Natalie Fenton

Natalie Fenton is Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, the University of London. She Co-Directs both the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre and the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. These projects focus on news journalism and the relationship between the media and resistance.

Natalie is particularly interested in notions of new media, networks and new politics; notions of political hope and rethinking our understanding of public culture, public sphere and democracy.

Her most recent books are New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age and Misunderstanding the Internet (with James Curran and Des Freedman). Her latest book, New Media and Radical Politics, is about to be published.

David Buckingham

David Buckingham is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Loughborough University. He has previously worked at the Institute of Education, University of London where he founded the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media. David is one of the world’s leading researchers on media education media literacy and children and young people’s interactions with media. He has written many of the key texts in these fields, including Youth, Identity and Digital Media and Beyond Technology: Children’s Learning in the Age of Digital Media.

In 2008-9 David conducted a research project which determined the impact of the commercial world on children’s wellbeing for two government departments. He has also consulted on behalf of UNESCO, the United Nations, Ofcom, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, and the Institute for Public Policy Research.

David has addressed conferences in more than 30 countries around the world, and has been a visiting professor at universities in Norway, Italy, the US, Hong Kong, Australia and South Africa. He still manages to find the time to make regular appearances in broadcast media and journalism, where he is consulted as an expert in media literacy.

Susan Orr

Susan Orr has recently joined The Arts University London as Professor and Dean of Learning, Teaching and Enhancement. Prior to this, she was Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Arts, Computing, Engineering and Science at Sheffield Hallam University and has also worked at York St John University and the London College of Fashion (part of the University of the Arts London).

Susan’s research has aimed to improve the quality of group work assessment, particularly in arts education. This has led to the design of new assessment materials, which have been disseminated widely with other practitioners across the UK and at MIT. Susan has created new ways to understand the concept of assessment rigour in Fine Art assessment.

More recently, Susan has been focusing on writing in an arts based curricula. Her work in this area is an attempt to subvert the visual/textual binary by recasting writing as a practice that has much in common with studio practice.

In 2010 Susan became a National Teaching Fellow.

Sarah Pink

Sarah Pink is Professor of Design (Media Ethnography) at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. A highly regarded expert on research design, Sarah’s work is concerned with the development and application of research approaches that attend theoretically and methodologically to the ways that people and technologies are situated and active. Her most recent activity is focused on digital media, energy consumption, workplace knowing, safety and health and forms of activism.

Sarah also holds a role at Loughborough University as Professor of Social Sciences, and where she founded LIQUID – a Qualitative Research Lab. Here Sarah works across the Schools of Social Sciences, Design and Civil Engineering. She is currently leading two research projects in this cross-disciplinary field.

Sarah is also an Honorary Professor at the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Griffith University, Australia and in Germany she teaches Applied Visual Anthropology at the Free University in Berlin. She has also worked in Barcelona and Sweden.