The Department of Gender Studies is organising a public lecture on Tuesday 14 January from 16:00 to 19:00 in Lecture Centre 271 (LC217). The lecture, entitled 'Gender, Politics, News: Research Trends and Shifting Interests' will be delivered by Professor Karen Ross.
The different ways in which the relationship between gender, politics and news plays out has been the subject of considerable research interest over the past few decades. In this lecture, Professor Karen Ross will talk about the ways in which research focus has shifted from a concentration on representation and news discourse, to more qualitative work with politicians and political journalists, to exploring the ways in which politicians use social media and how citizens respond to them through strategies such as liking, sharing, commenting and retweeting. Alongside these shifts, Prof. Ross will trace the ways in which my own research focus has changed over the past 25 years, consequent on both personal experience and interest but also the need to respond to the twists and turns in the direction of travel for political communication. In the end, she will come full circle in (re)considering the ways in which women politicians are still subjected to scrutiny and critique via the double-whammy of sex and profession, not by journalists working in mainstream media but rather through citizen action using social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook: old message, new medium.
Karen Ross PhD is Professor of Gender and Media at Newcastle University, UK. Her teaching and research are focused on issues of gender, media, politics and society. She has published numerous papers and books on this topic and her latest monograph Gender, Politics and News was published in 2017 (Wiley-Blackwell). She was principal investigator on two EU-funded projects: Women in Decision-Making in Media Organisations (2012-2013); and Advancing Gender Equality in Media Industries (2017-2019). She is currently the UK and European regional coordinator for the Global Media Monitoring Project.
