Professor Bart Cammaerts, Head of the Department of Media and Communications
Dear Alumni,
I hope you are well and have had an amazing summer. As you may remember, last time we were in touch we were preparing for our 20th anniversary conference, which I am delighted to say was a resounding success. 280 participants joined us from across the globe to listen to 120 presentations and engage on a wide range of topics. We were also very pleased to welcome some of you to an alumni-only gathering the night before the conference opening. Many of you made long journeys to come and join us - thank you all for helping us celebrate this important occasion.
If you’d like to find out more about the papers and the plenary sessions, please do visit the conference webpage here. We also created a number of special podcasts and blogs to mark the occasion, where faculty reflect on the changes to the discipline - and the Department - over the last two decades. You can access the podcasts here and the blogs here.
The Robin Mansell Student Support Fund
As announced last year, we have created a student support fund to enable more African and Black British students to study with us. The Department decided to name this fund after Professor Emerita Robin Mansell in recognition of her work, amongst others in the context of ICT and Development. Contributions from alumni, large and small, will be crucial for us to fund the waiving of tuition fees, transport costs and/or stipends, so if you’d like to help underrepresented students to study with us, you can now donate to the Department via the LSE donation website. Please visit this website If you would like to help us out, and select the Department in the list of ‘Funding Priorities’.
Dates for your diary
Thank you to all those of you who supported our events last year, including those who presented at students-focused events and those of you who have volunteered to be mentors for current students. Your support is invaluable for our students who love meeting you and hearing about your experiences. Over the coming year, we will continue to build our alumni network and create opportunities for you to connect with current students, as well as with each other. We will maintain the focus on careers, mentoring and networking, but also intellectual engagement, so please do keep an eye out for our emails about upcoming opportunities to be involved.
Regardless of where you are based, we are always keen to hear from you about the kinds of events you’d like to see, and what you’d like to hear about our work, in order to foster our community within and beyond the UK. Please do get in touch with our alumni manager, Martina Zuccarella (M.Zuccarella@lse.ac.uk) with any ideas you might have.
In the meantime, we wish you all the very best, wherever you are in the world.
Professor Bart Cammaerts
Head of Department