News and events
- Hilde Stephansen will give a talk on ‘Movements, academia, and social processes of knowledge production’ at Birkbeck on May 14
- Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos will give the Sociology Department’s Annual Lecture ‘Epistemologies of the South: Citizenship from the Perspective of Non-Citizens’ on May 2.
- Eleftheria Lekakis partakes in an international seminar on Innovative communication approaches
- Nick Couldry and Natalie Fenton wrote a piece on Occupy London for Craig Calhoun's Possible Futures website
- Kate Nash becomes Joint Director of the Centre with Nick Couldry
- ‘Democracy from below’ seminar series 2011-12. Speakers include Jeffrey Alexander (Yale), Donatella Della Porta (EUI Florence), and Engin Isin (Open University)
- The Centre for Global Media and Democracy co-organise two-day workshop Creating Publics, Creating Democracies (PDF).
Welcome
The future of democracy is inseparable from the capacities of media - at all scales from the local to the global. Both the sustainability and the expansion of democracy depend on what media institutions do and what spaces media make possible. The complexity of these processes requires interdisciplinary research across politics, sociology and media.
The Centre for the study of Global Media and Democracy was set up in September 2007 to address these connections. The Centre brings together researchers from Goldsmiths’ departments of Media and Communications, Sociology and Politics. It hosts public lectures and debates, research symposia, and seminar series: see Events. It plans to develop inter-disciplinary bids for research funding and welcomes research students from any discipline interested in the Centre’s themes.
The Centre builds on existing research initiatives at Goldsmiths: the Unit for Global Justice, the Spaces of the News project (funded by the Leverhulme Foundation), and the Research Unit in Governance and Democracy. Recent ESRC funded research by Centre members has investigated public connection and the construction of self through reality TV formats [PDF].
Topics explored since the Centre's inception in 2007 include:
- Digital media and the renewal of local democracy
- Democratic theory and the transnational public sphere
- Global governance, the state and cultural politics
- Global social movements, advocacy organisations and new media
- National media and the construction of 'the citizen' and ‘the human’
- Neoliberal discourse and the public realm
- Media ethics
The centre is building links with similar initiatives internationally.