Professor Nick Couldry
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About
Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.
As a sociologist of media and culture, he approaches media and communications from the perspective of the symbolic power that has been historically concentrated in media institutions. He is interested in how media and communications institutions and infrastructures contribute to various types of order (social, political, cultural, economic, ethical). His work has drawn on, and contributed to, social, spatial, democratic and cultural theory, anthropology, and media and communications ethics. His analysis of media as ‘practice’ has been widely influential. In the past 10 years, his work has increasingly focussed on data questions, and ethics, politics and deep social implications of AI, Big Data and small data practices. He is the author or editor of 18 books and many journal articles and book chapters.
In 2020 he co-founded the Tierra Comun tri-lingual website to encourage networking with and among Latin American scholars and activists interested in data colonialism. Click here access the page in English, Spanish and Portuguese. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2025.
Expertise
media and data ethics; media audiences; media and platform power; social theory; voice and listening; data colonialism; critical AI studies; rebuilding social media
Research
As a sociologist, Professor Couldry's main interests are media and communications, culture and power, and social theory. Most of all, he is interested in the consequences for everyday reality of symbolic power’s concentration in particular institutions.
Initially, Professor Couldry's work was focussed on the power of traditional ‘media’ (particular television and the press) to define political and social reality. More recently, he has become interested in how a range of institutions associated with ‘media’ have, in the digital age, taken over that power. Today, the work of constructing reality is done as importantly through algorithms that work to measure our performance online or while using a networked object (the ‘internet of things’), as through large-scale media narratives about society.
Throughout his career, Professor Couldry has tried to confront a basic paradox: that information and communication technologies, because they present us with a ‘reality’ every day, can easily come to seem like a second nature. As a result, what should always be contestable can end up seeming beyond challenge, a structure of power that is too ‘hard’ to move or break through. His work has looked at many examples of this: ritual forms around media, such as ‘reality TV’ and more recently how, in everyday organizations and settings, the power to measure and define through algorithmic processes is contested, a process he has called ‘social analytics’ (see Storycircle project). For his latest book on the emerging social and economic order around data practices, see https://colonizedbydata.com/. Professor Couldry has also researched the politics of representation: are we, through our uses of media, empowered to engage with the democratic process (see Public Connection project)?
Teaching
Postgraduate teaching
From 2019-2020 Professor Couldry convenes and teaches a new research-led option, Media, Data and Social Order (MC437) which runs in Lent Term. He has also contributed lectures to team-taught postgraduate-level Media and Communications courses relating to theories and concepts (MC408/MC418) and research methodologies (MC4M1/MC4M2).
Professor Couldry has taught previously in the LSE Departments of Sociology and Media and Communications (2001-2006), and before rejoining LSE in September 2013 was joint Head of the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Doctoral supervision
Professor Couldry supervises doctoral researchers and welcomes applications from prospective students relating to his areas of research. His current dodctoral supervisees include Anthony Kelly, Sebastian Lehuede, Ludmila Lupinacci Amaral, Svetlana Smirnovaand Jun Yu. He has recently successfully supervised Dr Fabien Cante and Dr Daniel Knapp to completion.
Engagement and impact
Professor Couldry has held visiting positions at MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, University of Stockholm, RMIT Melbourne, Roskilde University, Södertorn University, Stockholm, University of Technology Sydney, University of Toulouse and Utrecht University.
In June 2014, he was appointed Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. He has recently given invited lectures and seminars in Brazil, Chile, Finland, Germany, Holland, Israel, Korea, Japan, Portugal, Sweden, and the USA. Since 2017 he has been a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University.