Dr Nick Couldry

Nick Couldry

Nick Couldry Reader, in Media, Communications and Culture, Department of Media and Communications; joint Director of the MSc Culture and Society (run jointly with the Department of Sociology). Co-editor of the Media@lse Electronic Working Papers.

Biography

My first degree was in Classics and Philosophy from Oxford University. I have both a Masters and a PhD in Media and Communications obtained at Goldsmiths College, London University, where I was also a lecturer in Communications until December 2000. I joined Media@lse in January 2001.

Research interests

My research interests centre on the long-term impacts of the pervasive mediation of social life. This divides into three more specific areas.
I am interested from a theoretical point of view in how to model the way that the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions affects social life: our values, beliefs and sense of belonging, the authority of media institutions and media people (and the practices that derive from that authority: from celebrity and fandom, to media rituals and media events), as well as the impact of media processes on social and other forms of capital. I have written about this in The Place of Media Power and in articles since, and take this work further in my latest book Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (Routledge, 2003). This interest is also the focus of the option that I teach, MC412 Media, Ritual and Public Life.

Another interest is more closely related to issues of policy and politics in the broadest sense: what resources do media (including new media such as the World Wide Web and digital television) provide to enable people to be connected to wider spaces as citizens and participants in democratic forms? I am closely interested in alternative media practices through which people outside mainstream media institutions try to take media production resources into their own hands, whether as part of political activism or for other reasons (a theme, again, of The Place of Media Power) and a new edited book Contesting Media Power (co-edited with James Curran, 2003); the media activism connected with the anti-globalization movement would be one example. From another angle, I have worked recently on the ethics of mediation: how can we develop a framework for the ethical evaluation of the contribution to our lives made by the mediation process? How can we assess the ethics of all participants to the mediation process, not just media professionals, but any of us who, for example, contribute material to media? A major section of a new book (Listening Beyond the Echoes: Ethics and Agency in a Mediated World, Paradigm Books, USA, forthcoming 2006 is devoted to this).

Finally, my interest in mediation connects to a broader concern with the links between media, space and the trajectories people take across today's increasingly complex cultural environments: above all, what stories do they tell about themselves, as reflexive agents? I wrote about these issues from various angles in Inside Culture and in earlier work on public art; a recent edited collection MediaSpace (co-edited with Anna McCarthy, published January 2004) also addresses this theme in relation to a range of media. In the long term I plan to return to these themes in fresh empirical research into the complexities of everyday taste and reflexivity. This interest links not only with media sociology but also with anthropology, geography and cultural theory more generally.

REALITY TV, OR THE SECRET THEATRE OF NEOLIBERALISM

Research projects and recent reports

As part of my interests in alternative media I am a member of the OurMedia/NuestrosMedios Network of theorists and practictioners, follow link to Our Media.

I am currently engaged in a long-term project on Media and Citizenship; this involved a pilot funded by STICERD in 2001-2 with Ana Langer of Media@lse; from October 2003 I have begun a full-scale project entitled 'Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection' with Sonia Livingstone and Tim Markham, funded under the ESRC / AHRB Cultures of Consumption Programme (for more details, see http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/research/couldry.html and the project's own website http://www.publicconnection.org).

Teaching

I am joint Director of the new MSc Culture and Society (run jointly with the Department of Sociology, first entry 2003).

I also teach an option on Media, Ritual and Public Life (MC412), I am joint convenor of Cultural Theory (SO433) and Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (SO434), and Qualitative Methods of Cultural Analysis (SO444) and involved in various other teaching, including doctoral supervision.

Selected academic publications

Listening Beyond the Echodes: Agency and Ethics in a Mediated World (Paradigm Books, US, forthcoming 2006)

MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in Media Age (co-edited with Anna McCarthy, Routledge, 2004)

Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World (co-edited with James Curran, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003)

Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (Routledge, 2003)

The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (Routledge, 2000)

Inside Culture: Reimagining the Method of Cultural Studies (Sage, 2000)

as well as articles in Theory and Society, Journal of Consumer Culture, Media Culture & Society, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies / Critical Methodologies, and many other journals and edited collections.

Forthcoming publications

Plus the following selected articles which are in press:

Contact details

Dr Nick Couldry
Room S216
Department of Media and Communications
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London
WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7955 6243
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7955 7248
E-mail: n.couldry@lse.ac.uk

If you are coming to the LSE, you will find my office on the second floor of St Clements Building. For details, click here .

Last updated on 27 October, 2005