David Morley on role of social sciences and today's universities | News

David Morley

is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. His interdisciplinary research interests span media audiences, cultural geography, technology and mobility studies. While working at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham he developed empirical research on the seminal encoding/decoding model, a part of reception theory. He has played a key role in developing the conceptual framework for studying media consumption, his Nationwide Audience has been highly influential. David Morley’s subsequent work in cultural geography tackled questions of electronic media landscapes and globalisation as well as notions of home and nation in the context of migration and new communication technologies. His most recent book Communications and Mobility: The Migrant, the Mobile Phone and the Container Box explores mobility, territory, communications and transport in the 21st century.

If someone can be considered a living legend of media and cultural studies, then such a figure is definitely David Morley. How does he live with such a role? How does he view the role of the social sciences and humanities at a time when the Western world is culturally and politically quarreled and polarized? And why, according to him, today's universities do not work as they should?

See the interview done by Jakub Macek, head of Department of Media Studies and Journalism at Faculty of social studies MU, which hosted at the IAICS Conference 2019.