Research interests
Core research interests
- Media Policy and Regulation
- Media and Contemporary Social Change
- Ethnicity and Media Relations
- Comparative Media Studies
- Political Communications
- Media Professionals
- Media Organisation
- Transnational and International Media
- Audience Research
- Journalism
- Crime and Social Control
- Consumption
- New Media
- Information Society Studies
- Media and Conflict
- Video Gaming
- Democratisation and Information/Communications
Interdisciplinarity is at a premium and fruitful mixtures of Sociology, Political Science, Communications, Cultural Studies and Geography will be found at the Centre - though members do share an emphasis on the social dimensions of media and communications and place a premium on high-level research design.
Group publications include
P. Iosifidis (2011), Global Media and Communication Policy, Palgrave Macmillan
F.Webster, Theories of the Information Society, Routlege
K.Ball and F.Webster, The Intensification of Surveillance: Crime, Terrorism and Warfare in the Information Age, Pluto Press
J.Tunstall, The Media Were American, Oxford University Press
H.Tumber, F.Webster, Journalists Under Fire, Sage Publications Ltd
J.K. Chalaby, Transnational Television Worldwide: Towards a New Media Order, I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.
P.Iosifidis, Public Television in the Digital Era, Palgrave Macmillan
R.Blom, E.Karvonen, H.Melin, K.Nordenstreng, E.Puoskari, F.Webster, The Information Society Reader, Routledge Student Readers
S.Maltby, R.Keeble, Communicating War: Memory, Media and Military, Arima Publishing
A.Smith, F.Webster, The Postmodern University?: Contested Visions of Higher Education in Society, The Society for Research into Higher Education
K.Robins, F.Webster, The Virtual University: Knowledge, Markets and Management, Oxford University Press
K.Robins, F.Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life, Routledge
G.Browning, A.Halcli, F.Webster, Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present, SAGE Books
The Centre's principles
Several general principles inform, but do not restrict, the work of Centre members. These include a commitment to:
- Extend beyond media-centric orientations (i.e. reach beyond approaches which conduct, and remain with, immanent analyses of media), though interest in representation and organisation of media remains keen
- Situate media/communications in wide social relations
- Stress the mediation of social life
- Locate media in a context of rapid and accelerating change
- Conceive media broadly, to cover TV, radio, film press, but also the Internet and other new media
- Combine theoretical sophistication with empirically informed analysis
- Emphasise the increased prominence of 'culture' in society, expressed in the growth of media/communications, but also in the explosive development of different cultures (from youth groups to hybrid music)
- Situate democratisation in the above (to emphasise the centrality to new social movements, political groups and activities, of mediation and 'symbolic' campaigns and presentation, as well as to acknowledge the force of this major feature of social change in individual as well as collective identities).
Study with us
The Centre for International Communications & Society encourages candidates for a higher degree to apply for the Sociology Masters courses at City. Those interested in a Sociology research degree (MPhil/PhD) are advised to make preliminary contact with the staff member whose interests most clearly approximate to their own.