Culture and Power

Paddy Scannell worked for many years at the University of Westminster (London) where he and his colleagues established, in 1975, the first undergraduate degree program in Media Studies in the UK. He is a founding editor of Media, Culture and Society which began publication in 1979 and is now issued six times yearly. He is the author of A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1939 which he wrote with David Cardiff, editor of Broadcast Talk and author of Radio, Television and Modern Life. He is currently working on a trilogy. The first volume, Media and Communication, was published in June 2007. Professor Scannell is now working on the second volume, Television and the Meaning of 'Live.' The third volume, Love and Communication, is in preparation. His research interests include broadcasting history and historiography, the analysis of talk, the phenomenology of communication and culture and communication in Africa. Philip Schlesinger was appointed to the University of Glasgow's new Chair in Cultural Policy and became Academic Director of CCPR in January 2007. He was previously Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of Stirling and founding Director of Stirling Media Research Institute. He has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Greenwich, a Nuffield Social Science Research Fellow, a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute of Florence, and has held the Queen Victoria Eugenia Chair of Doctoral Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid. He was a longstanding Visiting Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Lugano, and at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Toulouse, CELSA in Paris, LUISS University in Rome, the University of Salamanca, and a Visiting Scholar at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris. He is the author of Putting 'Reality' Together (2nd ed. 1987) and Media, State and Nation (1991) and is co-author of Televising 'Terrorism' (1983), Women Viewing Violence (1992), Reporting Crime (1994) Open Scotland? (2001) and Mediated Access (2003). In the course of my research, I have worked with and advised the European Union, Unesco, the Open Society Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the British Council, Universities in the US, Europe and East Asia, and many other organisations, academic, official, and non-governmental. I have participated actively in the professional associations of the field, both nationally and internationally. I was one of the founders of Media, Culture and Society, and I continue to play an active role as managing editor, as well as editing issues on a regular basis. I was a founder of the European Institute for Communication and Culture. I have organised several of its colloquia, and edited themed issues of its journal Javnost/The Public. In 2004, I took the initiative to launch an open access journal Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, on whose editorial board I serve. My current research interests include the comparative study of media systems undergoing rapid change. I am particularly interested in comparing the media systems of post-communist countries with those of other societies that have moved away from different forms of dictatorship towards more democratic forms of political rule. My other major current interest is in theories of media and communication.