Current PhD students

The aim of my research is to explore the possibility of democratizing the Mexican media by implementing dialogical practices through its legislation. Inspired by Habermas’ theory of rational communication, I will inquire into the viability of institutionalize the values of equality, accountability and freedom from coercion.

Some of the questions I will try to answer are:

• Can mediated communication be dialogical?
• Can Habermas’ idea of rational communication be translated into media policies?
• Can the values of equality, accountability and freedom from coercion be safeguarded through legislation?
• Can laws and institutions in Mexico enforce these values?

I am interested in examining the campaign to make broadband internet accessible to Inuit comunities in norther Canada, exploring poilitical, economic, cultural, geographic and infrastructural issues related to this campaign.  Theoretical interests include centre-periphery relations; postcolonial theory; and the impact of physical place on virtual experiencel.

My thesis will examine the emergence of new media practice that works at the borders of both art and science. The transitory field of bio art has many definitions and encompasses different practices ranging from the application of computer technology to the manipulation of genetic code and cell structures.

The common root, however, is their interaction with new biosciences, particularly biotechnology and the developments that take life or living matter and manipulate it through technical intervention. The intention of this research is to question the role both art and science practice play in constructing political and philosophical concepts that become identified as 'life'. Vehemently opposed to positioning art, science or the humanities hierarchically in terms of 'value' I am interested in understanding how knowledge is mediated, how it gains cultural, social and political value in order to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the stories we tell about ourselves, about ‘the Other’ and about the 'world'.

Ben holds a Bachelors degree in Contemporary Media Practice from the University of Westminster where he specialised in Software Design as Art Practice and a Masters Degree in Digital Media from Goldsmiths College.

In my dissertation I investigate the affective connection between people and mobile phones, a connection I articulate as kinship, romance and other more ambiguous attachments. This connection implicates bodies – both animate and inanimate ones. As I argue, these bodies are not bounded, isolated ‘things’ but are rather part of ongoing processes of communication and information exchange. 

Drawing on my experiences as a career journalist I employ writing – as both my method of investigation and an embodied practice. Therefore, my writing is not only a way to list and describe experiences and feelings but also to perform them. 

I argue that part of my strategic role and critical reflexivity as a writer is to recognize the history of our human-mobile relationship. This affective narrative is, therefore, a fashioned response - a re-storying - of the already taken-for-granted stories told about the technology. In so doing, I  avoid reducing mobiles to objects for analytical study somehow exempt from the context, culture and history that produced them.    

Supervised by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska

Please find more information on my website: nataliedixon.info

The focus of my doctoral research is to propose what I call ‘geological filmmaking’, an approach that seeks to reimagine the geological as both a concept and a representational strategy. The Anthropocene, a newly proposed geological epoch in which the human is said to have made irreversible changes to the geophysics of the earth, is the horizon against which the urgency of my research unfolds. From the early survey and encyclopedic drawings influencing the development of the extraction industry and seeing the land as a resource to the ‘blue marble’ photograph from space, representations of the Earth have had a direct impact on our relationship to it.

It is therefore crucial at this time of planetary crisis to reimagine critically and responsibly the images of geophysical change. More than that, I argue that there is a need to create a new visuality in order to reflect how both our perceptual apparatus and what there is to perceive in the world are changing at increasing speeds. I will argue that perceiving geological change and perceiving geologically need to be approached as a dual task, and that film, as both a representational and sensorial medium, can tackle the creation of better images and a new way of seeing. Conscious of varying scales and time frames, geological filmmaking will create a new visual and sensory terrain on which to engage with geophysical questions, and create shifts in perceptual perspective that will decentre the human and provide a mental space in which imagining alternatives for the future is possible.

Sasha Litvintseva is supervised by Joanna Zylinska and Rachel Moore

Sasha Litvintseva is an artist, filmmaker and curator.

Sasha Litvintseva's website

Select journal publications

• ‘I love you more: an embodied account of performing ziyarat in Iraq’, Performing Islam, forthcoming 2014.
• ‘Gender, inclusivity and UK mosque experiences ,’ Contemporary Islam 8 (1) 2014, 1-16.
• 'Heather has two mommies and they're both caucasian and moneyed: Unsaids in international queer children's literature,'Darkmatter Journal, September 2010.
• 'Some Queer Questions from a Muslim faith perspective,' Journal of Sexualities, 2010, 13 (6) 671-684.
• 'Rap on 'l' Avenue'; reflections on Islam, Masculinities, and the public sphere in the Tunisian Rap scene,' (Co-authored with Qurra-Tul-Anne Hussain), Journal of Contemporary Islam, 2010, 5 (1) 37-58
• ‘Sexual ethics, marriage, and sexual autonomy,' Journal of Contemporary Islam, 2009, 3 (1) 59-78.

Select book chapters

• ‘Rap on l’avenue,’ (with Hussain, Q), in The Hip Hop and Religion Reader, eds. Pinn, A., and Miller, M., Routledge: New York., forthcoming 2014. 
• ‘Gender, sexuality and inclusivity in UK mosques’ in Marranci, G., Islam in practice, Routledge Studying Religions in Practice series, Routledge: London, 2014, 124-134. 
• ‘Textual Queering and filmatic interventions: Contesting Islam as heteronormative inheritance,' The Ashgate Research Companion to Sexuality and Religion, (Edited by Andrew Yip), 2012. 

in the module of culture and cultural studies (2016/2017) at Goldsmiths, University of London. Before joining Goldsmiths, he has obtained academic degrees at the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK), King’s College London (UK), and National Taiwan University of Arts (Taiwan), with the disciplines of media and communications, digital culture and sociology, and social psychology methodology. In the mean time, Chen-Ta works as a part-time survey researcher at Euromoney Instituitional Investor.

Chen-Ta’s academic interests locate in the fields of computer-mediated communications, social relationships in the digital age, social psychology of mass media and new media, and social and cultural implications of social media use.

Chen-Ta’s PhD thesis is under supervision by Dr. Mirca Madianou. The project is entitled as ‘Friendships and Social Media: A Taiwanese Perspective’. He argues that the notion of friendships in Taiwan is interwoven with Confucianism and social consequences of guanxi principles. The aim of his PhD project is to explore how these friendship values unfold in an integrated digital environment shaped by affordances of diverse digital media.

Rather than viewing online friendship practices as a global fashion with universal meanings, this study argues that the emerging practices of friendships are a process shaped by the interaction between features of complexity and uncertainty in the digital environment and embodiments of local values of friendships.

Anyone interested in the topics depicted, please contact on Email.