Professor David Morley

David's research spans questions of media technologies constituting the 'electronic landscapes' within which we live.

Staff details

Professor David Morley

Position

Emeritus Professor

Department

Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Email

d.morley (@gold.ac.uk)

David Morley’s interdisciplinary work spans media audience/technology studies, cultural geography and globalisation. He has held visiting Professorships/Fellowships at universities in Australia, China, France, Mexico, Spain, Sweden and the United States. His work has been translated into 22 languages.

As a member of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, he worked with Stuart Hall to develop empirical research based on the paradigm-setting encoding/decoding model of media audiences. He has subsequently co-edited two critical collections of Hall`s work ('Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies`, 1996 and `Conversations, Projects and Legacies` 2016), and most recently he has edited the two-volume set of Hall’s `Essential Essays` (Vol 1 `The Foundations of Cultural Studies`; Vol 2 `Identity and Diaspora`) to be published by Duke University Press in 2019.

At CCCS he pioneered the development of anthropological and ethnographic techniques in audience/technology studies (see `Towards an Ethnography of Media Audiences` 1974). His work helped to set the conceptual agenda for the study of media consumption internationally, focussing initially on questions of class (in the widely influential `Nationwide Audience` ,1978), and later on questions of gender and domesticity, in studies of the household uses of information and communication technology (`Family Television` 1986)

His subsequent work in cultural geography (`Spaces of Identity` 1996, ; `Home Territories` 2000 and `Media Modernity and Technology` 2006) encompasses macro questions about the role of satellite television , the Internet and the mobile phone in the constitution of the electronic landscapes within which we now live. His latest book `Communications and Mobility : the Mobile Phone, the Migrant and the Container Box` (2016) investigates the changing articulation of virtual and material geographies It seeks to offer a grounded critique of the paradigms of `nomadology` which have come to dominate contemporary work on phenomena such as `techno-globalisation` and `de-territorialisation` and re-examines ideas of home, community, place and territory, in the context of the spread of identity panics and the tightening of borders, across the globe.

He is the editor of the Comedia book series for Routledge and is on the Editorial/Advisory Boards of a number of journals, including Cultural Studies, The European Journal of Cultural Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Television and New Media

AIL-Talk: David Morley – Home Territories – Virtual and Material Geographies (V.2) from Angewandte Innovation Lab.

The Question of Theory in Cultural Studies - Professor David Morley, Goldsmiths, University of London from Goldsmiths, University of London.

`David Morley discussing the fundamental principles of Stuart Hall's `encoding/decoding` model of communication, in a video link presentation to a conference of communications and journalism students held in Bangalore, India in February 2019`

Publications and research outputs

Book

Morley, David G.. 2017. Communications and Mobility: The Migrant, the Mobile Phone, and the Container Box. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781405192019

Morley, David G.. 2007. Media, Modernity and Technology: the Geography of the New. Routledge. ISBN 9780415333429

Morley, David G. and Curran, James P.. 2006. Media and Cultural Theory. Routledge. ISBN 9780415317054

Edited Book

Morley, David G., ed. 2019. Stuart Hall: Essential Essays Volume 1 - Foundations of Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 9781478000938

Morley, David G., ed. 2019. Stuart Hall: Essential Essays Volume 2 - Identity and Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 9781478001638

Henriques, Julian F. and Morley, David G., eds. 2018. Stuart Hall: Conversations, Projects and Legacies. London: Goldsmiths Press. ISBN 9781906897475

Book Section

Morley, David G.. 2024. Constituting the Techno-Normal: The Practices of Everyday Media Consumption. In: Annette Hill and Peter Lunt, eds. The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 24-35. ISBN 9781032214665

Morley, David G. and Hartmann, Maren. 2023. A dialogue on domestication. In: Maren Hartmann, ed. The Routledge Handbook of Media and Technology Domestication. Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 9781032184142

Morley, David G.. 2021. Introduction Part I. In: Annette Hill; Maren Hartmann and Magnus Andersson, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Mobile Socialities. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 19-21. ISBN 9780367543976

Article

Morley, David G.. 2015. Audience Studies: Class, Technology and Politics (Les Ancrages Sociaux de la Reception). Politiques de Communication, 4(1), pp. 19-35. ISSN 2271-068X

Morley, David G. and Christensen, Miyase. 2014. New Media, New Crises, New Theories? An Interview with David Morley. Popular Communication, 12(4), pp. 208-222. ISSN 1540-5702

Morley, David G.. 2014. Cultural Studies, Common Sense and Communications. Cultural Studies, 29(1), pp. 23-31. ISSN 0950-2386

Conference or Workshop Item

Morley, David G.. 2015. 'Cultural Studies in the Arab World'. In: Talk. Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon.

Morley, David G.. 2014. 'The Encoding/Decoding Model Revisited'. In: Centre for Cultural Studies ‘Key Texts` Seminar Series. Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom.

Morley, David G.. 2014. 'The Question of Theory in Cultural Studies'. In: Stuart Hall; Conversations, Projects and Legacies. Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom.

Broadcast

Morley, David G.. 2012. Cultural Studies and Subcultures in Eastern Europe.

Areas of supervision

PhD topics supervised include:

Media power, space and place

The cultural significance of MTV Europe

Cultural identity and communications technologies in Taiwan

Television, the public sphere and the representation of ‘race’ in the UK

Satellite television and youth culture in Thailand

Music and cultural identity in Korea

Multicultural broadcasting in Eastern Europe

Telenovelas and political culture in Mexico

Japanese migrant cultural experiences in New York and London

The circulation of ‘cool’ between London and Tokyo

Transnational film culture is in Taiwan

The culture of the Jamaican reggae sound system

The Simpsons as inter-textual television

The ethnography of online music-file sharing

Media consumption in the Chinese diaspora

Technological competencies and media literacies

Transnational Television Consumption and Cultural Flows in East Asia;

Negotiating Public Screens in the Mediated City;

The Ethnography of Inuit conceptions of `internet`