Research
My current research interests are directed in three broad areas:
1. Environmental Media, Journalism and Climate Change
I am interested in the reporting and representation of global environmental change across all media, especially the traditional press and online, and its impact on both policy and public understanding. In particular, I am pursuing projects and research activity that investigates the ideological dimensions of media communication around the environment, employing a range of framing and critical discourse analytic techniques, drawing on Foucault’s ideas of regimes of truth and productive force, to unveil the ways in which meaning is organised in the service of power.
2. Literature and Decision
My PhD (commencing September 2009) is very much a personal ambition, and builds on my Masters in Creative and Critical Writing gained with distinction from the University of Sussex. The doctoral project is a creative exploration of the relationship between language acts and a ‘literary theory of mind and decision’. The major creative output will be a novel based on the historical development of psychosurgery in the 1930s and its schism with psychoanalysis as two contrasting methods for managing affective behavioural disorders. I am interested in the representation of decision and indecision in literature, reading these acts of literature through psychoanalytic and poststructural theory.
3. Magazines
As programme leader for magazine journalism at the University of Sunderland, my interests are both pedagogical and industry-related, to develop research projects focused on developing new and innovative ways of teaching and learning that prepare graduates for performing in and understanding the 21st century magazine publishing industry.
