Research students

Hiya Deb holds a Bachelors in Multimedia and Animation (India) and MA in Filmmaking from Kingston University.

Her primary research interest is Bengali Cinema based on Partition. Her PhD research project is about Caste, gender and representation in India, especially West Bengal. Beside her PhD research, she is a freelance Videographer and Editor.

Supervisor

• Gareth Stanton

Tessel's research looks at the value of artistic expression for articulating ongoing forms of animal colonialism and envisioning decolonial interspecies ecologies.

Chapters centre on Norwegian forced reindeer culling and Sámi sovereignty, Indonesian (were)tigers as a lens for addressing the liminal spaces in postcolonial histories, wild boar and the trespassing of private property as well as binaries between wild and domesticated, and underwater noise pollution and speculative attempts at listening to cetaceans.

Supervisors

• Shela Sheikh
• Matthew Fuller

Jaeyoon earned his MA in Digital Media at University College London. His research primarily explores the Korean Wave 3.0 in the UK.

He questions 'Koreanness' in Hallyu by investigating ways in which Korean authenticity in media products resonates with the UK born Hallyu audience.

Supervisors

• Louise Chambers
• Gareth Stanton

Ilaria's research focuses on the Dheisheh refugee camp (Bethlehem, West Bank) and it explores the relationships between art, space, temporariness, and citizenship. Her project looks at the Dheishian counter-narratives emerging from visual art, music, and dance in relation to space, right to return, and decolonisation.

By understanding Palestinian refugee camps as active counter-spaces, Ilaria's reaserch reads the politics of refugee artistic production as a radical culture that eludes and deconstructs the oppressing structures of (neo)colonial and global power.

Supervisor

• Shela Sheikh
• Gareth Stanton

Suzy Miller is a screenwriter and film maker.

Her first short film "One More Guest?" (Restino, 2021) was selected and placed in several international festivals. She has been selected to participate the Stowe Narrative Lab June 2023, and has a comedy pilot being. optioned by a UK Production Company.Her screenplay pilot "Breaking the Peace" is currently on the Coverfly 'Red List'.

Suzy is keen for fellow film and audio drama practitioners/students to come and get involved in the filming of her horror feature created as part of this PhD and the subsequent binaural audio drama verion.

Supervisors

• Richard Shannon
• Philip Palmer

With a background as a photographic artist, Emilia considers how imaging practices that are not centred around human perception could help us humans conceptualise and interfere in the world — that is also not centred around the human — in more responsible ways, particularly in the context of scientific research.

Her thesis develops imaging for machines as a figurative tool for reimagining what images could be, do and mean also on a nonvisual level when produced not just for humans but also for nonhumans.

Supervisor

• Joanna Zylinska

Callum is a PhD Researcher and Associate Lecturer in the media department. Previously at Goldsmiths (BA) and the LSE (MSc), Callum's research project investigates the contested and mediated boundaries of identity and homeland within the North, South and Joseonjok Korean diaspora(s) in the UK.

The unique case study of suburban London presents a globally exclusive coexistence of ethnic Koreans from North & South Korea and China (Joseonjok). The tumultuous history of the Korean diaspora(s) problematises the boundaries of citizenship, nation and subsequently identity and home.

Supervisors

• Mirca Madianou
• Richard MacDonald

Drawing on techniques of close reading from software studies and literary studies, as well as the interdisciplinary mode of cultural studies, Liam is researching three digital technologies which have been pivotal in generating the material conditions of our present: compression, encryption and indexing.

Thanks to jargon and technical complexity these things are often wrongly perceived as immaterial, detached from any material base. Liam’s work seeks to reassert the overlooked bonds between digital culture and materiality.

Supervisors

• Matthew Fuller
• James Burton

In 2019, Chile experienced a social uprising that challenged the prevalent neoliberal system.

Marcos' research explores the underlying reasons why the Chilean traditional print media, entangled with other hegemonic actors – political parties, corporations and think tanks – aimed to secure the political economic status quo even after it was put into question during the Chilean Spring.

In this endeavour he investigates institutions of power that prevail from the Pinochet years to revisit and reinvigorate Western theorisations of media power and ideology from a Global South perspective.

Supervisor

• Natalie Fenton

Besides the PhD research project, Sopolnawitch works as a commercial videographer and editor and a member of the Communication Arts programme at Khon Kaen University International College.

Supervisors

• Richard MacDonald
• Sue Clayton

Laurel’s research explores how the digital platformization of commercial sex is transforming the practices, values, and meanings of sex work.

Adopting digital ethnographic methods and a cultural studies framework, her project uses OnlyFans as a case study in order to interrogate the ways in which the dynamics of subjectivity impact upon laboring practices, with particular attention to how the discursive organization of sexuality and work are bound up with notions of agency and empowerment.

Her research aims to bring out the potentially valorizing dimensions of platform-based sex work while simultaneously accounting for the coercive and commodifying mechanisms of digital platforms, which further entrench power dynamics along the lines of sexuality, gender, race, class, and ability.

Supervisors

• Sarah Cefai
• Alison Winch

Having been working as a professional television journalist in Indonesia for the past 15 years, Sofie is exploring how alternative news media may pose challenge to the hegemonic news construction as a direct result of the entanglement between the oligarchic media industry and the governing power in Indonesia.

She argues that within a particular political context and media system, alternative news media can function as counter-hegemony within the larger media landscape. In serving as counter-hegemonic entities, alternative news media may play an important role in enhancing the democratic values of news production in Indonesia.

Supervisors

• Des Freedman
• Natalie Fenton

As a freelance camera assistant and climate activist, Annika is studying the political economic impacts of neo- and ordoliberalism on working conditions in precarious film labour in the UK and Germany.

She investigates worker's organisation on the micro-level to explore macro-level improvements. Her research interests include the political economy of the media, media policy, affective politics and social movements.

Supervisors

• Jacob Mukherjee
• Des Freedman