Best Overall MSc Performance Prize
Winner: Tomas Borsa, MSc Politics and Communication, with an aggregate of 298.5.
Microsoft Research Prize in Data and Society
This prize is awarded to a distinction-level dissertation that develops a critical perspective on the study of data in communication and society.
Winner: Atilla-Filipe Cevik, MSc Politics and Communication
Life in the Filter Bubble: A Platform Perspective on User Selectivity in Online News Consumption
"All of the panel members agree that this is a fantastic piece of work and worthy of this prize. All agree that it addresses existing research in an engaging and critical way, and employs significant methodological innovation in collection and analysis. The essay is a fascinating, original, very well structured and extremely well argued thesis. Bravely and convincingly challenges existing research and conventional wisdoms about news consumption and selective exposure to online news. Fascinating finding that personalisation and algorithmic curation on digital news reduce diversity - but only under certain conditions. Significantly, both markers and prize reviewers agreed that this is a publishable piece and that the student should pursue publication as soon as possible!" AP
Best Dissertation Prize
This prize is awarded to the dissertation with the highest mark at distinction level. Four candidates were awarded the highest mark of 80:
WINNERS:
Shutong Wang, MSc Global Media and Communication (USC)
Loudspeaker Broadcasting as Community Radio: A qualitative analysis of loudspeaker broadcasting in contemporary rural China in the framework of alternative media
‘This is an interesting and even pioneering thesis that even challenges western theorization about the role loudspeaker broadcasting in a Chinese village. The author cleverly uses the literature on community and on alternative radio and juxtaposes the theorization and the results with her own. The thesis overuses Bailey, Cammaerts and Carpentier (2008) as the main source. All the rest is excellent including the pictures the author took while doing interviews in the village. The thesis is based on extensive reading and the Bibliography is almost faultless.’ TR
Atilla-Filipe Cevik, MSc Politics and Communication
Life in the Filter Bubble: A Platform Perspective on User Selectivity in Online News Consumption
‘A fascinating empirical examination of content sorting in online news aggregators. It is a totally novel study and features an extremely well defined and position to the literature, framing and then answering three types of questions. It provides a good hypothesis challenging and interrogating current leading research, with well specified hypotheses. An interesting methodology almost amounts to reverse-engineering, leading to an important insight that algorithms are not structuring forces along, but are always about articulations to platforms. This is an important empirical validation of the claim that algorithmic curation reduces diversity, but also disproves hypotheses that political news is sorted based on political preference. Commendable work and should be published as soon as possible!’ AP
Esteban Bertarelli Valcarcel, MSc Media, Communication and Development
21st Century Cholos: Representations of Peruvian Youth in the Discourse of El Panfleto
‘This is an original sharp, succinct and historically alert piece of work, that pays tribute both to Peruvian and other Latin American sources as well as to the theories and concepts acquired during the year. Your writing is mature and moves seamlessly through concepts of voice, representation, hegemony, constraint and irony, forming a conceptual basket that acknowledges both the structural constraints and the fluid aspects of Peruvian indigenous constructions of identity in the new media arena. Your analysis, findings and discussion section provides an exemplary deconstruction of symbolic violence and efforts to resist this on the part of your subjects, the eponymous 'Cholo' youth of El Panfleto. Brilliant, and ethically reflexive work. It would be good to cut and sharpen the lit review, do a thorough proof read to eliminate occasional spelling mistakes, and publish this. In future, to strengthen even further, ensure that you explain the application of your method at every stage and retain this in relation to the examples you pick out to analyse.’ SB
Dokyum Kim, MSc Media, Communication and Development
Are All Lives Valued? Worthy ‘Us’, Unworthy ‘Others’: A Comparative Content Analysis of Global News Agencies’ Pictorial Representation of the Paris Attacks and the Beirut Bombings
‘This is an exceptionally clear and well-designed study which uses a rigorous and highly detailed content analysis to demonstrate quite striking evidence of how, within the standard image-making practice of two leading global news agencies, there is a regular hierarchization not just of events in the west over those in the east, but also between the lives involved in those events. The dissertation is very clearly written throughout and beautifully presented, including the details of ICR tests, codebook histograms in the appendices. You situate your study extremely well in the triple literature on visual analysis (with some nice historical details and excellent details on camera angles etc), Orientalism in general and in relation to media, and the more recent literature on distant suffering and grievability (Butler), also making powerful use of this literature at the dissertation’s end. You propose two clear hypothesis with three clear research questions and proceed to answer them very effectively. The way in which, through detailed analysis, you confirm Chouliaraki’s theory about the significance of extraordinary versus ordinary events is very powerful, precisely because of its rigorous detail. Your account of sampling, the refinements to the codebook (following ICR tests) and other methodological aspects is excellent. The findings themselves e.g. on regular variations in emotional tone and the types of action displayed in typical images is very striking, and also sensitive to possible counter-arguments. The conclusion is also very powerful. A superb piece of work. Well done!’ NC
Silverstone Prize
This prize is awarded to the best distinction-level dissertation which continues the work of the late Professor Roger Silverstone. This dissertation should address the key theme of Roger Silverstone's intellectual legacy, media and morality, and should engage with an ethical aspect of mediation, in its production, representation or consumption dimensions.
Shutong Wang, MSc Global Media and Communications (USC)
Loudspeaker Broadcasting as Community Radio: A qualitative analysis of loudspeaker broadcasting in contemporary rural China in the framework of alternative media
"This very well constructed and bravely researched dissertation re-theorizes community media by examining the use of loudspeaker broadcasting in rural China. Using but moving beyond existing frameworks for community media, it foregrounds the voices and media production experiences of Chinese villagers. With an interest in both the hierarchical forms of control of this local media as well as the differential value of such ‘minor’ forms of media, the paper’s approach makes a contribution to media ethics of production and consumption, from a key non-Western perspective. It also advances a new framework for community media that takes into account local specificity, and enhances the field of media ethics by offering a fresh and rich perspective of media practice for public good. It is a theoretically and methodologically robust piece that demonstrates sensitivity and reflexivity in gaining access to a difficult field. In addition to its broad contributions to media ethics by focusing on alternative modes of production, the paper also demonstrates a open, sensibility to engagement with interviewees. The committee chair notes: “I love the defense of local broadcasting by the interviewees!” AP