Research Fellows 2017

Sarah C. Bishop is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the City University of New York, and is the author of the book U.S. Media and Migration: Refugee Oral Histories (Routledge, 2016).  Bishop’s research considers the interactions of nationalism, citizenship, migration, and media, and her work in these areas has been supported with grants from The Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, the Waterhouse Family Institute at Villanova University, the Center for Intercultural Dialogue, the National Communication Association, the Urban Communication Foundation, the Diversity Projects Development Fund, and the Eugene Lang Foundation.  Bishop’s recent research is published in journals such as Critical Studies in Media Communication, the Journal of Applied Communication Research, Communication Culture and Critique, Space and Culture, the Journal of Studies in International Education and the Journal of Intercultural Communication Research. At CUNY, Bishop teaches a range of graduate and undergraduate classes in Gender/Race/Ethnicity in Communication, Media and Migration, Global Communication, Privilege and Difference, and Digital Media Culture.​

Max Hänska is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Prof.) at De Montfort University, and an associate at the LSE’s Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit. His research explores the role of digital technologies in political communication and citizen journalism. Furthermore, some of his work centres on normative questions that arise at the intersection between communication and collective choice. He is the founding editor of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/eurocrisispress/. For more information see: www.haenska.net.

Tim Highfield is Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, where his fellowship project is Visual Cultures of Social Media. He is the author of Social Media and Everyday Politics (Polity, 2016), which brings together his PhD and postdoctoral research into politics, popular culture, digital and social media, play and irreverence, activism, and Eurovision. His research examines how the everyday and the digital, the popular and the political, the silly and the serious are interlinked; his interests include the everyday practices of popular social media, and how formats and styles from animated GIFs to humorous hashtags and joke forms are used to engage with topics ranging from the explicitly political to the mundane and personal. More information can be found at http://timhighfield.net, and he is @timhighfield on Twitter.

Patrick McCurdy is Associate Professor in the Department Communication at the University of Ottawa.  His research draws from media and communication, journalism as well as social movement studies to study media as a site and source of social struggle and contestation. Most recently, Patrick’s work has studied the evolution of oil/tar sands advertising and campaigning from 1970 to present day with his project Mediatoil (www.mediatoil.ca). Patrick’s work has been published in several academic journals and he is the co-author of Protest Camps (Zed 2013) and the co-editor of three books Protest Camps in International Context: Spaces, Infrastructures and Media of Resistance (Policy Press 2017), Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (Palgrave 2013) and Mediation and Protest Movements (Intellect 2013).

Matti Pohjonen works at the intersection of comparative digital culture, philosophy and data science. He previously worked as a Senior Researcher for African Voices Foundation, a non-profit research organisation that emerged out of University of Cambridge. He also worked as a Research Fellow for the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence, an European academic network focused on researching the prevalence, contours, functions, and impacts of Violent Online Political Extremism and responses to it. He has also worked for the Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCLMP), University of Oxford, on two projects mapping online debates, hate speech and political conflict in Ethiopia. He finished his MA and PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where he was also an AHRC-funded Post-Doctorate Research Fellow, Teaching Fellow and Research Fellow in Digital Culture.