MeCCSA Outstanding Achievement Awards – 2025
The MeCCSA Awards recognise outstanding research in the fields of media, communication, and cultural studies.
These are the shortlisted entries for the 2025 awards. Eligible outputs were those published/released in public domain in 2024 and nominated by peers.
Award winners will be announced during the MeCCSA Annual Conference 2025, hosted by Edinburgh Napier University, 4-6th September 2025.
MeCCSA Bursary Awards – 2025
There was a strong field of applications from PhD students for our annual bursary awards to assist in attending the MeCCSA conference.
The winners are:
Yixuan Duan (University of East Anglia) and Chiadikaobi Ihuoma (Keele University).
SHORTLISTED
Kate Wright, Martin Scott and Mel Bunce
Capturing News, Capturing Democracy Trump and the Voice of America
Oxford University Press.
Judges’ comments:
This is a fascinating and important account of the way in which public service media have been captured by anti-democratic forces, with the fate of the US-funded Voice of America (VOA) and the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) comprising the primary case studies. The authors conducted interviews with 20 staff at VOA and USAGM, analysed news items focused on the leadership of these institutions and 15000 documents, mostly obtained via FOI requests. The book documents evidence of significant politicizing and weaponizing of both VOA and other media. The authors conclude that VOA could easily become merely the unacknowledged mouthpiece of a right-leaning US Government and thus exercise significant control over its citizens and hence undermine democratic processes. This is an important book for what it shows can happen when media which is explicitly intended to be a public service is appropriated for political ends. It is a rigorous and scholarly text and is both empirically and theoretically driven. The monograph constitutes a timely intervention in its analysis of the current state of de-democratisation in the US and is a brave and important book.
SHORTLISTED
Lilie Chouliaraki
Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood
Oxford University Press.
Judges’ comments:
This important book interrogates the relationship between privilege and suffering, shifting the focus from the author’s previous works towards the West as narrator of its own suffering. Interrogating far-right populism and much cited culture wars, the book examines the weaponization of narratives of victimhood and how that intersects with what the author terms a ‘politics of cruelty’. The book also takes an historical view examining how discourses of power through different cultural contexts show both continuities and discontinuities through how systems of power impact gender, race, and class
SHORTLISTED
Kay Dickinson
Supply Chain Cinema: Producing Global Film Workers
Bloomsbury Press.
Judges’ comments:
This fascinating book interrogates the concept of the supply chain as applied to the screen industries globally. The book has vigour, is rigorous, and contributes to a field that lacks a more global view of an industry that is highly co-dependent on many corporate players and transnational labour. Arguing that the concept of the supply chain as a mode of manufacturing exerts enormous power over multiple industries, the focus here is the transnational film industry where such practices are argued to be a version of offshoring. This is a key intervention into the way we understand transnational filmmaking to operate. Case studies include the UK and the UAE, and the book highlights the impact of the film supply chain on communities in lasting ways. The book provides important concluding remarks on how some of the more problematic practices of the supply chain might be disrupted.
SHORTLISTED
Daniel Jackson
Fighting Against the Machine: Inside a Solutions Journalism Campaign in UK Local Newsrooms, published in Journalism Studies, 26(3), 314–332. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2024.2425640
Judges’ comments:
Fascinating study on how key stakeholders in solutions journalism (SOJO) consider its utility as part of newsroom culture, using an interview-based research design, providing an examination of the integration of SOJO into UK local newsrooms during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research design, including interviews with journalists and editors and observations over an 18-month period, is well-justified and clearly articulated. The study is original, using action research into how SOJO practices can be adapted in resource-poor newsrooms. The paper begins by setting out what SOJO is and its purpose before discussing a range of relevant literature including studies which have focused on SOJO practices in a variety of different national contexts and where the motivations to proactively implement such a practice are many and varied. The three research questions which guide the study are credible although the relatively small sample base in terms of both informants (37) and the focus on local newsrooms rather than national, means that the findings can be considered to be exploratory rather than explanatory but the conclusions could have wider implications for the news industry more generally. The action research approach which comprised running practical workshops to train journalists in using a SOJO process and then evaluating its success is novel and such a strategy could be replicated across a wider range of national or indeed international newsrooms and could have a significant impact if journalists embed such an approach in their own practice. Importantly, the authors identify what helped and what hindered the adoption of SOJO in newsrooms, providing useful insights in relation to the efficacy of different training models, especially the problem that a SOJO approach challenges “a machine that is programmed for speed and volume of outputs over depth and investigation.” While the author suggests that the aim of the project was not fully met, he considers that the more pragmatic strategy of “SOJO-lite” could be implemented as a way of pursuing some, if not all, elements of SOJO which is definitely better than nothing.
SHORTLISTED
Philip Schlesinger
The Post-Public Sphere and Neo-Regulation of Digital Platforms, published in Javnost – The Public, 31(1), 64–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2024.2311010
Judges’ comments:
This article offers a well-argued examination of the post-public sphere and the neo-regulation of digital platforms. The paper is well structured and offers new insights into internet regulation of UK governments as case study. It is explicitly focused on rapid development of platformisation and the ways in which the internet is regulated has become almost as a proxy for a functioning public sphere. The first part of the article re-states Habermas’ more recent theoretical musings on how the political and media public spheres have been changed by digital media so that consumers and posters to social media platforms are now considered to constitute an ‘alternative’ or ‘competing’ public sphere. The author undertakes a thorough and wide-ranging analysis of the UK’s efforts to both regulate the internet and considers the different entities tasked with doing this Herculean task, suggesting the existence of a regulatory ‘field’ to borrow Bourdieu’s key concept, and scoping a number of ways in which regulation is operationalised. The paper is very well-written and fact-heavy with a plausible conclusion on a highly topical and important topic.
SHORTLISTED
Bart Cammaerts
Defending Democracy Against Populist Neo-Fascist Attacks: The Role and Problems of Public Sphere Theory, published in Javnost – The Public, 31(1), 26–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2024.2310983
Judges’ comments:
Highly topical paper which explores the potential of theorising a middle ground between competing notions of the democracy vs populist neo-fascism dichotomy, focusing on the balance between consensus, conflict, rationality and emotion in deploying a revised vision of the political public sphere, also taking account of the ways in which legacy and social media are complicit in the lurch to the right across a number of contemporary, hitherto democratic nations. Cammaerts does a neat job of critiquing public sphere theory and the idea that excluding far right discourse is the way to reassert democracy, instead agreeing with others that an inclusive politics could be more productive for reaching some kind of political consensus where media function as some kind of ‘honest broker’ between polarised positions or in Cammaerts’ words, a hybrid media system needs to be ‘defeudalised’ and operate inside the democratic fightback, emphasizing the need for critical engagement in combating populist neo-fascism. He advocates for a new regulatory framework to reconnect media with democratic values, drawing inspiration from the tradition of public journalism. He provides a thoughtful theoretical discussion which provides some intelligent ideas for reimagining a more robust communications framework and a public sphere fit for our current age. There seems to be some original theorising in the paper, drawing on an extensive and relevant literature.
SHORTLISTED
Lisa Bradley (Volume editor)Emma Heywood (Volume editor)
Journalism as the Fourth Emergency Service, Peter Lang.
Judges’ comments:
An original approach to an important subject. Its 27 chapters combine academic articles, interviews with high-profile journalists written up as news features, and how-to materials for educators and working journalists, and include some powerful reflections by contributors who reported on distressing news events. The collection works as both a coherent research intervention and a valuable resource for learning and teaching.
SHORTLISTED
James Morrison, and Sarah Pedersen
Silenced Voices and the Media: Who Gets to Speak?, Palgrave MacMillan.
Judges’ comments:
Questions of who gets to speak and who is kept silent are of fundamental importance in media analysis. The contributors to the 18 chapters in this wide-ranging collection explore this central theme through a very diverse range of case studies, media forms, geographical locations, and theoretical lenses.
SHORTLISTED
Hayes Mawindi Mabweazara, and Bethia Pearson
Media Capture in Africa and Latin America, Palgrave MacMillan.
Judges’ comments:
A very strong collection with a rigorous theoretical framing and a clear focus on articulating how developing discourses of ‘media capture’ can be usefully mobilised as an analytical concept and applied to a diverse range of countries in the Global South. Across 13 chapters, connections are drawn between focussed case studies from very different countries across Latin America and Africa, offering insights into specific contexts and wider patterns of media capture.
SHORTLISTED
Ilia Ryzhenko (University of Warwick)
Theatricality and Time in Narrative Cinema Presence, Anachronism, Metalepsis
Judges’ comments:
This at first sight may appear as a rather ‘niche’ thesis but in fact the idea of considering theatricality (as defined by Michael Fried) and applying it to cinema is very original. The author then goes about interpellating filmcraft and the various cinematic modalities which deliver a theoretical framework for ‘cinematic theatricality’. By looking at cinematic time and its coterminous status with the viewer, what is conceptualised as the ‘present moment’, it establishes a thread that runs throughout the three substantive chapters. In the first chapter there is a consideration of two case studies in filmmaking which adopt the uninterrupted long take: Memoria and Victoria, respectively slow cinema and one-take cinematography, discussed as examples of ‘cinematic theatricality’ and drawing on a number of references to many other films which ‘resemble’ them in ‘cinematic theatricality’; here the films and the viewers are conceived in what is conceptualised as the ‘phenomenological now’. A different set of films are analysed in chapter two: three period films, Transit, The Favourite, Caravaggio through the lens of the ‘historical now’, with the analysis concentrating on the films deliberate historical anachronisms as a conscious effort to reach the contemporary viewer in what is conceptualised as ‘the historical now’. This is also theorised as an example of ‘cinematic theatricality’. The final chapter looks at a different idea of cinematic time, in two films, The Father and Synecdoche, where the narrative concentrates on the temporal ‘scramble’ of its protagonists, respectively dementia and obsession, a temporal confusion that is transferred to the viewer, which the author argues, is also another example of ‘cinematic theatricality’. This doctoral research delivers a sophisticated and theoretically rich argument throughout and demonstrates in the analysis of the various filmic case studies how ‘cinematic theatricality’ comes into being, both temporally and ontologically.
SHORTLISTED
Liang Ge (Kings College London)
In, With, and Through Ambivalence: Subjectivities, Desires and Affects of Chinese Danmei Participants in Producing and Consuming Male-Male Romances and/or Erotica
Judges’ comments:
This thesis delves into the embodied lived experiences in the dynamic yet ambivalent danmei (boys’ love) cultural ecology in China. It offers a unique theoretical-analytical approach, grounded in the grammar of ambivalences, enabling audiences to engage in everyday, embodied forms of resistance to gender/sexual normativities and queer feminist sensibilities. Liang Ge’s unique contribution is expressed in their argument that current research on danmei tends to assume it resides in an homogeneous, stable field and so ignores the heterogeneity of its content and participants. Researchers have also failed to understand why many participants/audiences/producers of danmei are female. Prioritising a focus on gender, recent research has also neglected to examine the importance of sexuality, class and age of danmei communities. The central research questions of the thesis explore why this is the case, through analysis of 275 questionnaires, and interviews with 61 danmei writers and readers. Past studies have focused primarily on danmei texts, whereas the present research shifts the lense to writers, fans and readers of danmei whose gender and sexual identities the author highlights as fluid and queer/feminist. By exploring why and how danmei writers/readers indulge in this male-male romance, and their vibrant affective engagement with danmei culture and beyond, the author probes the emotional states, imagined realities and cultural ideals of this community. Whilst danmei allows one to challenge heteropatriarchy and normative sexual desire, homosexuality remains prohibited and repressed by the Communist Party and often severe crackdowns on danmei have occurred in recent years. The ambivalences of danmei reside in their ability to embody progressive queer feminisms which are nonetheless moving in tandem with regressive movements which result in reaffirmations of gendered normativity. Taken together, the uniqueness of the author’s conceptual/theoretical frameworks, coupled with empirical data generated from extensive questionnaires and interviews offers a new way of thinking of gender, sexuality and sexual desire in China today through the lense of Sino feminist/queer theory and acknowledgement of the ambivalences of contemporary danmei consumption practices and sensibilities.
SHORTLISTED
Ann McCluskey (University of Glasgow)
The Making of Scottish Visual Arts Television Programmes from 1952 to 2018
Judges’ comments:
This is an important and valuable piece of research which advances our understanding of the development of the British and specifically the Scottish media and television industries. The thesis is a well-structured and clearly written piece of work that addresses an area neglected to date by academia. The author demonstrates a strong commitment to scholarly inquiry and has produced a valuable contribution to the field.