Advisory Board

Afonso de Albuquerque joined Fluminense Federal University in 1992. In 1997, he was one of the founders of the Graduate Program in Communication Studies at this university. From 2005 to 2007, he served as president of the Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Communication (Compós). He also presided over the Brazilian Political Communication Studies Association (Compolítica) from 2009 to 2011. He is part of the editorial boards of a number of international journals, such as Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, Online Media and Global Communication, and World of Media: Journal of Russian Media and Journalism Studies.

Cherian George is a Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University’s School of Communication. He researches media and politics, focusing on freedom of expression, censorship, media under authoritarianism, hate, intolerance, and polarisation. His books include, Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and its Threat to Democracy (MIT Press, 2016), which Publishers’ Weekly named one of the best 100 books of the year; and Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship (MIT Press, 2021), honoured by the Association of American Publishers as one of the year’s three top scholarly books in both the Media & Cultural Studies and Graphic Nonfiction categories. Born in Singapore, he has written best-selling books of essays on the country’s politics, including Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited (2020). He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association.

Rosalind Gill is University Research Lead in Inequalities in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is author of numerous publications including Gender and the Media (Polity, 2007), Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (with Ena Elias and Christina Scharff, Palgrave 2017), Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture (with Meg-John Barker and Laura Harvey, Polity 2018), and Confidence Culture (with Shani Orgad, Duke, 2022). Her most recent book is Perfect: Feeling Judged on Social Media (Polity, 2023).

Edda Humprecht is a Professor of Communication Research at the University of Jena, Germany, where she heads a research group focusing on digitalization and the public sphere. Previously, she held academic positions at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, where she also completed her doctorate. Her award-winning research focuses primarily on strengthening digital resilience against mis- and disinformation in the context of political communication. By analyzing the interplay of media interactions and opportunity structures in different national contexts, Edda Humprecht investigates how public discourse shapes and shapes digital political communication. An important aspect of her work is to explore strategies that citizens can use to resist such manipulation, contributing crucial insights into the dynamics of media consumption and public consciousness.

Ruchi Kher Jaggi, PhD, is Professor and Director of Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, and Dean of the Faculty of Media and Communication, Symbiosis International University, Pune, India. Her research interests include television studies, media and children, media and creative industries, Korean dramas and digital cultures. She has published and presented extensively in national and international forums. S he has led a team which received a USIEF grant to work on a project on interactive documentary film-making and is currently the Primary Investigator on another grant project that evaluates India’s soft power potential among its diaspora through original content on streaming platforms. She is also the founder-head of the Symbiosis Centre for Research in Media and Creative Industries.

Aswin Punathambekar is a Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC). Previously he taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, and held a British Academy Global Professorship at Loughborough University. Punathambekar studies media and cultural change in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, with a focus on media industries and institutions, formations of audiences and publics, and cultural identity and politics. He takes cultural and historical approaches to studying global media and communication with a particular focus on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora in the U.S. and the U.K

Stuart Soroka is Professor in the Departments of Communication and Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on political communication, political psychology, and the relationships between public policy, public opinion, and mass media. His books include, Negativity in democratic politics: Causes and consequences  (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Degrees of Democracy: Politics, Public Opinion and Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2010, with Christopher Wlezien); Agenda-setting dynamics in Canada (UBC Press, 2002).

Elizabeth Stokoe is a professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at The London School of Economics and Political Science. She conducts conversation analytic research to understand how talk works - from first dates to medical communication and from sales encounters to mediation and crisis negotiation. She has worked as an industry fellow at technology companies Typeform and at Deployed. In addition to academic publishing, she is passionate about science communication, and has given talks at TED, Google, Microsoft, and The Royal Institution, and performed at Latitude and Cheltenham Science Festivals. Her books include Talk: The Science of Conversation (Little, Brown, 2018), Crisis Talk (Routledge, 2022, co-authored with Rein Ove Sikveland and Heidi Kevoe-Feldman), and Categories in Social Interaction (Routledge, 2024, co-authored with Kevin Whitehead and Geoffrey Raymond). She is a Wired Innovation Fellow and in 2021 was awarded Honorary Fellowship of the British Psychological Society.

Helen Wood's research interests are mainly in class, gender and the media. She has published widely on television, popular culture and audiences and has conducted research funded by the ESRC, British Academy and the AHRC. She has been a long-serving editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies and serves on the boards of a number of media journals. Her current research project is the AHRC 'ReCARETV: Reality Television, working practices and duties of care' with project partners: CMS select committee, and the union's Equity and BECTU. Her latest book is Audience (2024) Routledge.