POLIS is a joint initiative of LSE's Department of Media and Communications and the London College of Communication,aimed at working journalists, people in public life and students in the UK and around the world. POLIS is the place where journalists and the wider world can examine and discuss the media and its impact on society. POLIS has a dual mission to:
- provide a forum for public debate and policy intervention on key issues of news journalism
- produce outstanding research on the impact of mediation and journalism in our societies
To this end, POLIS' commitment is two-fold. It is committed to promoting open and substantial dialogue on the changing structures, policies and practices of journalism, inviting diverse stakeholders to reflect on the dilemmas that journalism faces today. At the same time, POLIS is committed to enabling high quality, interdisciplinary research on the emerging challenges posed by formal networks and informal trajectories of news production and circulation. This is how the world is made available to us as a political, cultural and ethical reality.
POLIS is thus a hub of people and ideas which regards journalism not simply as a practical skill but also as a historical-political practice to be situated within broader changes in public life. It is also a theoretical project to be approached in the light of social and cultural theory and political philosophy. In bridging the applied with the theoretical, POLIS is uniquely positioned to engage with journalism at once as a set of contemporary challenges, around topical issues of professional sustainability, impartiality or democratic transparency, and as a set of long-standing ethical and philosophical questions about the very nature of technology, public communication and social change.
For more information on our research|, our staff|, events |and other activities, please visit the links on this page.