Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy People

Professor Kate Nash, Department of Sociology

Kate Nash is the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. Kate has interests in political sociology, cultural sociology and social theory more generally. She has been working on the culture and politics of human rights for some years now, and has published widely in this area, including The Political Sociology of Human Rights (2015) and The Cultural Politics of Human Rights: Comparing the US and UK (2009). She is currently interested in media and human rights, and working on human rights films.

Professor Natalie Fenton, Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Natalie Fenton is the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. In this forum Natalie seeks to interrogate the relationship between the media and resistance - either as a dominant social force which through uniformity of representation encourages digression, or as a means of forging other identities and developing alternative political projects. I am particularly interested in notions of new media, networks and progressive politics; notions of political hope and rethinking our understanding of public culture, public sphere and democracy.

Irving Huerta

Irving Huerta is a Visiting Postdoctoral fellow at The Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. He is a Mexican journalist and holds a PhD in Politics from Goldsmiths University of London. He was worked for Aristegui Noticias, Forensic Architecture, and the Centre for Investigative Journalism among others, where he has covered corruption and human rights violations. He is currently a member of the Editorial Board at CONNECTAS, an organisation that supports investigative journalism in the Americas. His research revolves around the representation of wrongdoing and the disposition of power through legal and illegal means. 

Marco Perolini

Marco Perolini has just finished his PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths College. His research focuses on the construction of emancipatory and non-legal notions of human rights by the social movement opposing border regimes in Berlin. He conducted an 11-month ethnography in Berlin in 2018 when he participated in collective action undertaken by migrant-led grassroots organizations and networks. Marco Perolini also works as a human rights researcher with Amnesty International focusing on discrimination, policing and freedom of assembly in Europe. He has published numerous human rights reports as well as op-eds in leading international media outlets. 

Macarena Bonhomme

Macarena Bonhomme joined us as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in October 2020. She is an Adjunct Researcher at the Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales (ICSO-UDP) and Lecturer at Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) in Chile. She also holds a postdoctoral research position at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) and is co-investigator of Fairwork Foundation (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford -Chile team). 

Dr Bonhomme has a PhD from the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, an MSc in Culture and Society from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a BA in Sociology from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She was the recipient of the LASA/OXFAM Martin Dissertation Award 2020 for her doctoral thesis. Her main research topics are migration, "race" and racism, processes of racialisation, ethnicity, sociology of racism, urban studies, cultural studies and the gig economy. 

Dr Sanja Vico

Dr Sanja Vico is a Postdoctoral Research Officer on the ERC-funded project Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding at European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and an Associate of the LSEE – South Eastern Europe Research Unit at the LSE. She received a PhD in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019, an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BSc from the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade. Her PhD research explored how Serbian Londoners navigated digital media environments to negotiate their identities, with a focus on their banal expressions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

Ashjan Ajour

Ashjan Ajour is a Teaching Fellow in the Sociology Department at the University of Warwick, convening a number of undergraduate and postgraduate modules in Gender Studies. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths in May 2019 and my MA in Gender studies at Birzeit University in 2013. Ashjan's research interests and teaching experience are situated in political sociology; gender studies; feminist theories and movements; political subjectivity and subject formation; incarceration; anthropology of the body; decolonization and global indigenous politics.

Jorge Saavedra Utman

Jorge Saavedra Utman joined us as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in November 2017. He has a PhD from the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths. Dr. Saavedra Utman also has an MA in Political Communications from University of Chile (Chile) and a BA in Media and Communications at Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (Chile). His main research topics are in the media and communicative practices of non-mainstream actors in contexts of narrow democracies, the cultures of participation and activism, and Latin American cultural politics.

Miranda Iossifidis

Miranda Iossifidis joined us as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in January 2017. She has a PhD from the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths. Dr. Iossifidis has an MSc in Contemporary Urbanism from the LSE and her research interests lie in urban studies and audiovisual culture.

Eloísa Nos-Aldás, Visiting International Fellow

Eloísa Nos-Aldás joined us as a Visiting Fellow in March 2018. Nos-Aldás is PhD Professor at the Department of Communication Sciences at the Universitat Jaume I (UJI), Castellón, Spain and researcher at the Interuniversity Institute of Social Development and Peace (IUDESP), where she was Head from 2010-2016.​

With 20 years of experience in teaching, research and university politics, she coordinated the Masters and Doctorate program​s in International Studies in Peace, Conflict and Development Studies at UJI, both recognized with Excellence by the Spanish Government​​. She has coordinated national and local competitively funded research projects on Communication, Civil Society and Social Change (explored from a “cultural efficacy” perspective).

Professor James Miller, Visiting International Professor

‌In January 2011 James Miller joined the Centre as International Visiting Professor. James is professor of communications in the School of Cognitive Science at Hampshire College in the US. Hampshire College, part of the Five College consortium (Amherst, Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges and the main campus of the University of Massachusetts), enjoys an international reputation for institutional collaboration.

Professor Miller came to Goldsmiths after a semester at the MIT Media Lab. His past research subjects include media law and policy and the comparative study of new media innovation, including Fulbright research in Paris, exploring the privatization of French radio and the introduction of Minitel. He is engaged in a continuing, critical study of Western media assistance to so-called democratizing countries.

Professor Bruce Williams, International Visiting Professor

The Centre welcomed Professor Bruce Williams in late June and early July 2008 as its first International Visiting Professor. While based at the Centre, Professor Williams worked closely with members of the Leverhulme Spaces of the News project on reviewing shared interests in the changing dynamics of news and entertainment.

Bruce A. Williams received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota and has taught at the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and the London School of Economics. His current research interest focus on the role of a changing media environment in shaping citizenship in the United States.