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'Early in life, I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper...' George Orwell
1992: MA in Communication, Culture & Society - Goldsmiths' College, University of London (part-time)
2000: PhD in Communication, Goldsmiths' College, University of London (part-time)
Before becoming an academic, I worked at a number of different blue- and white-collar jobs and began travelling and/or living in a number of different places, from 1979 onwards, including England, Netherlands, Germany, Greece, (former) Yugoslavia, Mexico and Spain.
By my late 20s, I had started working as a lecturer in FE (Further Education) and AE (Adult Education) in greater London, England, which was followed by a short three-year stint in the media industries. This included working as a radio editor and an assistant manager of TV post-production in the private sector.
After I started studying part-time for my PhD at Goldsmiths, I began teaching full-time in higher education in greater London. Since 1993, I have taught across six different universities in England and Ontario, Canada.
I have worked in the Department of Communication Studies since it was formed on July 1st, 2001, teaching a range of courses that have overlapped with my outside advocacy work with anti-poverty and minimum-wage campaigns as well as contract faculty campaigns.
I draw upon these experiences to integrate practical and analytical approaches in studying how news media work in covering economic and social justice movements and issues, and how these social movements communicate their ideas.
It is through my advocacy work with economic justice organisations that I have developed aspects of different courses, including my graduate level "The Rhetoric of Economics". Other courses include a focus on public communication, public advocacy campaigns, alternative media, moral panics and free speech, culture wars, and the global financial crisis in popular communication.
My research at present is on the 'Culture Wars': this is a focus on the authoritarian right-wing machinery that organizes and fosters ideological attacks on knowledge, science and universities, and the connections with powerful individuals and institutions which amplify and popularize such attacks, particularly in the ways that this is used to silence those who are critical of the dominant power structures in contemporary society. In particular, I am interested in their use of argumentative strategies, rhetorical devices and tropes, and keyword and language choices.
- (30 January 2023) Wars of Position? Marxism Today, Cultural Politics and the Remaking of the Left Press, 1979-90. Chicago: Haymarket Publishing.
- (16 December 2021) Wars of Position? Marxism Today, Cultural Politics and the Remaking of the Left Press, 1979-90.Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.
- (2021) "'Persuasion, Precarity and the Professoriate': Communication Challenges on Contract Faculty Campaigns", Democratic Communiqué, 30 (1) (August): Article 2.
- (2017) “Stuart Hall’s Legacy: Thatcherism, Cultural Studies and ‘the Battle for Socialist Ideas’ during the 1980s”, Socialist Studies, 12 (1) (March) (online).
- (2017) “‘Engaging Class Struggles’: Preparing Students for the ‘Real World’ by Teaching ‘Activist’ Cultural Production in the Classroom”, Canadian Journal of Communication, 42 (1) (Spring 2017): 33-48. Special issue on ‘Activism and Communication Scholarship in Canada’. (Print, online.)
- (2015) "Vanguard Media: The Promise of Strategic Communication?" in Chris Atton (ed) The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media.
- (2014) “‘Militant Entertainment’? ‘Crisis music’ and political ephemera in the emergent ‘structure of feeling’, 1976-83,” Fight Back: Punk, Politics and Resistance, edited by The Subcultures Network, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 268-286.
- (2014) "Stuart Hall: An Exemplary Socialist Public Intellectual?" Socialist Studies, 10(1).
- (2014) "Reality Check: The Counter-Publicity of Alternative Media," in K. Kozolanka (ed) Publicity and the Canadian State, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp281-303.