Media City London seeks to support and enhance public engagement and knowledge exchange within the context of the Media@LSE research platform. “Media City London” is a broadly interpreted framework for research which touches on a wide range of themes, including social movements, London identities, migration, and media and digital industries.
Projects aim to engage in creative knowledge co-production with urban communities and institutions through public events and engagement with citizens, civil society, and public institutions. Projects also seek to engage in creative forms of research dissemination, showcasing research through film, exhibitions, and digital projects.
Media City London projects are conducted collaboratively with student interns within the context of the Media@LSE Knowledge Exchange Internship Programme. The programme is designed to introduce students to the production and dissemination of high-quality academic research.
Next generation mobile communication services – 5G – are being rolled out in London and other cities. 5G technologies are the focus of disputes concerning data security and public safety, conspiracy theories linking 5G and Covid-19, as well as US sanctions against the Chinese manufacturer, Huawei. How did the UK broadsheet and tabloid media cover 5G in this context? A large-scale media content analysis from January 2017 to early March 2020 shows that UK media generally reproduced an optimistic vision of 5G technology, associating it with efficiency gains and benefits for business, while under-reporting 5G benefits and risks for the general public.
Prof Robin Mansell
Dr Jean-Christophe Plantin
This project uses visual methods to examine how digital technologies, digital and material intersections, and digital datafication are experienced and represented in urban public space. In collaboration with a small team of MSc students, our aim is to map out digital articulations of (i.) publicness and privacy and (ii.) identity and consumption by exploring, documenting and intervening in the visual geographies of digital city London. We will use the collected material in three distinct contexts: first, to engage students with the city as a communicative, lived but also contested space; second, to showcase collaborative student-staff research with wider audiences; third, to develop seed research on innovative methods of mapping the digital city as communicative and cultural space.
Prof Myria Georgiou
Dr Alison Powell
This project is currently on hold due to coronavirus.
Prof Sarah Banet-Weiser
This project focuses on mediation and the Youth Climate Strike movement which emerged in 2019, manifesting in a series of strikes on the streets of London and numerous cities around the world. In collaboration with colleagues from Finland, US and Canada, this project encompasses interviews with leaders of this movement (who are all young women), as well as social media analysis and content analysis of media representations of the movement. The research questions focus on their messaging and discourse, their self-mediation practices and self-reflexivity in that regard, changes in mainstream media representations over time, as well as elite and public-opinion formation to assess the mediation opportunity structure of the movement in the various contexts we study: Finland, UK, Belgium, US and Canada.
Prof Bart Cammaerts