Keynotes

Dr Shakuntala Banaji (LSE)

Shakuntala Banaji, PhD, is programme director for the MSc in Media, Communication and Development in the department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She lectures in development and communication, international media and world cinema, and is the winner of the fourth European Prize for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Diener Prize (2015). She has participated in several large cross-European projects on young people, new technologies, schooling and democratic participation, and is currently UK project director of a multi-country Horizon 2020 project, CATCH-EyoU, on youth active citizenship in Europe (2015-2018) and Principle Investigator for a collaborative grant with American University Sharjah on participatory culture, the internet and creative production in the Middle East 2015-2017). Shakuntala has published widely on Young people, children, Hindi cinema, audiences, creativity, news reception and online civic participation. Her books include Reading Bollywood Palgrave 2006/2011, South Asian Media Cultures, Anthem Press 2010; The Civic Web: Young people, the Internet and civic participation with David Buckingham, MIT Press, 2013; Young People and Democratic Life with Bart Cammaerts et al. , Palgrave 2015. Her new monograph about Children, Labour and Media in India is out with Routledge in 2017.

Professor Andrew Ross (New York University)

Andrew Ross is a social activist and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, the Nation, and Al Jazeera, he is the author of many books, including Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal, Bird On Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City, Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, Fast Boat to China--Lessons from Shanghai, No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs, and The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town. He is also the editor of the recently published The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor (available from OR Books).[/lgc_column]

Professor Barbie Zelizer (University of Pennsylvania)

Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. A former journalist, Zelizer is known for her work on journalism, culture, memory and images, particularly in times of crisis. She has authored or edited fourteen books, including the award-winning About To Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford, 2010) and Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago, 1998), and over a hundred articles, book chapters and essays. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Freedom Forum Center Research Fellowship, a Fellowship from Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, a Fulbright Senior Scholar and a Fellowship from Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Zelizer is also a media critic, whose work has appeared in The Nation, PBS News Hour, CNN, The Huffington Post, Newsday and other media organs. Coeditor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, she is a recent President of the International Communication Association, where she is also a Fellow, and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. Her work has been translated into French, Korean, Turkish, Romanian, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew and Portuguese. Her newest book What Journalism Could Be will be published by Polity in late 2016.

Professor Paul Gilroy (King’s College London)

Paul Gilroy is Professor of American and English Literature at Kings College London. He joined Kings September 2012 having previously been Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics (2005-2012), Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale (1999-2005) and Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths College (1995-1999). He is the author of There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack (1987), Small Acts (1993), The Black Atlantic (1993), Between Camps (2000), and After Empire (2004; published as Postcolonial Melancholia in the United States), among other works. The Black Atlantic received an American Book Award in 1994 and has subsequently been translated into Italian, French, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.