Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Marianne Franklin

Reader, Convener of the Transnational Communications and Global Media ProgrammeWith a background in the Humanities (History & Music) and Social Sciences (Politics), Marianne Franklin has held teaching and research positions in Humanities, Social Science, and Engineering faculties; the University of Auckland (NZ), University of Amsterdam (NL), University for Humanistics (NL), and Columbia University (USA). Her research is grounded in an ongoing fascination with the ways in which technologies, society, culture, and politics co-construct one another, even as they appear to operate as separate domains. Along with research funded by the Social Science Research Council (USA) and the Ford Foundation her work has several angles. In no particular order these are: ownership and control of (new) media and ICTs; Internet governance, ICT for Development, and policy discourses; online practices of everyday life, postcoloniality, and cultures of ICT (non-)use; transnationalism, NGOs, and multilateral institutions; power and agency in computer-mediated settings; theorising (cyber)spatiality, (inter)subjectivity, and human-machine relations from feminist & critical theory perspectives; music, culture, and society.

Currently on the Steering Committee of the Internet Rights and Principles Dynamic Coalition at the UN Internet Governance Forum, and the Program Committee of the GigaNet Research Network, she has also held office in other capacities; on the International Communications Section Executive, as Section Chair and Vice-Chair/Programme Chair of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association. A member of several international editorial boards and one of the founding editorial team of the RIPE Series in Global Political Economy (Routledge), she has been editor of the Key Thinkers: Past and Present series in Information, Communication, and Society since 2006.

Areas of supervision

Students under my supervision have completed work on a variety of topics. For instance: Internet cultures of use, (new) media, culture, and identity; digitalization discourses and media policy in the EU; ‘ICT for Development’ agendas and local communities; class, community, and the internet; national identity-construction in private and public domains (Korean reunification discourses, double nationality debates in the Netherlands); diasporas and transnationalism; indigenous television; NGO advocacy at the UN; grassroots participation, local governance and sustainable development; content and meaning-making in public education on biogenetics; theorising cyborgs and the human body in hi-tech society; Big Pharma, biopolitics, and HIV/AIDS debates; The World Social Forum and the Internet; Africa, Cyberspace, and the Internet Infrastructure. Students have gone on to find employment in cultural sectors, intergovernmental organizations, media organizations, telecommunications, government departments, NGOs, consultancy and PR, academic careers, university administrations, arts and cultural management.

Selected publications

Latest Publications 

Understanding Research: Coping with the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide, London/New York: Routledge [DoP late 2011]

"Transnational Communications in Action: A Critical Praxis" co-authored with Kenton T. Wilkinson, Communication, Culture & Critique 4 (4) 2011 (in press)

"Decolonising Futures: To go where no Cyborg has gone before?" in Interoperabel Nederland, edited by Pieter Wisse, Den Haag, the Netherlands: Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs (in press)

Previous Publications - Selected

Resounding International Relations: On Music, Culture and Politics , Palgrave Macmillan, (ed.), 2005

Postcolonial Politics, the Internet, and Everyday Life: Pacific Traversals Online, Routledge 2004

Media Research in the 21^st Century, Henry Stewart Talks: Journalism Series, edited by Paul Lashmar. Russell House, London: Henry Stewart Talks (2010)

‘Digital Dilemmas: Transnational Politics in the 21st Century’, Brown Journal of World Affairs. Vol. XVI, Issue 11, Spring/Summer 2010: 67-85

“Sex, Gender and Cyberspace”, in Gender Matters in Global Politics, edited by Laura Shepherd. Routledge 2009: 328-349

“Who’s Who in the ‘Internet Governance Wars’: Hail the Phantom Menace?”, in Who controls the Internet? Beyond the obstinacy or obsoleteness of the State , International Studies Review Forum, edited by G. Giacomello & J. Ericksson. Vol. 11, Issue 1 (March) 2009: 221-226

“What If? Confessions of a Sceptical Activist” in Making Communications Research Matter: Essay Forum in Social Science Perspectives. New York: Social Science Research Council, December 2008: http://www.ssrc.org/essays/mcrm/?p=27

“NGO’s and the ‘Information Society’: Grassroots Advocacy at the UN - a cautionary tale”, Review of Policy Research, Vol. 24, No. 4, July 2007: 309-330.

“Democracy, Postcolonialism, and Everyday Life: Contesting the ‘Royal We’ Online”, in The Internet and Radical Democracy: Exploring Theory and Practice, (eds.) Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera, New York/London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007: 168-190

Gender Advocacy at the World Summit on the Information Society: Preliminary Observations. Research Report: Knowledge, Creativity, and Freedom Program: Media, Arts, and Culture Portfolio: Ford Foundation, 2005

“'I Define My Own Identity': Pacific Articulations of ‘Race’ and ‘Culture’ on the Internet", Ethnicities 3 (4), December 2003: 465-490

"Reading Walter Benjamin and Donna Haraway In the Age of Digital Reproduction”, in Information, Communication and Society, volume 5, number 4, 2002: 591-624.

“InsideOut: Postcolonial Subjectivities and Everyday Life Online" in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Volume 3, Number 3, November 2001: 387-422: