Visiting international researchers

The Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies is delighted to welcome international visiting researchers to be based in the department for a period. These are the current visitors.

Dr Lanfranco Aceti

Dr Lanfranco Aceti from Sabanci University in Istanbul. Dr Aceti works as an academic, artist and curator and is the founder of the Studium: Lanfranco Aceti Inc., that is a company, an online archive and an art project. He is the founder and Director of OCR (Operational and Curatorial Research in Contemporary Art, Design, Science and Technology) and founder and Director of MoCC (Museum of Contemporary Cuts). He has also founded the Media Exhibition Platform that has operated from 2010 presenting a range of international exhibitions both online and in physical spcaces.

He is Visiting Scholar at New York University and Goldsmiths College, Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies; teaches Contemporary Art and Digital Culture at the Faculty of Arts and Social Scineces, Sabanci University, Istanbul; and is Editor in Cheif of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (The MIT Press, Leonardo journal and ISAST). He was the Artistic Director and Conference Chair for ISEA2011 Istanbul and worked as gallery director at Kasa Gallery in Istanbul. He has a PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. His work has been published in Leonardo, Routledge and Art Inquiry, and his interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection between digital arts, visual culture and new media technologies. He has exhibited internationally and participated in numerous art fairs and biennials and spoken at numerous universities including Yale, Goldsmiths, Harvard, New York University, The New School and the Royal College of Art.

Lanfranco Aceti is specialised in contemporary art, inter-semiotic translations between classic media and new media, contemporary digital hybridistion processes, Avant-garde film and new media studies and their practice-based applications in the field of fine arts.

Dr Marko Ampuja marko.ampuja(at)tuni.fi

Dr Marko Ampuja is currently an Academy Research Fellow at the Tampere Research Centre for Journalism, Media and Communication (COMET), University of Tampere, Finland. Previously he worked as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Helsinki, Department of Social Research, where he taught in the discipline of Media and Communication and on the International MA Programme Media and Global Communication. He has also worked at the YLE (Finnish Broadcasting Company) audience research department.

He has published on media and social theory, critical theory, media and globalization, information society, political economy of communication and media coverage of economic policies following the financial crisis of 2008. His PhD thesis critically examined academic globalization theories and debates from the viewpoint of media and communications. A revised version of the dissertation was published as Theorizing Globalization: A Critique of the Mediatization of Social Theory (Brill 2012; Haymarket Books 2013).

His current research project, Conjunctural Changes in Information Technological Innovation Discourses, supported by the Academy of Finland, focuses on policies and media discourses surrounding innovation and entrepreneurship from an ideology-theoretical perspective.

Former visiting researchers to Media, Communications and Cultural Studies 

Allaine Cerwonka

Allaine Cerwonka is a Professor of Gender Studies and Director of the Science Studies Program at Central European University. Her disciplinary background lies in political theory with an emphasis in social and cultural theories. Her research and teaching have used an interdisciplinary approach to examine a range of issues including national identity; social geography; identity; ethnographic knowledge production; feminist theory; and science studies. Her work includes two books:  Native to the Nation: Disciplining Landscapes and Bodies in Australia (Univ. of Minnesota Press 2005) and Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork (Chicago UP, 2007). Her articles have appeared in SIGNS: Journal of Woman in Culture and Society; Cultural Studies; Feminist@Law, as well as have circulated in other journals and anthologies.

Her current research is a materialist intellectual history that explores the social and gendered dimensions of the concept of the human, interrogating its historical legacies and contemporary instability. The analysis weaves the definition of the human (the line distinguishing it from animals, God, or machines) to the political/cultural context out of which a particular demarcation is situated. It reads across the definitions to make an argument about the way the development of the “human” circumscribes how political rights and ethics take shape in modern forms of governing and in contemporary social thought today. It is this book project on the “Human” that will occupy her energies while at Goldsmiths this year.

Professor Yuri Obata from the USA who is the Department's visiting research scholar this term from University of Indiana South Bend.  She is researching comparative media law and will be assisting us in this year's Media Law & Ethics course by presenting a lecture and taking seminars.

One of her special interests is the comparative media law of obscenity and the regulation of pornography. She has published on the prosecutions of D.H. Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and other indecency case histories in Japan and the USA.

Marcus Antonio Assis Lima

Marcus Antonio Assis Lima (April 2013 - March 2014) earned a PhD in the Graduate Program in Linguistics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in 2008 (with an emphasis on discourse analysis) and a Master in Communication and Sociability, at the same university in 2000, Brazil.  He graduate in Journalism in 1991.  He is currently Associate Professor in Journalism and Theory and Research Methodology in Communication and a professor at the Graduate Program in Literature: Culture, Education and Languages at the State University of Southeas Bahia (UESB). 

At this Institution he coordinates the Centre for Research in Journalism, and also the Experimental News Agency for Civic Journalism, with funding from a Brazilian agency (FAPESB).  Currently he has research interestes in the politics of recognition and citizen participation in politics, especially in the virtual enviorment.  As a Visiting Researcher Fellow at Goldsmiths College, he will use the concept of "Voice", as proposed by Nick Couldry, as an empirical category of analysis.  To do so, he will work with the issue of the campaign for equal marriage (between people of the same sex) in Brazil (perhaps also in the UK), focusing attention on the "voice" of its main leader, a gay activist and first congressman in Brazil to coming out his sexual orientation. Access Marcus Antonio Assis Lima's academic resume.

Past visiting researchers have included: Dr Sirma Bilge, University of Montreal; Professor Robert (Bob) Hackett, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; Professor Younghak Han, Professor of Journalism, Mass Media and Media Ethics and Law, Faculty of Law, Hokkaigakuen University, Japan; Professor Andreas Hepp, University of Bremen, Germany; Professor Keisuke Kitano, Professor of College of Image Arts and Science, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan; Dr. Laura Porzio. Spanish Council of Scientific Research, Barcelona; Dr Katja Valaskivi, University ofTampere, Finland; Professor Junchao Wang, Tsinghua University; Beatriz Belando Garín, Professor of Administrative Law, University of Valencia (Spain).