Dr Nick Anstead is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, having joined the Department in September 2010.
Dr Anstead’s research focuses on political communication practices and their relationship with political institutions. Additionally, he has researched the ways in which political ideas develop, circulate and are used in debate. Geographically, Dr Anstead’s work has tended to focus on British, continental European and North American politics.
Nick, did you always intend to go into academia? If not, what made you pursue a career in this field?
Not always, no. Each time I got a qualification, I ended up thinking I should just go do one more before heading off into the world of work. It was really only when I was about halfway through my PhD that I realised that I really enjoyed the atmosphere in a university – the collegiality, the huge amount of agency that we enjoy and the variety of different types of work that professional academics get to do that I decided it was a career that I really wanted.
What made you interested in media and communications and specifically the area that you research?
I have jumped across disciplines over the years – my undergraduate degree is in history, my masters in comparative politics, and my first job was in a politics department. I only formally became aligned to media and communications as a discipline when I came to LSE. At the moment, I feel I am in the luckiest position I could be in. I still have strong institutional and professional connections with political science, but I am continually exposed to and challenged by the key debates in media and communications.
My general interests though have always remained fairly constant. When I studied history, I was strongly focused on political history, and when I studied politics I spent most of my time focusing on political institutions. But my specific interest in political communication developed largely as a stroke of luck – I did my Masters degree at Royal Holloway (2004-2005), where Andrew Chadwick was a professor, and he was working on the relationship between politics and internet. I ended up staying and doing a PhD, looking at the relationship between emerging online campaigning techniques and the institutional context in American and British politics.
I then had a tremendous piece of good fortune. I was finishing my PhD off in the 2008-2009 academic year, just when the Obama-Clinton primary campaign was ongoing, leading to the 2008 Presidential election. Suddenly everyone was talking about the internet and political communication. Andy was also an excellent supervisor, both in an intellectual but also in a professional sense. He advised me on how to have the right publications and teaching on my CV so as I could be competitive in the job market when opportunities arose.
What advice they would give students who are thinking of pursuing a PhD and/or career in academia?
While it is incredibly hard to do, because we get so emotionally involved in our PhDs, remember that it is an exam like any other. Know what the expectations of the examination are and make sure you meet them. The document you submit to your examination does not have to be perfect, nor does it have to your final word on the topic. If all goes well, you will have the whole rest of your career to refine your ideas and arguments.
What was the main issue of the day in terms of media and communications when you were a student? How has it developed?
I think the thing that is most striking to me, looking back is the power of master narratives. In 2008, when I was finishing my PhD and applying for jobs the grand narrative was incredibly optimistic – the internet was going to bring people closer to power, engage young voters and generally lead to healthier democracies. A decade later, things look very different – the internet is fuelling populism and the proliferation of misinformation. Of course, these two stories are not mutually exclusive, they can both be happening at the same time. However, collectively, we find it hard to go beyond the very biggest events (Obama’s election victory, Trump’s election victory) which frame our understanding of the world. But what astonishes me most is how this “mood music” frames the whole debate, not just in public discourse but also in academia.
What do you think is the most important contemporary issue in the field of media and communications, both for soon-to-be graduate students and for professionals in the field?
Related to my answer above, I think the major issue is thinking about ways in which media and communication-based explanations fit into wider social and political patterns. For years scholars in our field have (rightly) agitated for media and communications to be taken seriously within the social sciences. For a long time, for example, political science was fairly guilty of ignoring work in media and communications. However, I sometimes wonder if we have now gone too far the other way? When we seek to explain Trump’s election victory or the Brexit vote, it seems a bit too easy to say, for example, it was all down to Facebook adverts or fake news. I think what I am saying is that media-centricity poses its own risks of reductionism.
The big challenge is therefore to produce understandings of contemporary political and social questions that rely on interdisciplinary synthesis.
What do you enjoy most about teaching students and why?
Our students are fantastic! It really is a great privilege to teach such a talented and diverse group of people. I think the best thing I can say about teaching at the LSE is that every time I walk into a classroom, I do not just expect to teach but I also know I am going to learn something too, because of the sheer wealth of knowledge, insights and experience in the group.
Are there any particularly interesting projects that you are working on at the moment?
I am currently writing a book on the idea of Fake News. If everything goes according to plan, the manuscript should be finished by the end of the summer. The broad argument is that many of our current definitions of fake news are deficient or are so broad as to be fairly meaningless. Instead, I take an institutional approach, arguing that the concept of fake news is inherently related to the decline of a group of institutions that have historically been deemed as the arbiters of an agreed notion of “the truth”.
What you like doing when you are not busy being an academic?
Our lives have changed dramatically in the past year. Our son Jude was born in March 2019. Hanging out with him is the most fun thing imaginable, and watching him grow and learn is the most exciting thing I have ever done.