2020 - 2021 | COVID-19: A Communication Crisis – Ethics, Privacy, Inequalities
The core project is a cross-national media analysis of the representations of COVID-19 inequalities from an intersectional perspective. Specifically, the project interrogates how mainstream media reaffirm and/or contest the intensification of inequalities in the context of a pandemic. We addressed this question through a dual lens, focussing on both the narrative representations (in news reporting), and the visual representations (in data visualisations) of the pandemic in mainstream media.
Read more here.
2020 | Media@LSE Virtual Exhibition (Artsteps)
Explore the groundbreaking research of faculty, doctoral researchers and students in the Department of Media and Communications, LSE, by gaining a hands-on virtual experience of their work through interactive videos, posters, and visualizations of their work on through our virtual exhibition space, created in collaboration with interactive platform Artsteps. The exhibition included work from Professor Sonia Livingstone, Dr Mariya Stoilova, Ruhi Khan, Jessica Su, Professor Shakuntala Banaji and Rob Sharp.
2019 - 2020 | Media City London
Media City London sought to support and enhance public engagement and knowledge exchange within the context of the Media@LSE research platform. “Media City London” is a broadly interpreted framework for research which touches on a wide range of themes, including social movements, London identities, migration, and media and digital industries.
Projects funded as part of Media City London include:
2019 - 2020 | Creating and visualizing digital city London
Directed by Myria Georgiou and Alison Powell with the participation of MSc students.
This project explores, documents and intervenes in the visual geographies of digital city London. More particularly, the project visually records how ‘the digital’, as lived and as represented in the city, shapes urban public space. In collaboration with MSc students who produced original projects, we visually examine how digital technologies, digital and material intersections, and digital datafication are experienced and represented in urban public space. The project’s overarching aim was to map out digital articulations of publicness and privacy; and identity and consumption.
Read more here.
2019 - 2020 | Urban Futures with 5G
Produced for British Press Reporting by Robin Mansell and Jean-Chrisophe Plantin
Fifth Generation mobile technology – or 5G – is at the centre of multiple controversies. Huawei, as a Chinese 5G equipment manufacturer is being implicated in international trade wars and there are suspicions of foreign interventions in domestic affairs. 5G is also linked to long-standing concerns about potential health hazards of electromagnetic frequencies. This controversy gained momentum in early 2020 when conspiracy theories conflated the global spread of Covid-19 with China and 5G networks.
New infrastructure projects are always accompanied by conflicting visions or imaginaries and political and economic interests. We set out to study how the main British broadsheet and tabloid newspapers represented 5G deployments from January 2017 to early March 2020. What has the media deemed worthy of coverage and which controversies did they signpost in the lead up to and during the early implementation of 5G?
Read the full report here.
2015 - 2017 | Migration and the media
The “migration crisis” , which peaked in 2015-16, posed a fundamental challenge to European states, their alliance, and to the ethico-political frames that drive public political discourse and acts within nation-states and the European Union as a whole. At the moment of “crisis”, media were full with images of migrants fleeing war, suffering, or losing their lives during their journey.
The research builds on the Department’s earlier work on migration and the media, and on the consequences of media’s role in shaping imaginaries and policies of migration.
More information on the project including the final report is available here.