The LSE Department of Media and Communication is celebrating its 20th anniversaryth anniversary in 2023 and marks the occasion with the upcoming Media Futures Conference on June 15-16. To celebrate the department’s contribution to media and communication research and teaching over the past 20 years, we are publishing a series of faculty reflections. Here, current MA student Ava Waugh interviews Professor Shani Orgad, gender, feminism and media researcher, who shares her thoughts on the growth of the department since 2003 and where her research is headed.
Shani Orgad’s current research explores how in contemporary culture, lack of self-esteem is often seen as a major issue holding women back, and how solutions to gender inequality often focus on ‘fixing’ women rather than structural inequalities. Her work also explores how media representations shape people’s understanding of themselves, others and the world, a topic she has explored in her books Media Representation and the Global Imagination (2012, Politics), Care during a crisis? Humanitarianism, the public and NGGOS (with Bruna Seu, Palgrave, 2017) and Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality (Columbia University Press, 2019).
I asked Professor Orgad, herself an LSE graduate and first-time appointee to LSE’s Department of Media and Communication, what makes the department an exciting place to study.
“First of all, the brilliant students who come to study in the department!” Professor Orgad exclaimed, expressing his appreciation for the benefits of teaching. “Teaching and learning in the department is never an ‘ivory tower’ exercise;” she continued, “it is about engaging with the world we live in, exploring its possibilities and limitations, and exploring ways to achieve greater equity and equality’. Finally, Professor Orgad noted how the department “never rests on its laurels”, making it a vibrant place of continuous improvement and innovation.
When I asked about the most profound changes in her field of research over the past 20 years, Professor Orgad replied “Where do I begin?”
Since the department was established in 2003, the same year Professor Orgad completed her PhD, she has seen the field of media and communications grow and change over two decades. She reflects on her doctoral research on breast cancer patients’ online communication: “Back then, I wrote about how the online and offline realms are intertwined. Today, however, the interrelationship between the two realms is much more extensive and intense; our online engagement is an integral part of our daily lives, of who we are and of what we do”.
Professor Orgad discussed the “intensification of corporate and state control over media institutions and the digital sphere in particular” as a notable development; specifically how “this control is disguised, naturalized, and often invisible.”
She also noted how power relations have changed with the emergence of new forms of mediated visibility. “These new forms hold enormous promise – especially for oppressed, marginalized and disadvantaged groups and individuals – to receive long overdue recognition and resources to redress injustices and inequalities,” she said. This issue will continue to inform Professor Orgad’s future work, particularly in relation to “the ways in which contemporary media and culture regulate and control women and other minority groups, but also how these individuals and groups negotiate and resist this pressures and regulatory powers’.
Based on her research to date, I asked Professor Orgad whether or not there has been significant progress in the representation of women and gender in the media.
Professor Orgad said he recognized that “in some respects there has been important progress that has been linked to changes in the political, economic and social spheres”. Specifically, “representations of gender are more diverse than in the past in terms of who is visible, who is associated with positions of power and authority, and who is allowed to speak.” She notes how, for example, “in advertisements , targeting women and girls, we’re seeing a real shift from the previous emphasis on what’s wrong and how to improve, to a focus on (superficial) body positivity, confidence and self-love,” a topic she discusses in his book with Rosalind Gill, A culture of trust.
However, despite these important changes, Professor Orgad stresses that “there is a fundamental disconnect between the discourses and rhetoric around progress, diversity, inclusion, women’s empowerment and gender equality, and societal structures that change much more slowly”. Therefore, she adds, “one of the key challenges is how to translate the current popular embrace of ideas such as diversity, women’s empowerment and equality into systemic and structural change and a long-term commitment to justice and equality, rather than a desire to ‘fix “women”.
After discussing the changes in media and communications over the past twenty years, I asked Professor Orgad what he most looks forward to learning in the next twenty years. “I am passionate and excited to continue interrogating the relationship between feminism, media representations, and lived realities,” she said. “I am also excited to explore how and whether cultural narratives in the coming decades will challenge neoliberal notions of individualism, choice, self-responsibility, resilience, positivity and self-care; and whether and what alternative narratives can encourage people to refuse to accept insecurity, inequality and injustice as personal failings and as inevitable conditions that cannot be changed”.
You can read more about Professor Shani Orgad and her work here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/people/academic-staff/shani-orgad. This post represents the views of the author and not the position of the Media@LSE blog nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.