Journalism, Politics, & Communication

Jared’s research principally focuses questions of (self-)representation, power and identity in regard to non-state terrorism. He has written about print, broadcast and online portrayals of 'Islamic' terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and is especially interested in the complex interactions that take place between terrorists, political elites, journalists and citizens in today's 'hybrid' media environment. His work is interdisciplinary and fuses approaches taken from cultural studies, political communications, visual culture, and poststructuralist theory.

Jared’s current research focuses on the way different groups imagine the Islamic State phenomenon, and examines the interplay between the group’s propaganda and media, policy and public imaginations of the threat. He also has a growing interest in ultranationalist and far-right extremist propaganda narratives and imagery. 

PhD supervision

Jared is particularly interested in hearing from research students writing on the following areas:

• Media discourses and representations of the East, Islam, terrorism and political violence
• The politics/processes of terrorist/extremist (self)representation, knowledge and power 
• Violent Jihadi or far-right extremist propaganda
• Terrorism and visual political communication

Research Interests

My research focus around designing and applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models in two major areas:

1. Computer Vision: Industry and Academics research projects in areas of Object Detection (YOLO, SSD, RetinaNet), Image Segmentation (Segment anything Model SAM, U-Net), Image Classification (MobileNet, ResNet, VGG, DarkNet), Few Shot Learning, 3D Point Cloud (PointNet, SPVCNN), and these approaches with Supervised, Semi-Supervised, and Unsupervised
Learning.

2. Health Sciences: Electronic Health Records, Multiple Long-Term Conditions (MLTC), Multimorbidity, Temporal Graph Neural Networks, Codelists (SNOMED, MedCodes), Designing Deep Neural Networks for diagnosing medical conditions like Arthritis, Hospital Admissions, Face Injuries, Skin Cancer, Brain Tumour, and other use cases.

3. Other research areas: Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT), Publish Subscribe Paradigm Multimedia Event Processing (MEP), Complex Event Processing (text data queries).
Please find details in research publications at:

(https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bfXlzuMAAAAJ&hl=en)

Codings, Tools, and Implementation (Help for PhD Students in): Python, Tensorflow, CUDA, Pytorch, Pytorch Lightening, TensorFlow, Keras, Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, Jupyter Notebooks, GPU servers, Visual Studio, entwine, CloudCompare, MLflow, Jira, confluence.

Major Research Areas can be summarised as: Computer Vision, Deep Neural Networks, Smart Cities, and Health Sciences.

Research Supervision

I am looking for PhD students interested in Interdisciplinary projects involving Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) applications in multiple domains. Some of the potential examples are included below:

- AI based models for processing Heterogenous data for Early Diagnosis of Life-threatening Conditions.
- Asset Inspection with 3D Image Segmentation.
- Generative AI Models for Skin Cancer Detection on Phone Images.
- Automatic generation of Object Detection Dataset (ObjectNet).
- Pattern Detection in Patient Trajectories using Temporal Graph Neural Networks.

Research interests

My research is in the field of Critical Data Studies. Critical Data Studies is an interdisciplinary field that uses social theory to inform examination of the social drivers, implications and power relations of emergent forms of data and algorithmic practices.

My recent research broadly breaks down into three areas: (1) data and AI cultures of practice - including issues around Responsible data/AI practice, (2) data journeys & data friction - particularly climate and energy data flows, and (3) digital labour - particularly crowdwork. You can read more about my research in each of these areas on my website: https://lifeofdata.org/site/category/research-areas/

I am currently working on the following projects, which involve collaborations with a variety of organisations including GSK, JISC, BBC and DWP:

- Patterns in Practice (Principal Investigator). AHRC funded. https://lifeofdata.org/site/patterns-in-practice/

- Living with Data (Co-investigator). Nuffield funded. https://livingwithdata.org/current-research/

- Energy data-sharing scoping study (PI). Internally funded.

I am interested in supervising PhD projects that advance the critical study of emerging data and algorithmic practices and flows. By critical I mean projects that in some way grapple with issues of power, ethics and justice as they relate to topics of data, automation, data science and/or AI. I tend to use qualitative research methods, including ethnographic methods and (policy) document analysis. There is a wide range of potential projects in this area. Applicants are advised to check out recent papers in key journals (e.g. 'Big Data and Society' and 'Information, Communication and Society') and conferences (e.g. Data Power, Data Justice) to get a sense for emerging topics.

Research interests

My research interests and experience are broadly focused in the following areas:

• Public library services

• Library services for children and young people

• Reading research and the promotion of literature and reading.

More specifically, my work relates to the social, political and educational roles of public and youth libraries in society, with a particular focus on diversity, social justice and reading. I am happy to supervise PhD projects related to any of these areas.

Human-Computer Interaction

My research examines users’ experiences in their interaction with technology, particularly in terms of the user and autonomous systems as two agents in collaborative work towards shared goals.

My work has also explored people’s emotional experiences in working with new technology, the reliability and performance of assistive technology in people’s intention to use, and children’s understanding of robots.

PhD supervision

I am particularly interested in hearing from research students focusing on the following areas:

• Human-robot interaction – particularly in social robotics

• People’s experiences in human-robot collaborative working

• User’s trust in automation and robotics

Research interests

My research interests focus on developing effective retrieval technologies that support users as they seek to fulfil their information needs. Specifically I have carried out research in the areas of:

• multilingual search

• retrieval of images

• geo-spatial search

• analysis of transaction logs

• text re-use and plagiarism detection 

• the evaluation of search systems

My background in natural language processing has allowed me to develop more sophisticated approaches to accessing information. In addition to developing techniques, I have also built up an understanding of the users of information access systems and their information needs, taking a more user-oriented view to my research. I am also interested in the creation of re-usable evaluation resources (corpora and test collections) for the wider research community, such as computational linguistics and information retrieval.

Research Interests

My research interests are:

• Critical Algorithm and Data Studies

• Critical HCI and Interdisciplinary Theory

• Cultural Studies and Responsible Computing

• Capitalism

• Sociotechnical theory

• Digital Well-Being

• The digital good life and discourses of wellness

• Neoliberalism

• Power/Knowledge

Research Supervision

I can supervise a wide range of interdisciplinary topics that could involve, for instance, mixed method studies of platforms and their use, qualitative digital research, digital well-being, power, advancing sociotechnical theory, and responsible computational design. I would be interested in supervising PhDs in the following and related areas:

• Sociotechnical systems and responsible computing

• How people manage their digital well-being online

• The politics of data and platforms

• The production of ideal users in HCI

• Normative and exclusionary technologies

• Nudge technologies and their links to neoliberalism

• The digital good life and discourses of wellness

• The relationships between mediation, digital materiality and discourse

Research interests

My main research interests are within the area of information management, with specialist expertise in information governance and ethics. I have led and worked with colleagues from across a number of disciplines on externally funded projects in this area supported by the EPSRC, ESRC, AHRC, and Innovate UK. I predominantly use qualitative and mixed-methods.

PhD Supervision

Information governance and ethics; AI governance, accountability and ethics; trustworthy and responsible AI; information management.

Public Communication & Media Freedom

Jackie's area of expertise is the civil role and power of the news. Her research examines three particular aspects of this: the architecture and culture of the news; the mediation of civil society and social identity by the news; and issues of news freedom and standards. She has written extensively in these areas.

Jackie also chairs the interdisciplinary research body Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM). CFOM seeks to research and evaluate the role of free and independent news media in building and maintaining political and civil freedoms.

PhD supervision

Due to her numerous other commitments Jackie is unable to supervise new PhD students at present.

When her workload permits, Jackie will be interested in hearing from research students focusing on the following areas:

• The relationship between the news and civil society
• Post conflict reconstruction via the factual mass media
• Constraints and restraints on freedom of expression

Journalism, Radio and Communication

Emma's research interests lie in the role of radio and social media in fragile and conflict-affected zones. She is particularly interested in working with journalists, and also with audiences to ensure the information they receive is indeed what they want, when they want it, in the language they prefer and in a format they can identify with. 

She collaborates with international media development agencies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society organisations (CSOs) and humanitarian agencies operating in the Global South. She leads the FemmePowermentAfrique project, which conducts large-scale qualitative and quantitative participatory research into the impact of radio, and social media, on women's empowerment and youth in the Sahel. Her work with internally displaced populations and other marginalised and isolated communities in the Global South has enabled her recommendations to be adopted by many UN bodies. 

Emma’s main research focus is media development, media for development, audience research, and working with international and local agencies to promote and improve radio and social media as a communicative and peacebuilding tool.

In recent years, Emma has published books and articles on radio in conflict, women's empowerment, trauma sensitive communication and qualitative methodologies in the Global South.

PhD Supervision

Emma is particularly interested in hearing from research students focusing on the following areas:

• Radio, (social) media and international development 

• Humanitarian crises and communication 

• Audiences and audience feedback and associated methodologies

• The interaction between media and international development agencies, NGOs, and CSOs 

• The role of radio in a changing media context

• Women’s empowerment, international development and media

Research interests

My research interests currently focus on ignorance management, organisational learning and strategic decision-making. I am particularly interested in studying how our mind operates under bounded constraints, exploring the interplay between knowledge and ignorance to optimise the way in which we make decisions. My work also looks at strategies for enhancing knowledge sharing in organisations.

Research supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas:

• Strategic knowledge management

• Interproject and cross-organisational learning

• Managing knowledge in project environments

• Knowledge networks and boundaries

International Media Law

Irini's research interests are in the areas of European, international and comparative media law and policy. Her most recent publication is a monograph on Press Freedom and Regulation in a Digital Era: A Comparative Study (OUP, 2024). Her current collaborative research projects include 'Unreliable science: Unravelling the impact of mainstream media misrepresentation', funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation European Media and Information Fund, and 'Fact-checked - Understanding the Factors Behind Direct Fact-Check Rejection', funded by SPRITE+ (EPSRC).

PhD supervision

Irini is particularly interested in hearing from research students focusing on the following areas:

• International, European and comparative media law and policy
• Freedom of expression
• Information law

Research Applications

My research interests cover use of data science and machine learning models to address problems in bio-informatics, computational biology and health-informatics fields. For example, I develop new or employ established data science and machine learning models to understand the key mechanisms underlying diseases by integrating multi-omics data resources. I also have an interest in employing explainable AI to predict the subtypes of different cancer types from the pathological images; predicting the associations between circular RNA, microRNA, and target genes which drive a particular type of cancer.

Example topics:

-Prediction of biomarkers (e.g. circRNA, microRNA or mRNA) and their interactions for a given cancer type.

-Integrating multi-omics data resources for biomarker prediction in common human diseases such as cardiometabolic disorders.

-Using explainable AI to analyse histopathological images to predict subtypes within a cancer cohort and extending this approach to other cancer types.

Global Communication and Computational Methods in Journalism

Dani's research focuses on global political communication and international media flows, with a focus on the Global South. He has published on the impact of global Chinese media on local journalistic cultures in English and French speaking Africa. He has also studied the multiple ways audiences in East and Southern Africa engage with news and entertainment on Chinese media.

In recent years, he has also been interested in the geopolitics of disinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly from an audience perspective. He is currently examining how media users engage with disinformation online, and how foreign disinformation influences public opinion.

In his research, Dani employs a wide range of methods and welcomes students with a keen interest in mixed methods, including computational approaches to the study of media texts.

PhD Supervision

Dani is particularly interested in hearing from research students focusing on the following areas:

• China-Africa media relations
• Disinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Global public opinion
• Audiences and global media flows
• Computational approaches to the study news

Research interests

My research interests focus on:

Pedagogy for Information Literacy in Higher Education.

The relationship between Inquiry-based Learning and Information Literacy, including how learners can be supported in their inquiries through the development of Information Literacy capabilities and how Information Literacy can be taught using Inquiry-based pedagogies

Reflective practice for teachers and learners in Higher Education

The development of teaching competencies in librarians.

Students working in groups and the tools and technologies groups use to communicate and collaborate.

Information Literacy and Information behaviour in everyday life contexts with a specific focus on health information literacy in marginalised comunities

Self-tracking information practices

PhD supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD research projects in the areas of:

Information literacy and Information behaviour in educational or everyday life contexts

Health information literacy in marginalised communities

The teaching practices of librarians, and professional development for teacher-librarians

Self-tracking information practices

I am interested in qualitative approaches to research, and welcome proposals for Phenomenography, grounded theory, situational analysis and visual methods

Research interests

My research interests focus on issues of power and inequality in digital systems, institutions, and cultures. This includes:

• Critical analysis of tech/digital industries

• Critical analysis of digital/technical practices 

• Critical analysis of sociotechnical discourses

• Politics of digital platforms

• Politics of inclusion/exclusion/belonging in digital cultures, particularly concerning gender and race

• Inequality & digital labour

Research supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD research projects that contend with power relations and the digital. This includes, but is not limited to, projects relating to:

• Politics of digital technologies

• Inequality and the digital

• Digital identities and online communities

• Technical industries and cultures

• Sociotechnical practices and assemblages

Journalism, Media and Communication

Bina’s research interests include media representation, the relationship between the media and democracy, critical incidents in journalism, race equality in journalism, media policy, and media self-coverage. Bina’s research and publications have contributed to knowledge relating to key debates about press regulation, the public interest, public trust, media ownership, political economy of the media, paradigm repair, boundary work, and the public sphere concept. Her research into how the British press covered the press standards debate that followed The News of the World phone hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry employed content and critical discourse analyses and was interdisciplinary in content drawing from law, politics and psychology in addition to journalism. 

Bina’s research entitled, A meta-analysis of key concerns and developments on media standards informed the 2020-2022 Impress Code Review. The research findings were used by the press regulator, Impress to modernise the Standards Code and make it fit for purpose in the digital age. Her research on the WhatsApp, Black People and COVID-19 Infodemic explored the WhatsApp Communications of Nigerians in the UK and Nigeria, using the methods of interviews and content analysis. This work made contributions to knowledge about effective health communications in times of Public Health Emergencies. Bina’s current research investigates race-based student activism in journalism, media, and communication schools in the UK using the methods of content analysis, interviews, and surveys. 

PhD Supervision 

• Bina is interested in supervising students in the following areas:
• The relationship between the media and democracy
• Race equality involving Black Asian and Minority Ethnic groups
• Media representation on diverse platforms
• Media self-coverage 
• Political economy of the media

Research interests

My research focuses on the study of bias and transparency in information retrieval and multilingual information access. I am especially interested in investigating how biases influence information access, and how bias-aware search engines should be designed to support users in their search tasks. I am also interested in researching cross-lingual similarity in Wikipedia; this includes creating methods to measure cross-lingual similarity, understanding why dissimilar information exists, and how this impacts different users (e.g., users in different locations or those speaking different languages).

PhD supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD research projects in the areas of:

• Fairness and transparency in search engines, e.g., impacts of biases, technologies to mitigate biases, designs of search engines to improve users’ awareness of biases
• Bias in data across languages
• Multilingual information access
• Cross-lingual similarity in the Web, especially Wikipedia
• Development and evaluation of systems/technologies to support information access
• Information extraction 
• Information seeking behaviour

Research Interests

My main interests are in text mining, both from semi-structured sources (such as publications) and unstructured sources (web, social media) and the application of natural language processing techniques for the purpose of knowledge extraction. I am particularly interested in applications in health, employment and education.

PhD supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD projects that exploit natural language, including:

• Combinations of text and speech within language models.

• Extraction of information from social media for the creation of (potentially structured) knowledge bases.

• Automatic organizing (hierarchical structuring) of information.

• Identifying and quantifying new information in text.

• Applications in the health domain, including literature based discovery or automatic diagnosis (assistance) based on natural text.

• Analyzing natural language (including native language identification) for applications in education.

Journalism Practice, Media Freedom & Democracy

Lada's research is focused on media and journalistic practice in Eastern and Southern European democracies. She has published on threats to media freedom, such as censorship and self-censorship, media corruption, ethical challenges to journalistic practice, and violence and intimidation against journalists. She is also working on a cross-national comparative study researching more recent challenges to media freedom in four Southern European countries -  Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece and Malta. The study aims to map the impact of external political, economic, legal and societal factors on the way(s) news organisations and journalists operate in times of crisis. 

My work spreads across the factors that shape the communicative spaces: this is, the integration of social interactions with mobile and digital social platforms, with the physical-geographic space.

I am intrigued by the misfits between data, geographies, and culture; that is why sometimes I research on the governance of culture and media policies (such as copyright and piracy, or censorship or media ownership or local cultural strategies); sometimes I research on politics of technology, data infrastructures and algorithms, and geographic inequalities (working on concepts like public sphere, or communicative spaces, news deserts, mediatization, or surveillance); and sometimes I dare to explore hybrid communities (including piracy and fandom, commuters, porn communities, nationalism, or social movements). Sometimes I works with the three fronts at once often by combining computational methods, quantitative, and radical qualitative approaches.

I am particularly interested in supervising doctoral students interested in aspects crossing these areas:

Media Governance and Industries (including ownership, public sphere, and power inequalities)

Data, surveillance, and digital technologies (including algorithms and data literacy)

Media Technologies and Infrastructures of Communication (including Artificial Intelligence, media materialities and geographic inequalities)

Cultural governance and datafication

Media Mobility and Geographies and Media.

Social Movements and Social Media

Computational Methodologies for Social and Communication Science.

Research interests

My research interests focus on:

• Trust formation in health online information

• Information needs of healthcare professionals

• Online information needs of men and women in different contexts (e.g. e-commerce, health, finance, holidays, etc.)

• Non-compliancy issues in relation to chronic conditions (e.g. why people tend to not use medications as prescribed)

• How to understand and meet the needs of dementia patients’ cares

• How to understand and meet the needs of Alzheimer’s patients’ cares

I would be interested in supervising PhD students in any of the above areas.

Research Interests

I am interested in research evaluation methods and bibliometrics, including with artificial intelligence approaches.

Bibliometrics involves primarily quantitative analysis of academic publications, including factors like citation rates, the role of collaboration, gender differences, and the relationship between citations and research quality. It also includes altmetrics, in the form of alternative quantitative indicators of research impact. The AI component involves using traditional machine learning or Large Language Models to predict research quality or to perform other tasks within the research assessment ecosystem.

Research supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD projects in the following areas:

• Artificial intelligence and particularly Large Language Models in research assessment.
• Bibliometrics and research evaluation, whether methods development, broad applications, or the assessment of the influences of factors like gender and collaboration.
• The accuracy and limitations of various types of scholarly peer review in research assessment.
• Equality and diversity in research assessment.
• Qualitative-quantitative methods to analyse social media data for social research goals, such as testing theory or investigating online or offline phenomena.
• Artificial intelligence methods for social media analysis.

Journalism, technology & society

Jingrong is currently writing about data and journalism as well as (social) media discourses of political and environmental issues. Her current research interests include the impact of digital technology on journalism, social media communication, discourses of social issues, and environmental communication. She has expertise in computational (social) media analysis.

PhD supervision

Jingrong is particularly interested in hearing from research students focusing on the following areas:

• Journalism, technology and society
• Data and communication
• Discourses, politics and/or the environment
• Social media communication

Research interests

My research interests focus on the relationship between the management of information and knowledge, systems and innovation practices.

Specific interests are:

• knowledge sharing

• knowledge boundaries and boundary spanning activities

• knowledge absorption, absorptive capacity and innovation

• information failure and organizational learning

• online identities, communities of practice and virtual communities

• information systems adaptation

I bring a perspective to these themes influenced by Arenas/Social Worlds Theory, Practice Theory and approaches such as Discourse Analysis and Grounded Theory.

I am interested in supervising PhDs in the above areas.

Research interests

My research interests focus on investigating information literacy and information behaviour in context. Contexts include:

• Virtual contexts e.g. information behaviour in computer gaming; information literacy in virtual worlds

• Cultural and lifestage contexts, e.g. information behaviour of carers; Media and Information Literacy of older people; information literacy as experienced in different countries; information behaviour in the workplace

• Educational contexts e.g. information literacy at different stages of education, and in different disciplines; information behaviour in distance learning

I am also interested in research investigating the pedagogy of information literacy.  

I am a qualitative researcher, with particular expertise in phenomenography, autoethnography, action research and case study research.

Research supervision

I am interested in supervising PhDs in all the above areas. Potential research topics include:

• A case study investigating whether a specific university is information literate (using Webber & Johnston's indicators of the Information Literate University)

Peter Willett is not currently taking on new PhD students.

Research interests

The general focus of my research pertains to the unravelling of the socio-technical aspects of IS innovations and emerging technologies, with a keen eye on the power dynamics among various stakeholders, such as citizens, businesses, local governments, and the state. Beyond examining IS research at the individual and organisational levels, I delve into its manifestation in urban and regional contexts. My particular interest lies in understanding and scrutinising radical innovations through a critical perspective. This endeavour has encompassed critical appraisals of prevailing smart city innovations, digital platforms, and urban AI and autonomous systems. In these empirical domains, my research aims to uncover the benefits that communities and citizens derive from these technological initiatives. More recently, I have shifted my focus towards urban AI, autonomous systems, and urban robotics, investigating issues of digital rights, governmentality, digital citizenship, and the discursive practices that shape the narratives of AI in urbanism.

PhD supervision

I am particularly interested in supervising PhD candidates in the following areas:

- Power dynamics in smart city governance and governmentality

- Critical research around urban AI, autonomous systems, and robotics

- Social value creation in platform cooperativism and grassroots digital innovations.

- Exploring digital inequality, digital rights, digital citizenship within digital platforms.

My research is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and has applications both in academic, public service and in industry. The topics and methods I am interested in include, but are not limited to: Information Retrieval, Human Computer Interaction, Data Visualisation, Urban Analytics, Digital Health, Machine Learning, Spatial Data Science, Representation Learning.

A detailed and updated list can be found here.