John Downey

John read Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University. He was a Senior Scholar at Gonville and Caius College and was the Graythorne Scholar and Beaumont Scholar at Jesus College. His PhD was about the Frankfurt School and John was a post-doc at the Graduate College for Communication Sciences at Siegen University in Germany. John came to the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough in 2000. He was a Visiting Professor of Sociology at Williams College, Massachusetts in 2007. John seeks to apply the work of the Frankfurt School to the study of media. As well as receiving funding from the Economic and Social Research Council for his research, he has engaged in work for the BBC Board of Governors, the BBC Trust, the Office of Communication, the Electoral Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality, and the Guardian newspaper. His research interests focus mainly on new media and on comparative media.

John’s research in recent years has tended to focus on international media or rather on comparative media: the comparison of media institutions and content across time and space. In 2006 he led a project for the BBC’s Governors analysing the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2012 he worked on a project for the BBC Trust examining the BBC’s coverage of the Arab Spring. His work seeks to develop the field of comparative media theoretically, methodologically and empirically. With Thomas Koenig he introduced the use of computer-aided analysis to large n frame analysis. With James Stanyer he introduced the use of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to the study of media.

John is Director of the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture.