Ethnographic Wearing’. Clothing Research: Wardrobe Studies Library Blog. Oslo Metropolitan University.