News 2016

On 22 November, Dr Shani Orgad of the Department of Media and Communications will be a talk on ‘refugees and the media: a crisis of imagination’ at the J. P. Morgan symposium on Philanthropy’s Role in the Refugee Crisis. Other speakers include UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein and Mark Golding, Chief Executive of Oxfam GB.

On 18 November, media policy expert Dr Damian Tambini (@DamianTambini) of the Department of Media and Communications gave a keynote address at the 2016 Annual Colloquium on Fundamental Rights in Brussels. The colloquium theme was ‘Media pluralism and democracy’ and Dr Tambini’s talk focused on protecting pluralism and media freedom and the free flow of opinions and ideas within and outside the EU. Dr Tambini is Director of the Media Policy Project and its accompanying blog, which aims to promote media policy communication between academics, civil society, media professionals and policy makers.

Sonia Livingstone appeared on Czech national radio station Český rozhlas  on 10 November to discuss the Global Kids Online project.

LSE’s Learning Technology & Innovation have highlighted the amazing work of Dr Shani Orgad, Associate Professor, as one of four LSE Innovators case studies for Michaelmas Term 2016.  You can find the link to her case study here. Her case study celebrates her work as an advocate for student learning and innovative pedagogy.  Both through the interview and the case study, Shani demonstrates a critical but curious approach to teaching and learning, and her use of fictional characters like Paddington bear introduces a playful yet serious element to her teaching.  This comes through clearly and passionately in the video that celebrates her work.  Shani is the first of the LSE Innovators announced for 2016/17 and joins 11 other LSE academics as part of the Innovators series, which you can find here.

Professor Robin Mansell of the Department of Media and Communications was keynote speaker at the EuroMedia Research Group ECREA Pre-Conference, 8-9 November, Prague. Professor Mansell spoke on ‘Inequality and Digitally Mediated Communication: Divides, Contradictions and Consequences’.

The Global Kids Online project, launched on 2 November 2016 at the Children’s Lives in the Digital Age seminar held at UNICEF Headquarters in New York, aims to build a global network of researchers investigating the risks and opportunities of child internet use. The Global Kids Online website makes high quality, flexible research tools freely available worldwide.

Speaking at the New York launch event, Principal Investigator Professor Sonia Livingstone observed: “As the internet reaches more children in more countries, it is vital to extend the evidence base to guide policy makers as they balance children’s rights to participation, provision and protection online.”

For more information, visit www.globalkidsonline.net.

Professor Livingstone writes about the project in The Conversation.

On 2 November, Dr Ellen Helsper (@EllenHel) of the Department of Media and Communications was in Chile to present a paper at the COES-LSE Conference on Inequalities entitled ‘Digital inequalities in Latin America:  An evaluation of the definition, development and potential effectiveness of Policies’.  On 3 November, Dr Helsper presents her book chapter: Inequalities in Digital Literacy: Definitions, Measurement, Explanations and Policy Implications (from the TIC Household Survey Book, 2016) in Sao Paolo.

Dr Bart Cammaerts of the Department of Media and Communications was in Sweden on 29 October to present a paper entitled ‘Self-mediation practices of the anti-austerity movement. A dialectic between the symbolic and the material’  at a colloqium on Communication, material and discursive power dynamics, co-organised by Uppsala University and DESIRE, the Centre for the study of Democracy.

Photo 1 (c) Derya Yuksek

Photo 2 (c) Derya Yuksek

Professor Lilie Chouliaraki of the Department of Media and Communications will present a public lecture at Northwestern University's School of Communication in Illinois on Monday 31 October. Professor Chouliaraki will present findings from her and Myria Georgiou's fieldwork conducted in December 2015 on the Greek border island of Chios in a lecture entitled The Digital Border: The Communicative Networks of Reception during the European Refugee Crisis. This event will follow a symposium co-sponsored by the Department of Media and Communications and Northwestern University on The Ethics of Media,  taking place on 27 and 28 October and featuring keynotes by Paul Frosh (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Nick Vaughan-Williams (University of Warwick). She will also give the keynote lecture at the 6th International Conference on Digital Ethics at Loyola University and offer a faculty talk at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Can the media make us more welcoming?

Is the European media reflecting the “refugee crisis” or helping create it? This is the question posed by Myria Georgiou, Deputy Head of LSE Media and Communications, in her project analysing how newspapers in nine European countries covered the so-called refugee crisis in 2015.

Myria's seemingly impossible idea is for the media to be more productive in helping us understand complex issues around migration. Check the video here. 

Fanning the Flames: Reporting Terror in a Networked World

Charlie Beckett has written a report in collaboration with Tow Centre for the Digital Journalism in New York that looks at the problems facing journalism around terrorism: the increasing speed of the news cycle; new technologies and the limits on resources; the challenge of verification, definition, proportionality; and dealing with spin and propaganda. The report was recently launched at an event in the Columbia Journalism School in NYC on 17th October.

Dr Shani Orgad of the Department of Media and Communications will be presenting her research on media representations of working and stay-at-home mothers at a panel discussion ‘Women and the Workplace: Separating Myths from Reality’, hosted by Bloomberg on 4 November.  Dr Orgad will present findings from her research publications Incongruous encounters: media representations and lived experiences of stay-at-home mothers and The cruel optimism of The Good Wife: the fantastic working mother on the fantastical treadmill  and then take part in a panel discussion with industry leaders from Dell, BP and Barclays. 

On Tuesday 27 September, Professor Sonia Livingstone presented evidence to the first meeting of EC Commissioner Oettinger’s new Alliance to Better Protect Minors Online, in Brussels, building on the work she led by the EU Kids Online network. The Alliance, comprising CEOs of leading ICT and media companies and representatives from civil society, will report on progress on Safer Internet Day in early 2017. 

On Wednesday 28  September, Professor Livingstone addressed the Ad hoc Committee for the Rights of the Child (CAHENF) at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on developing guidance for its 47 member states regarding the rights on the child in the digital environment. In presenting discussing the priorities for action, illustrated with good practice case studies and framed by an analysis of the legal standards in Europe related to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, she built on her earlier presentation to the Conference on the Council of Europe Strategy for the Rights of the Child (2016-2021) Sofia, April 2016.

Professor Marc Raboy, Visiting Professor in the Department of Media and Communications, has been shortlisted in the 2016 Governor General’s Literary Awards for his book Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World, (Oxford University Press). Professor Raboy will be giving a public lecture based on his book on Tuesday 11 October entitled The Man Who Networked the World: Guglielmo Marconi and the invention of modern communication.  Professor Raboy has also blogged about the subject: The first company that wanted to ‘connect the world’ wasn’t Google or Facebook.

Congratulations to Paula Kiel, doctoral researcher in the Department of Media and Communications who has won the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) 2016 Best Student Paper Award.  Her paper - The emerging practices of the collective afterlife: multimodal analysis of websites for post-mortem digital interaction - particularly impressed the judging panel for its strong theoretical grounding, the novelty of its object, and its overall relevance to the field of internet research. 

The paper will be presented in Berlin at the AoIR Conference (#AoIR2016) on 7 October 2016. More about Paula’s presentation here.

Professor Nick Couldry (@CouldryNick), Head of the Department of Media and Communications, was featured in The Conversation  on 23 September in an article focusing on ‘The price of connection: ‘surveillance capitalism’.  Professor Couldry’s article explores the risks to freedom, autonomy and democracy posed by living in a society which increasingly relies on connecting individuals through internet platforms. The article is part of a wider project on The Price of Connection that Professor Couldry is undertaking for The Enhancing Life Project, funded by the University of Chicago.

Professor Sonia Livingstone has been appointed as a specialist adviser to the Communications Committee Inquiry into children and the internet. More details are available here.

Professor Livingstone commented: “It’s an honour and a challenge to act as specialist advisor to the Communications Committee inquiry. An honour, because it’s a fantastic group to work with, and I know we’re about to be deluged with evidence in response to the call. A challenge, because there’s so much that needs to be done.”             

Dr Ellen Helsper, Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communicationsprovided input to the Barclays Digital Development Index, which benchmarked 10 countries around the world on their readiness to compete in the digital economy.  Launched on Tuesday 19 July, the report, which can be found here, highlights that the UK, one of the most active online consumer markets globally, lags behind other countries when it comes to being able to create new digital technologies.

Dr Helsper commented: “One organisation – whether government, business or charity – will not be able to tackle this problem alone. Nor can there be a ‘one size fits all’ approach. The solutions must be tailored to the needs and circumstances of the people that are going to be using these technologies.”

European Migration Crisis and the Media: Preliminary findings

During the 2016 POLIS conference on April 21, researchers from Media and Communications department’s European Migration Crisis and the Media project presented their preliminary findings for the first time. A panel consisting of Dr Myria Georgiou and Dr Rafal Zaborowski along with student researchers Antonis Dimitriadis, Lisa Elkhoury, Afroditi Koulaxi, Sadichchha Pokharel and Pauline Vidal discussed their research on European media coverage of the migration crisis. See here for powerpoint presentation and audio.

Dr Myria Georgiou and Dr Wallis Motta are winners of The International Association for Media and Communication Research -IAMCR- and the Urban Communication Foundation 2016 Urban Communication Research Grant for their project Community Through Digital Connectivity? Communication Infrastructure in Multicultural London. The research grant will be awarded at the IAMCR 2016 Conference during the plenary session on 28 July. Read more here.

Congratulations to Rafal Zaborowski who was awarded an LSE Students’ Union (LSESU) Class Teacher Award for his excellent teaching during the 2015-16 academic year. The award was presented to Dr Zaborowski at the Teaching Awards Celebration event in The Venue on the evening of Wednesday 11 May. See the full listing of LSESU Teaching award winners 2016 here.

Congratulations to Professor Sonia Livingstone, who has been shortlisted for the prestigious ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize 2016. Professor Livingstone has been recognised in the Outstanding International Impact category. For more on Professor Livingstone's work, see her latest book The Class and her world-leading impact case study Protecting and empowering children in digital environments.

PhD Researcher Winnie Li has been shortlisted for the prestigious Asian Women of Achievement Awards 2016 in the Social and Humanitarian category, for her work on the issue of sexual assault and consent, including launching the Clear Lines Festival. Winnie writes about her nomination on her blog here.

On 18 April, Professor Charlie Beckett of the Department of Media and Communications appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week to discuss news reporting on war, conflict the rise of citizen journalism. Listen here.

On 19 April, Professor Sonia Livingstone of the Department of Media and Communications appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Today to discuss the first parliamentary inquiry into the scale of sexual harassment and violence in schools. Listen here from 1hr 9mins.

On 19 April, Dr Nick Anstead of the Department of Media and Communications appeared on BBC Radio 4’s World Update to discuss party politics and identity. Listen here.

On 28 April, Dr Bart Cammaerts of the Department of Media and Communications will be giving a public talk at Northwestern University in Illinois on The Circuit of Socio-Political Struggle: The encoding, mediation and decoding of anti-austerity discourses. Dr Cammaerts will also be holding a multi-method research designs and triangulation session for postgraduates studying media and communications courses. Dr Cammaerts' visit is the latest event held as part of the ongoing research initative between LSE’s Department of Media and Communications and the Northwestern University School of Communication.

LSE's Department of Media and Communications has been rated #1 outside of the US and #3 globally in the 2016 QS World University Rankings, with USC Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication again rated #1 in the world. The two institutions collaborate on a double degree in MSc/MA Global Media and Communications, as well as joining forces to research the profound implications of media and communications technologies for our shared futures. See more here.

On 17 March, Associate Professor Dr Bart Cammaerts gave a paper on The Transgressive Nature of the Mainstream Media Representation of Jeremy Corbyn at the Media and Transgression Symposium held at Lund University in Sweden. In this paper, co-written with Media and Communications PhD Researchers  Brooks DeCillia, César Jiménez-Martínez and João Carlos Magalhães, Dr Cammaerts presented the preliminary results of a small-scale research project on mainstream media  representations of Jeremy Corbyn funded by the Department of Media and Communications.

LSE Department of Media and Communications convenes a meeting of Global Kids Online ahead of launch of global toolkit for research on children’s digital experience

LSE’s Department of Media and Communications and UNICEF Innocenti are convening the second Global Kids Online network meeting at LSE on 21 and 22 March 2016. The network will be presenting the lessons learned from international research findings on children’s internet use and will develop research and policy recommendations for the launch of the toolkit in late 2016.

The meeting will host close to 40 academics and UNICEF staff from 14 different countries, including Argentina, South Africa, Serbia, the Philippines, Montenegro, India, and Ghana). A report from the meeting will be published on the project website shortly after the meeting. See here for more information on this meeting.

PhD Researcher César Jiménez-Martínez published the book chapter 'Integrative disruption: The rescue of the 33 Chilean miners as a live media event', as part of the edited collection Global Perspectives on Media Events in Contemporary Society.

Dr Alison Powell has been highlighted by LSE’s Learning Technology & Innovation team as one of three LSE Innovators case studies for Lent Term 2016. Check out her case study on An Ethical Approach to Teaching. 

Alison comments: “I am interested in how people think about technologies, and how they can build them in ways that transform the world… when we build technologies, especially of communication, we actually build them with a set of values that are in the world that we occupy at the time that we build them.”

Alison will be giving an LSE networkEd seminar organised by LSE’s Learning Technology & Innovation team us on 18 May 2016.

Professor Livingstone awarded honorary doctorate from the University of Panthéon-Assas

On Friday 29 January, Professor Sonia Livingstone was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Panthéon-Assas (Paris II). The award was conferred to her by the President of the University, William Leyte, in the great amphitheatre.

Professor Livingstone said: "Collaborating with researchers across Europe has long been central to my work on audiences, given the transnational nature of media, so it was a pleasure to receive this honour from the University of Panthéon-Assas.

See more images below:

Honorary Doctorate Professor Livingstone 1
Honorary Doctorate Professor Livingstone 2
Honorary Doctorate Professor Livingstone 3
Honorary Doctorate Professor Livingstone 4

Robin Mansell, Professor of New Media and the Internet and LSE Deputy Director and Provost, has been featured in the January 2016 Newsletter of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). Professor Mansell has been highlighted for the contribution to the life and work of IAMCR. She joined IAMCR in 1984 and over the years has been an active member and served as a section head as well chair or member of numerous committees. Read more here.

Dr Ellen Helsper, Associate Professor, participated on 6 & 7 January in a meeting launching the Kids Online Chile survey and the Latin American Kids Online project. The meeting was organised by the Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso and the Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago, where 30 experts from Chile and abroad discussed how to adapt the surveys of Kids Online Europe to the contexts of different Latin American countries and to design the Chilean survey.

PhD Researcher Cesar Jimenez-Martinez was interviewed by the Brazilian blog Brasilianismo about the media coverage of the January 2016 protests in Sao Paulo. 'Given that violence has become the centre of the debate, the reasons why people are protesting get buried', he said.

Dr Shani Orgad, Associate Professor will be a panel-member at the Reading The Pictures Salon event on The Visual Framing of the Migrant Crisis. The event will be held on Sunday 10 January 2016 on a Google HangOut platform accommodating live audio and video with involvement from viewers via live chat. 

Event abstract: Photos of the migrant crisis have dominated the media space over the past year. What can we learn from the way traditional and social media, primarily in the west, has depicted the crisis in terms of context; scale and scope; demographics (including gender, race and nationality); geopolitics; aesthetics; empathy and sensitivity?