Welcome to the 2020 autumn edition of our research newsletter, updating you on academic news from the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds.

PUBLICATION HIGHLIGHTS

HOW PEOPLE TALK ABOUT POLITICS

Professor Stephen Coleman’s new book, How People Talk About Politics, was published in November 2020 by Bloomsbury Press. During the Brexit referendum campaign it became clear how easily national conversations around politics could become raucous and bitter. This book explores the nature of talking about politically contentious issues and how our society can begin to develop a more constructive culture of political talk.

Uniquely, this study focuses on citizens own experiences and reflections on developing, practising and evaluating their own political voices. Based on seventy in-depth interviews with a diverse range of people, Stephen Coleman explores the intricate nature of interpersonal political talk and what this means for public attitudes towards politics and how people negotiate their political identities. Engaging with a broad range of subjects from Political Communication to Sociology this book offers valuable insight into how the public can discuss politically turbulent topics in a meaningful and constructive way.

CAPTURING THE MOOD OF DEMOCRACY

Professor Stephen Coleman and Dr James Brogden have published a book entitled Capturing the Mood of Democracy: The British General Election 2019 (Palgrave, 2020).

This book provides an ethnographic study of the November-December 2019 UK Election, through the multicultural, multivoiced experiences of Bradford, a city situated in the northern ‘heartlands’ of the Labour Party.

SPACES OF WAR, WAR OF SPACES

Along with her co-editors at the SAGE journal, Media, War & Conflict, Dr Katy Parry has just published an edited collection in July 2020, Spaces of War, War of Spaces (Bloomsbury). The collection provides a rich, international and multi-disciplinary engagement with the convergence of war and media through the conceptual lens of 'space'. Contributions to the book were selected from those that were invited to present at the 10th Anniversary Media, War & Conflict conference in 2018.

WOMEN MAKE HORROR

Dr Alison Peirse's edited collection, Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre, was published in September 2020 by Rutgers University Press. It is the first book-length study of women filmmakers in horror film, the first all-women edited book on horror film, and the first book to call out the male-bias in written histories of horror and then to illuminate precisely how, and where, these histories are lacking. It re-evaluates existing literature on the history of horror film, on women practitioners in the film industry and approaches to undertaking film industries research. It establishes new approaches for studying women practitioners and illuminates their unexamined contribution to the formation and evolution of the horror genre. The book focuses on women directors and screenwriters but also acknowledges the importance of women producers, editors and cinematographers. It explores narrative and experimental cinema, short, anthology and feature-filmmaking, and offers case studies of North American, Latin American, European, East Asian and Australian filmmakers, films and festivals.

RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT

THE PANDEMIC AND ITS PUBLICS

Professor Stephen Coleman, Dr Giles Moss and Dr Nely Konstantinova produced a report on how people respond to official coronavirus guidance. It states that people can be split into six distinct groups determined by the ways they search for, make sense of and act upon official advice.

TOM JACKSON SECURES FUNDING FOR THREE PROJECTS WITH XR STORIES

Dr Tom Jackson has secured funding for three projects as the Lead Academic partner, in collaboration with external agencies and academic co-investigators. The funding comes from XR Stories, which is an AHRC Creative R&D Partnerships Grant. The total funding across all three projects (Surround Stories Lab, Glimmer & Symphony, and Shapeshifter) is £180,000.

"NOT-EQUAL" EPSRC PROJECT

Congratulations to Dr Joanne Armitage (PI), Dr Helen Thornham (Co-I) and Dr Chris Birchall (Co-I) for their successful bid (£40,000) to the EPSRC-funded Network+ Scheme, “Not-Equal”, run by Newcastle University.

Their project is titled Equally Digital/Digitally Equal (ED/DE). It has been developed in partnership with four cooperatives in four different countries in order to examine and technologically respond to the challenges of inequality, social justice and enablement in a moment of unprecedented change caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Each cooperative is currently seeking ways to continue their work and engage vulnerable groups in social justice projects and the project will collectively evaluate these practices and methods to (1) develop new sharable and collaborative practices fit for the current global condition (2) ask how the lived necessity of digital engagement has reimagined issues of inequality and social justice as datalogical, socio-technical and algorithmic (for example).

"CREATORS OF COLOUR" ESRC PROJECT

Congratulations to Professor Dave Hesmondhalgh for his recent success on a very exciting new project. Dave is part of a team of three researchers that in July were awarded £15,920 by the Innovation Fund of the ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre, to investigate '“Creators of Colour”, Digital Platforms, and Access to the Cultural and Creative Industries'. The PI is Dr Francesca Sobande (Cardiff University) and the other investigator is Dr Anamik Saha (Goldsmiths University of London). The project will run for one year from September 2020.

CLIMATE CHANGE: PUTTING WOMEN AT THE CENTRE OF THE SOLUTIONS

Women are often on the frontline of climate change, as subsistence farmers trying to feed their families and as lynchpins holding rural communities together.

It’s therefore important to understand how these women on the ground receive information about climate change and how they interact with it — they need this information in order to survive.

New insights and policy initiatives come from governments and scientists on how to mitigate the impacts of climate change, but do they reach the people who need them, and in a timely manner? And how easily can the information be put to use, alongside the knowledge they already have from the day-to-day reality of dealing with these challenges?

These are the questions that inspired a collaboration between experts in communications and gender at the University of Leeds, including Dr Chris Paterson, School of Media and Communication, and their counterparts at the University of Nairobi, funded through the Global Challenges Research Fund.

PhD NEWS

Ruxandra Lupu has been awarded a PhD for her thesis on ‘The Home Movie 4.0: (co)creative strategies for a tacit, embodied and affective reading of the Sicilian home movie archive’. Her practice-led research explored co-creative methods for opening up the meaning of Sicilian home movie archive to the public.

Drawing on Bergson’s model of actualization, Ruxandra developed a novel methodological approach to exploring the “reading” of Sicilian home movies that is positioned at the juncture of theory and creative practice. The method suggested, theorised and tested three modalities of “seeing” through the body, counting for the exercise of both the body of the individual, as well as that of the collective. The identified modalities – of tacitness; embodiment; and affect – trace a distinct and unique framework of various creative methods not only for engaging differently (i.e. creatively, bodily, somatically) with home movies, but also versatile enough to potentially apply to a wide range of items, including other more mainstream film genres as well as other forms of heritage assets.

Her supervisors were Mr Simon Popple, Dr Paul Cooke and Dr Giorgia Aiello. The project was funded through the generous support of Mr Colin Needham. Ruxandra will take up the position of LAHRI Postdoc researcher at the University of Leeds, starting 1 December 2020.

Abdullah Alhuntushi has been awarded a PhD for his thesis on ‘How Arab Journalists Engage and Use Statistics to Report Science: The Case of Statistics in Science News in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt'.

This study examines journalists’ use of statistical information within science news. The study focuses on how news reporters use statistics when articulating science news in two broad areas, that of health and technology news in Arab countries, specifically, of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It does so by triangulating content analysis, close reading, expert panel and triangulating this with semi-structured interviews with journalists. Overall, the study found that despite a rich Islamic historical tradition of engagement with science in general and maths in particular in these societies, news reporting of science presents severe deficiencies and gaps when it comes to engaging and using statistics and numbers to articulate science news. The results suggest that a lack of professional autonomy influences the use and articulation of statistical data and attributes this to the constrains that the political system places upon reporters.

More information about our research degrees

EVENTS

RESEARCH SEMINARS

Our Research Seminar series for 2020-2021 is shaping up nicely. In Semester One there were talks by Professor Gina Marchetti (University of Hong Kong), Dr Francesca Sobande (Cardiff University), Mr Ric Bailey (BBC / University of Leeds), Dr Rachel Lifter (New York University), and Professor Julia Sonnevend (The New School for Social Research).

Upcoming talks will be given by Dr James Wahutu (New York University / Harvard), Dr Alison Winch (University of East Anglia), Professor Gina Neff (Oxford Internet Institute / University of Oxford), Dr Alisa Perren (University of Texas at Austin), and Professor Linda Mizejewski (University of Pittsburgh), including a joint seminar by Dr Limin Liang (Hong Kong University) and Dr Lone Sorensen (University of Leeds).

More information

ANGER AND AGENCY IN THE DIGITAL PUBLIC SPHERE

Professor Stephen Coleman was invited to give the opening keynote address entitled 'Anger and Agency in the Digital Public Sphere' to the annual conference of the National Institute of Science and Technology for Digital Democracy in Brazil on 26 October 2020. It is now available to watch on YouTube.

Watch on YouTube

IS MUSIC STREAMING BAD FOR MUSICIANS?

Professor Dave Hesmondhalgh was invited to give a talk as part of the Digit Debates series from the Digital Futures at Work Centre. Great controversy has surrounded the growth of the music streaming services that are now central to the music industries internationally.  In this talk, Professor Hesmondhalgh considers the key claim that that music streaming has made it harder than before for musicians to make a living from music. It is now available to watch on YouTube.

Watch on YouTube

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University of Leeds · School of Media and Communication · University of Leeds · Leeds, LS2 9JT · United Kingdom