Three new research centres established in the School of the Arts

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The School of the Arts has launched three new research centres, reflecting sustained research excellence in established and emerging fields of particular collective expertise.

The Centre for Digital Politics, Media and Democracy, the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life, and the Discourse, Data and Society Research Centre join eight existing centres within the School, some of which have a long-established reputation (the Institute for Popular Music and CAVA, for example) and some of which are more recently established (such as the Literature and Science Hub and the Olaf Stapledon Centre for Speculative Futures).

Dean of the School of the Arts, Professor Peter Buse said: "we are incredibly excited about the plans of all centres – old and new – for the next year and beyond.

"Research centres are an integral part of the School’s research environment and culture. They make a vital contribution to the growth in research activity and research income; enhance the environment for both staff and postgraduate research students; and facilitate potential pathways to impact."

The contribution of all 11 research centres will be recognised at a special event on 1st March 2022, where centre directors will share their practice, ideas and experience.

The three new centres are profiled below:

Centre for Culture and Everyday Life

The Centre for Culture and Everyday Life (CCEL) is a hub of critical, creative and theoretically engaged research that works to build partnerships between academics, practitioners in the arts, cultural institutions, policy-makers and communities. We conduct qualitative and experimental research in the arts, culture and everyday life. The Centre has grown out of long-standing interdisciplinary expertise in everyday culture with a strong emphasis on issues of space, time and memory. Our work engages with urban experience and visual culture both in Liverpool and internationally. At a time when arts and cultural research are undervalued, and as everyday experience becomes ever more mediated and instrumentalized, the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life provides a forum for debate that extends beyond disciplinary divides, encouraging and supporting new collaborative practices and critical approaches. 

Centre for Digital Politics, Media and Democracy

The Centre for Digital Politics, Media and Democracy (CDPMD) is an interdisciplinary centre that champions challenge-led collaborative and interdisciplinary research to address some of the most pressing research questions around digital media and democracy. CDPMD works with academic and non-academic partners to probe the impact of communication on politics and society and considers how norms, attitudes, and values are both expressed in and shaped by media. The Centre produces cutting-edge research on online harms, the future of journalism, political information and misinformation, and inequalities and human rights, analysing media content, audiences and users, as well as studying the institutions which produce media.

Discourse, Data and Society Research Centre

The Discourse, Data and Society Research Centre (DDS) addresses the challenges and opportunities that socio-cultural change, big data, Artificial Intelligence and digitised communication entail for the study of language. Leveraging on existing research expertise in the Departments of English and Communication & Media, as well as through cross-disciplinary collaborations and strategic partnerships with the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science, the Virtual Engineering Centre, the Digital Innovation Facility and the Centre for Teaching Excellence in Language Learning, the Centre aims to develop advanced methods for the large-scale analysis of language and digital media to address global challenges.

Further information about research activity in the School of the Arts can be found on the research pages.