Professor David Morley

David's research spans questions of media technologies constituting the 'electronic landscapes' within which we live.

Staff details

Professor David Morley

Position

Emeritus Professor

Department

Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Email

d.morley (@gold.ac.uk)

David Morley’s interdisciplinary work spans media audience/technology studies, cultural geography and globalisation. He has held visiting Professorships/Fellowships at universities in Australia, China, France, Mexico, Spain, Sweden and the United States. His work has been translated into 22 languages.

As a member of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, he worked with Stuart Hall to develop empirical research based on the paradigm-setting encoding/decoding model of media audiences. He has subsequently co-edited two critical collections of Hall`s work ('Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies`, 1996 and `Conversations, Projects and Legacies` 2016), and most recently he has edited the two-volume set of Hall’s `Essential Essays` (Vol 1 `The Foundations of Cultural Studies`; Vol 2 `Identity and Diaspora`) to be published by Duke University Press in 2019.

At CCCS he pioneered the development of anthropological and ethnographic techniques in audience/technology studies (see `Towards an Ethnography of Media Audiences` 1974). His work helped to set the conceptual agenda for the study of media consumption internationally, focussing initially on questions of class (in the widely influential `Nationwide Audience` ,1978), and later on questions of gender and domesticity, in studies of the household uses of information and communication technology (`Family Television` 1986)

His subsequent work in cultural geography (`Spaces of Identity` 1996, ; `Home Territories` 2000 and `Media Modernity and Technology` 2006) encompasses macro questions about the role of satellite television , the Internet and the mobile phone in the constitution of the electronic landscapes within which we now live. His latest book `Communications and Mobility : the Mobile Phone, the Migrant and the Container Box` (2016) investigates the changing articulation of virtual and material geographies It seeks to offer a grounded critique of the paradigms of `nomadology` which have come to dominate contemporary work on phenomena such as `techno-globalisation` and `de-territorialisation` and re-examines ideas of home, community, place and territory, in the context of the spread of identity panics and the tightening of borders, across the globe.

He is the editor of the Comedia book series for Routledge and is on the Editorial/Advisory Boards of a number of journals, including Cultural Studies, The European Journal of Cultural Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Television and New Media

AIL-Talk: David Morley – Home Territories – Virtual and Material Geographies (V.2) from Angewandte Innovation Lab.

The Question of Theory in Cultural Studies - Professor David Morley, Goldsmiths, University of London from Goldsmiths, University of London.

`David Morley discussing the fundamental principles of Stuart Hall's `encoding/decoding` model of communication, in a video link presentation to a conference of communications and journalism students held in Bangalore, India in February 2019`

Publications and research outputs

Book

Edited Book

Book Section

Article

Conference or Workshop Item

Broadcast

Areas of supervision

PhD topics supervised include:

Media power, space and place

The cultural significance of MTV Europe

Cultural identity and communications technologies in Taiwan

Television, the public sphere and the representation of ‘race’ in the UK

Satellite television and youth culture in Thailand

Music and cultural identity in Korea

Multicultural broadcasting in Eastern Europe

Telenovelas and political culture in Mexico

Japanese migrant cultural experiences in New York and London

The circulation of ‘cool’ between London and Tokyo

Transnational film culture is in Taiwan

The culture of the Jamaican reggae sound system

The Simpsons as inter-textual television

The ethnography of online music-file sharing

Media consumption in the Chinese diaspora

Technological competencies and media literacies

Transnational Television Consumption and Cultural Flows in East Asia;

Negotiating Public Screens in the Mediated City;

The Ethnography of Inuit conceptions of `internet`