Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre: Spaces, Connections, Control
The Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre is interdisciplinary and not only studies media spaces but also designs them to better understand their future potential. Media spaces are in a process of rapid transformation. If we want to understand the profound implication of these changes for public life and social relations, the key questions are empirical: where are the boundaries drawn between media and non-mediated spaces today? What are the economic, political, social and technological determinants of this? And what are the ways in which we engage with these media and media spaces?
The Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre is composed of five individual projects. Project One, Spaces of News considers the spaces of news gathering and the dispersal of news sources in the age of blogging and camera phones. Project Two, Metadata In The Age of Ubiquitous Data investigates the properties of new metadata in software to both enable and block various forms of connectivity. Project Three, Project 3: The Mediatised View is a design project which explores the potential of new media to transform our vision of the city through an interactive installation in the London Eye. Project Four, Project 4: Europe in Motion asks how the ability of migrants to be simultaneously in Europe and at home through media is transforming the European public sphere. And Project Five, Project 5: Tracking the Moving Image tracks the movement of the screen out from the cinema and the living room and consequent changes in engagement with it as part of everyday urban life.
All projects overlap and interconnect through concerns such as:
- The significance of new media economies and cultures in relation to broader economic, social and cultural transformations.
- The processes of greater media fragmentation and individualisation, in terms of both production and consumption - what we term the dispersal of the screen.
- The shift in media cultures and politics from the paradigm of imagined community to the significance of networked connectivity.
- Issues of power and control, freedom and diversity over ways of seeing, ways of telling and ways of thinking.
- What all this means for the public sphere and public culture – through local, national and transnational spaces.
By bringing together the true diversity of approaches and projects under the rubric of space and the portal in monthly meetings and annual symposia, the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre will generate creative intellectual dialogue across the disciplines and spark unforeseeable new ideas, projects, and possibilities.
Latest
Media, Power & Revolution: Making the 21st Century
2, 3, 4 April 2012
Senate House, London
From Twitter and Facebook revolutions to phone hacking and the power of the Murdoch empire, Wiki-leaks, and the Abu-Ghraib photographs -- a new intensity links power, revolution, and the media in the twenty-first century. The new media do make a difference, but what exactly is the nature of that difference? What are the crucial questions of technological form, usage, and control that shape the political and cultural agency of governments, corporations, political uprisings, and individuals?
Confirmed speakers:
Anne Alexander, Goetz Bachmann, Anthony Barnett, Rod Benson, Chris Berry, Dave Boyle, Brian Cathcart, James Curran, Nick Davies, Natalie Fenton, Graham Fairfax, Marianne Franklin, Des Freedman, Janet Harbord, Amal Khalaf, Gholam Khiabany, Scott Lash, Duncan McCargo, Robert McChesney, Rachel Moore, Monika Metykova, Evgeny Morozov, Graham Murdock, John Naughton, Angela Phillips, Terry Rosenberg, Annabelle Sreberny, Rod Tiffen
Please see the full conference programme here.
News
Professor Natalie Fenton delivered her inaugral lecture 'Press, Publics, Protest and Power' on 13 December 2011 at Goldsmiths University London.
>>
Dr Des Freedman and Professor Natalie Fenton spoke on media reform at the Bank of Ideas on 19 December 2011.
>>
Professor Natalie Fenton presented a paper to a conference 'Trust. Revisited' at Edinburgh University on 25 November 2011 titled 'Press, Politics Power and the Public Interest'.
Professor Natalie Fenton gave a keynote lecture to a conference at Bergen University on 4 November 2011: 'New Ways of Telling Truths or Tales: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age'.
>>
Professor James Curran gave expert public presentation to the Leveson Inquiry, 21 October 2011
>>>
On 12 October 2011, a new book by Toril Aalberg and James Curran (eds) was published, entitled, How Media Inform Democracy (Routledge, New York), in which James Curran co-authored four essays.
>>>
Rachel Moore and Janet Harbord's paper, "Film in our midst: City as cinematic archive," was published in Urban Cinematics: Understanding Urban Phenomena through the Moving Image this past summer.
>>>
On 17 September, James Curran gave a keynote address at Lingnan University Conference in Hong Kong on 'Impact of the Internet: An Historical Perspective'.
While on 21 September, Professor Curran was in Sydney giving a public lecture on 'Internet: Prophecy and Reality' at the Police Museum and, which was broadcast by ABC in its 'Big Ideas Series' on October 16, 2011. Listen to the broadcast here.
>>>Mapping Digital Media: United Kingdom, written by Des Freedman and Justin Schlosberg, now available online.
>>>
In May 2011, Professor James Curran became the first winner of the Edwin C. Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy awarded by the Philosophy of Communication, Law and Policy Divisions of the International Communication Association in recognition of his long-term research in this field.