Dr Mirca Madianou

BA (Athens); MSc and PhD (London School of Economics)

Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication and Director of Postgraduate Research Studies

mm499@le.ac.uk

Mirca Madianou joined the Department of Media and Communication as Senior Lecturer in October 2011. Between 2004-2011 she taught at the University of Cambridge where she was a Newton Trust Lecturer in Sociology and a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College. She has held Research Fellowship Positions at UCL (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology, 2002-4) and at the Centre for Research in Arts Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge (2006). In 2002 she was awarded a PhD in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics. Her current research examines the role of new communication technologies in the context of migration and transnational families in particular. She is the author of two books and several journal articles on new media and long distance relationships; migration and transnationalsm; media and nationalism; audiences (particularly the audiences for news media); and the role of emotions in mediated communication. Her research has been funded by the ESRC, ESF, the Mellon Foundation and CRASSH, Cambridge.

Research Interests

The consequences of new communication technologies for interpersonal relationships especially in the context of migration; ICTs and development; media and identities in a national and transnational context; media audiences, especially the audiences for news media; the emotional dimension of mediated communication; media ethics; comparative ethnography.

I welcome applications for doctoral research in any of the above areas.

Research

Migration and New Media: transnational families and polymedia

I have just completed an ESRC-funded study on Migration, ICTs and the transformation of transnational family life (2007-2011). This research investigates how parents and children care for each other when they are separated because of migration using new media such as mobile phones, email, instant messaging, social networking sites and webcam. This has been a three-year ethnographic project, in collaboration with Daniel Miller (UCL), in which we worked with Filipino and Caribbean people living in London and Cambridge as well as their left-behind families in the Philippines and Trinidad. Our book ‘Migration and New Media: transnational families and polymedia’ is published by Routledge in November 2011. For other journal articles from this research please see
‘Publications’ below. See also under ‘Conference Organisation’ for information relating to the Digital Diasporas Conference in January 2011. For other related outputs and public engagement activities see here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012l4p1 and here: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/RES-000-22-2266/read

Media, Nationalism and Transnational Identities: the boundary-making role of the news media

In my first book entitled Mediating the Nation (2005), I explored the impact of television news on the ways people experience the political entity of the nation and their national and transnational identities. Drawing on a two-year ethnography of television viewing in Greece, the book followed the range of public discourses about the nation found in the Greek news and compared them to the everyday discourses and practices about the nation both among Greeks and members of the Turkish minority, a beached diaspora. The book identifies the occasions when the news reinforces symbolic boundaries for inclusion and exclusion from public life. The book also identifies the moments when the public and official discourses about the nation and belonging are contested from below.

Publications

Books

Madianou, M. and D. Miller (2011) Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia. London: Routledge.

Madianou, M. (2005) Mediating the Nation: News, audiences and the politics of identity. London: UCL Press/Routledge. Translated into Greek (Athens: Patakis, 2008).

Articles and book chapters

Madianou, M. (2012) ‘Humanitarian Campaigns in Social Media: Network architectures and polymedia events’, Journalism Studies. iFirst, 17 September 2012, DOI:10.1080/1461670X.2012.718558

Madianou, M. (2012) ‘Migration and the accentuated ambivalence of motherhood: The role of ICTs in Filipino Transnational Families’. Global Networks, vol. 12 (3): 277-295. DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-0374.2012.00352.x, Top Paper Award, Feminist Scholarship, ICA, 2011.

Madianou, M. (2012) ‘News as a looking glass: shame and the symbolic power of mediation’. International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 15(1): 3-16, DOI: 10.1177/1367877911411795

Madianou, M. and Miller, D. (2012) ‘Polymedia: towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication’. International Journal of Cultural Studies, Published online before print August 22, 2012, DOI:10.1177/1367877912452486

Madianou, M. and Miller, D. (2011) ‘Mobile Phone Parenting? Reconfiguring relationships between migrant Filipina mothers and their left behind children’. New Media and Society, vol. 13 (3). First published March 23, 2011 as doi:10.1177/1461444810393903 (Online First).

Madianou, M. and Miller, D. (2011) ‘Crafting Love: letters and cassette tapes in transnational Filipino family communication’. South East Asian Research, vol. 19 (2).

Madianou, M. (2011) ‘Beyond the presumption of identity? Ethnicities, Cultures and Transnational Audiences’. In Nightingale, V. (ed.), Handbook of Media Audiences. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 444-458.

Madianou, M. (2010) ‘Living with News: Ethnography and news consumption’. In Allan, S. (ed.), The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism Studies. Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 428-438.

Madianou, M. (2009) ‘Audience reception and news in everyday life’. In Wahl-Jorgensenn, K. and Hanitzsch, T. (eds.) Handbook of Journalism Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 325-357.

Madianou, M. (2007) ‘Shifting identities: banal nationalism and cultural intimacy in Greek television news and everyday life’. In Mole, R. (ed.) Discursive constructions of identity in European politics. London: Palgrave, pp. 95-118.

Madianou, M. (2006) ‘ICTs transnational networks and everyday life’. In Bodo, S. (ed.), Quando la cultura fa la differenza. Rome: Meltemi, pp. 189-199.

Madianou, M. (2005) ‘Contested communicative spaces: identities, boundaries and the role of the media’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 31(3): 521-541.

Madianou, M. (2005) ‘The elusive public of television news’. In Livingstone, S. ed., Audiences and Publics: when cultural engagement matters to the public sphere. Bristol: Intellect Press, pp. 99-114.

Madianou, M. (2005) ‘Desperately seeking the news public’. Journal of Media Practice, vol.6(1): 29-39.

Recent Grants and Awards

2011 Top Paper Award, Feminist Scholarship Division, International Communication Association (ICA) Annual Conference, Boston, May 2011.

2007-2011 Principal Investigator on ESRC Research Grant: ‘Migration, ICTs and the transformation of transnational family life’.

2006-7 Early Career Fellowship, Awarded by the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge.

2002-2004 Postdoctoral Fellowship held at the Department of Anthropology, awarded from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Conference Organisation

‘Digital Diasporas’, CRASSH, January 13-14th 2011.
Conference convenor: Dr. M. Madianou
For more information please see: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1328/

‘The Ethics of Media’, CRASSH, 4-5 April 2008
Co-convenor with Prof. Nick Couldry (Goldsmiths', University of London).
More information can be found  here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/67/

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