Media and communications are at the heart of public and private life. However much they innovate and change, no matter the political, economic, or technological context, they influence how individuals, communities and societies evolve and prosper. They shape identity and representation, connection and conflict, visions of the future and memories of the past. Media and communications are increasingly tied to matters of rights, justice and equity and to the prospects for participation, politics and resistance.
Department Profile
Research in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE thrives on curiosity and informs change. For more than two decades, our scholarship has probed the inner workings and logics of institutions, practices, technologies, and uses, often for the betterment of society. Our department has been pivotal in establishing media and communications as adynamic and complex object of study in the United Kingdom and internationally.
Challenges and Opportunities
How and why do we do media and communication research? To answer the how question, we must examine the conditions against (and within) which research agendas are shaped and executed. Scholarly work that is unconventional or contrary to common sense or received notions of how the world works frequently competes with cultural forces that discredit facts and campaign on disinformation. Meanwhile, researchers face diminishing access to information held by both public and private actors on the one hand, and increasing ephemerality of that same information, on the other. The why challenge concerns the current and ongoing changes faced by the media and communications sectors and their practitioners. As old ways of storytelling, of doing news, and of producing entertainment content transform under the weight of technological, economic, and political change, and as legacy media struggles, research on media and communications needs to keep up and remain relevant as well as critical Industrial shifts.
Technological changes, even contentious conditions for research—all form part of the impetus to drive understanding of media and communications’ role and importance in contemporary as well as past societies, while
demonstrating and defending the integrity of facts, stories, and histories, and generating and sharing knowledge in ways that are available to all.
Research Areas
A steady force in the face of moral panics and technological trends, our research deepens understanding of media and communications in a global context, disrupting conventional forms of knowledge generation, and linking the study of media and communications to reflexive, democratic practice and to just and equitable societies. Our lines of inquiry also focus on: media culture and identities; media participation and politics; communication histories and futures; and, communication, technology, rights and justice. Our research informs public discourse and decision making on digital literacy, fairness, equity, and ethics in automated systems, humanitarianism and journalistic narrative, and migrant and refugee voices. Topics span developments in user and audience culture, sociotechnical change in speech practices, evolution of platform and computational infrastructure, and intersections between ecology, human rights, and mediated life.
The department serves as home to Digital Futures for Children (children’s digital rights), JournalismAI (news and automation, Justice, Equity and Technology Project (tech justice and digital rights) and REMEDIS (media literacy), among many other projects. Our research profile is divided into three areas:
- Core research themes (current, past)
- Emergent research (in development, future)
- Rising research (current, in development)