Research areas

Media engagement, democracy and cultural citizenship

Media engagement is a multidimensional phenomenon that can be analysed to understand the ways citizens and audiences engage and disengage with media that matters to them in the context of their lived experiences. Research in this area strives to understand the connections across reason and emotion, and why people connect or disconnect with politics, culture and the doing of citizenship. To probe the meaning of engagement opens up our horizons of understanding how the political and cultural spheres intersect through the parameters of civic engagement and democracy.

Strategic Communication and Society

The research specialises in understanding, explaining or critically examining communicative problems in the political sphere and/or strategic communication and its societal consequences. It includes research on:

• Disinformation and propaganda
• Digital media and politics
• Crisis communication
• Civic engagement and citizen dialogues
• Public Diplomacy
• Political communication
• Visual communication

Media industries and creativity

The creative industries are mashing up genres, mixing technologies, and working in creative hubs where there is a cross-fertilisation of skills and ideas. Research in this area focuses on co-creative labour and working spaces, visual cultures and grassroots creative communities, the talent and celebrity industries, and mixed genres and modes of storytelling for cross-platform content. Such co-creative labour can generate new expressions of symbolic meaning and value within the creative industries, but there are also tensions regarding the socio-political consequences of these forms of mixed media and creative collaboration.

Strategic Communication and Organisations

The research specialises in communication and communicative processes involving organisations of various kinds. It includes research on:

• Sustainability communication
• Internal communication
• Crisis communication
• Communication strategies
• Leadership communication
• Public diplomacy
• Professionalism, expertise and ethics
• Brand communication
• Visual communication

Gender, health and society

Gender representations in the news, media health and wellbeing invite critical questions of power relations and empowerment in the media and society. Research in this area focuses on gender equality and journalism, health and everyday media practices, public health and misinformation in online rumours for anti-vaccination, media scandals and victim recognition. Another area of research in this theme analyses media, death and dying, including storytelling, the paranormal and alternative health for mind, body and spirit.

Methods in Strategic Communication

The Department of Communication has researchers with expertise in a variety of research methods and experience in applying these in different contexts. Specialised expertise exists around:

• Survey experiments
• Eye-tracking
• Interview surveys (focus group, photo-elicitation)
• Network analysis
• Observations (participation, shadowing)
• Text analyses e.g. discourse analysis
• Video analytics
• Web and social media scraping

Audiences, popular culture and everyday life

Media audiences and everyday life address the movements, combinations and connections between media, social relations and life experiences. We map and evaluate the patterns and tracks people now make as they roam the digital media landscape. We analyse how popular culture connects with whole ways of life. Research in this area re-thinks the very category of ‘audience’ and the perspectives and methods used to understand media engagement and experiences in a rapidly changing environment.