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Lecturer in Media and Communication, University of Leicester

In the past I have worked as a Research Fellow at ISCTE – University of Lisbon and as a Lecturer in Film Studies and Media at York St John University. In 2006 I was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.

Cutting across the humanities and the social sciences, my areas of interest are cosmopolitanism, globalisation, media ethics, new protest movements, and cultural and political sociology. My specialist research broadly falls into three strands:

Europe, protest movements, and the public sphere: my research on new protest movements looks at how via the use of the possibilities of digital media, the indignados social movement went on to devise new forms of public communication and socio-political struggle. In this context, I am interested in understanding how shared ways of thinking and acting are capable of fuelling radical modes of citizen participation and a sense of shared European solidarity. I also seek to explore the relation between embodied occupation and virtual communication.

Mediated Cosmopolitanism: here, I explore how and when certain media genres – cosmopolitan cinema, alternative and activist media - are capable of enacting forms of cosmopolitan engagement with the perils of distant others via serious public dialogue in a transnational public sphere.

Citizenship and the arts: I am interested in understanding how artists – particularly those in contexts of asylum and migration - can reinvent citizenship as a political project and reconfigure community. This strand of my research investigates ways in which artists – in both online and offline contexts - are able to create new communicative spaces for contesting established notions of citizenship.

Experience

  • –present
    Lecturer in Media and Communication, University of Leicester