Research

I am currently a PhD student at the London School of Economics, Department of Media and Communications, supervised by Dr Dylan Mulvin and Professor Lilie Chouliaraki and funded by a studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council.

My research began in 2020 as an inquiry into the implication of automation and ‘artificially intelligent’ software systems for photojournalism. Informed by Science and Technology Studies and social constructivist ideas in particular, I was interested in examining the degree of mutual social shaping that was taking place between these technologies and newsroom practices. However as the work has developed the focus has also shifted, and the project now looks more at the way photojournalism professionals – and the organisations they constitute – attempt to navigate an increasingly precarious landscape in which audience trust which was once taken for granted is now increasingly in doubt, in no small part because of the widening use of these technologies.

My research examines how audience trust and the challenges to it are understood by photojournalism professionals across three industry sites, and what measures these organisations do, or do not implement in order to restore, protect or increase that trust. I attempts to trace a complex interplay of factors, from technological initiatives and institutional dynamics, to the place of industry standards, public scandal, and individual critique in explaining this. Fundamentally at the root of my research is a concern with the ‘world making’ power of photography, and the role that images of news play not just as simple illustrations, or as frames for other forms of media like text, but as things which are fundamentally important in and of themselves for the way they shape our ideas about each other, the world that we collectively occupy, and the possibilities for action in it.