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Professor Lee Edwards

Professor Lee Edwards

Professor of Strategic Communications and Public Engagement

Department of Media and Communications

Telephone
+44 20 7107 5248
Email
l.edwards2@lse.ac.uk
Room No
FAW 6.01E
orcid
0000-0001-6542-1234
Connect with me

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Languages
English, German
Key Expertise
critical public relations, promotional culture, deliberation and copyright

About me

Please note Professor Edwards will be on sabbatical and research leave during Winter, Spring and Autumn Terms 2025. See term dates.

Lee Edwards is Professor of Strategic Communications and Public Engagement in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.  

She teaches about strategic communications from a socio-cultural perspective, engaging with questions of power, context, and inequalities that characterise the contemporary global communications industries and their practices. She has three main strands of research: first, how power operates in and through the promotional industries, and public relations in particular. Through this research she has analysed diversity in the public relations profession, analysed the social and cultural inequalities produced through promotional discourse, and explored the inherent bias towards perspectives from the global north and west in academic thinking about public relations and promotion. Her second research focus is on public engagement and particularly how deliberative engagement can extend and enhance citizen participation in media policy, including copyright law and public service media in the UK. Finally, she focuses on media literacy, and particularly on the challenges faced by pracittioners trying to navigate the ever-increasing complexity of media landscapes, misinformation, and political and social polarisation, while pursuing media literacy as a means of activating critical thinking and citizenship. 

Professor Edwards is the author of Understanding Public Relations: Theory, Culture and Society (Sage, 2018); Power, Diversity and Public Relations (Routledge, 2014); and Understanding Copyright (with Dr Bethany Klein and Dr Giles Moss, Sage, 2015). She is co-editor of Public Relations, Society and the Generative Power of History (Routledge, 2019) and of Public Relations, Society and Culture: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations (Routledge, 2011). She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, and is a regular contributor to the field’s disciplinary conferences. 

Her PhD (Leeds Metropolitan University) was a Bourdieuvian analysis of the public relations profession focusing on the ways in which it exercised symbolic power within organisations as well as in wider society. She has a BSc in Linguistics and International Studies (University of Surrey), and MPhil in Management and Labour Relations (University of Auckland). 

Professor Edwards was the Secretary of the International Communication Association PR Division (2014-16) and won an ICA Environmental Communication Division Top Faculty paper award in 2020 for the paper ‘Gender and Climate Change Communications Practices: Pilot Research in Two Communities in Rural Kenya’, co-authored with Chris Paterson, Jacinta Mwende Maweu, Lata Narayanaswamy, & Silas O. Oriaso. She also won an ICA Communication Policy Division Top Paper award in 2013, with co-authors Giles Moss, Bethany Klein, Fiona Philip and David Lee, for the paper ‘Justifying Copyright: Discourse, Legitimation and Critique’. She was a regional editor for the Journal of Communication from 2016-18 and a co-editor of PR Inquiry from 2014-2018. She has reviewed for a wide range of journals including Public Relations Review, Journal of Public Relations Research, Public Relations Inquiry; the International Journal of Strategic Communication; Consumption, Markets and Culture; Media, Culture and Society; The Journal of Professions and Organisations; and New Media and Society. 

Before she joined academia, Professor Edwards worked for six years as a PR professional in New Zealand and the UK, specialising in technology PR and providing consultancy services to a wide range of organisations, including Microsoft.  

View CV (PDF)

Expertise Details

promotional culture; diversity; inequality and PR; PR as a professional field; young people; PR; voice; recognition; PR and democracy; copyright policy and discourse; postcolonial and decolonial analyses of PR

Research

Professor Edwards pursues her research through theoretical and conceptual writing as well as through empirical projects, including a number of publicly-funded and government-funded research projects addressing her interests.  

As a critical scholar, Professor Edwards' primary focus in her work on public relations and the promotional industries is on the operation of power within the occupational fields and in wider society.  She is particularly interested in the relationship between public relations, different forms of inequality, its contribution to democracy and its impact on social justice. She draws on a wide range of theory in her work, from Bourdieuvian sociology and deliberative theory, to critical race theory and the sociology of the professions, in order to understand how public relations shapes both the world we inhabit and how we interpret our place within that world. She has made a number of different theoretical contributions to the field, including new interpretations of public relations as an object of research, conceptualisations of public relations’ role in globalization, public relations as a cultural industry and as cultural intermediation.  

She has also published extensively from her work on public engagement with media policy. Here she emphasises the user / audience perspective to critique top-down approaches to policymaking and emphasise both the value of public participation in policymaking, and the capacity of the public to engage effectively in complex debates about the media. Finally, her work on media literacy has explored the intersections of media literacy and misinformation, challenging ‘solutionist’ assumptions that assume media literacy can be used to tackle misinformation effectively. She has also conducted a significant empirical project on the challenges facing media literacy practitioners in the UK, making practitioner voices visible in the debates about media literacy for the first time.

Publications

Books

  • Edwards, L. (2018). Understanding public relations: Theory, culture, society. London: SAGE.
  • Klein, B., Moss, G. & Edwards, L. (2015). Understanding copyright: Intellectual property in the digital age. London: Sage.
  • Edwards, L. (2014). Power, diversity and public relations. London: Routledge.
  • Edwards, L. & Hodges, C. (Eds) (2011). Public relations, society and culture: Theoretical and empirical explorations. London: Routledge.

 

Other publications

View a comprehensive list of Dr Edwards' publications.

Teaching and supervision

Postgraduate teaching

Professor Edwards teaches on a range of courses in the Department in line with her expertise, and including teaching for team-taught courses relating to theories and concepts and research methodologies. 


Doctoral supervision

Professor Edwards welcomes applications from prospective candidates interested in projects relating to her areas of research. 

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