Why do so many creative professionals report feeling both deeply fulfilled and profoundly unwell?
Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) and a panel of experts to discuss Professor Mark Deuze’s new book, exploring well-being and mental health across media industries.
Location: University of Westminster, Marylebone Campus (Room MG14).
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The media and creative industries thrive on passion, but that passion often comes at a cost. Behind the glamour of journalism, filmmaking, games, music, advertising, and online content creation lies a growing crisis-one of burnout, anxiety, substance abuse, and exhaustion.
Mark Deuze investigates the systemic issues that make creative work both exhilarating and unsustainable. Drawing on extensive research and in-depth interviews with media professionals, his book notes the hidden downsides of doing what you love and offers a candid analysis of how workplace structures, high workloads, and perceived injustices contribute to mental and physical distress.
But this book is not just about what’s broken; it’s about what can be done. Deuze provides a roadmap for rethinking the culture of creative industries and offers strategies for balancing passion with sustainability, challenging us to imagine a healthier future for our labour of love.
Biographies
Mark Deuze is a professor of media studies at the University of Amsterdam’s Faculty of Humanities. Publications of his work include over 150 academic papers and 14 books, including Well-Being and Creative Careers (Intellect, 2025), Happiness in Journalism (Routledge, 2024), and Life in Media (The MIT Press, 2023). Professor Deuze has held honorary appointments at the Faculty of Journalism at Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University in Perth and the School of Communication of the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and the Department of Communication and Media Studies of Northumbria University, United Kingdom. He is also band member of Skinflower, latest album Kaduc(Record Union, 2024).
Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Professor Rebecca L. Stein (Duke University).
Location: University of Westminster, Marylebone Campus (Room MG14).
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From its outset, the Israeli assault on Gaza was understood by many Israeli Jews as a war of images. And one they risked losing. While Gazan Palestinians had long employed social media to document Israeli military assaults, the scale of this documentation, and the degree of its global virality, has been unprecedented. Within mainstream Jewish Israeli society, this Palestinian media ecosystem was deemed a considerable threat — even, some argued, an existential one. In response, Israeli state institutions, social media influencers, and private foundations would engage in a range of tactics to change the international view of Gaza and to keep Palestinian victims out of the Israeli frame: all were efforts to (as I argue) unsee Gaza.
This paper explores the range of visual strategies employed to do this unseeing work: including classic colonial erasure strategies, the visual coding of Palestinians as terrorists, and the denial of famine images. Surveying state documents, social media, and popular media discourse, this paper proposes that Israeli visual practices and discourses have played a key role in sustaining Jewish Israeli support for the genocide.
Biographies
Rebecca L. Stein is a cultural anthropologist researching linkages between culture and politics in Israel in the context of the Israeli military occupation and legacy of the Palestinian dispossession. She is the author and/or editor of five books in the field of anti-colonial Israel/Palestine studies. Her latest book, Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine, is the culmination of a multi-book project about the ways that new media and communication technologies are recalibrating the Israeli relationship to its military occupation. Herfirst book on this topic — Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (with Adi Kuntsman, 2015) — studied the place of social media within this equation. Her current project studies the changing status of wartime evidence in Israel/Palestine amidst the rise of artificial intelligence, open source intelligence (OSINT), and amateur digital forensics.
Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), Peter Cunliffe-Jones and Prof. Jean Seaton for a seminar on fact-checking, forecasting and information disorder.
Location: University of Westminster, Marylebone Campus (Room MG28).
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Long-range weather forecasts, though not always accurate, help farmers better protect their crops from the effects of droughts or floods. Understanding the potential long- and short-term consequences of misinformation could help protect society from events misinformation affects, like the 2024 Southport riots or public health crises. However, accurately predicting the way that individuals and groups may respond to different forms of information, true or false, is notoriously challenging. In this seminar, Peter Cunliffe-Jones will discuss the theoretical model set out in his new book – ‘Fake News – What’s the harm?’ The model is being trialled this year by fact-checkers and researchers in the UK, the EU and the Middle East to distinguish between factually false claims that do, and do not have a substantive potential to cause or contribute to specific substantive consequences, or harms.
To apply the model in practice, fact-checking organisations and researchers use a tool built around around three core questions set out in the book. These relate to (i) the relative degree of falsity of a claim, (ii) the number of people needed to act to cause a particular effect, and (iii) the capacity and motivation of those who hold a particular false understanding to act in a way that would cause this specific consequence or consequences. In the mid-1970s, the eminent British statistician George Box wrote that “all models are wrong, but some are useful”. If the model is fundamentally wrong, or misapplied, it could hamper either the efforts to counter harmful misinformation or the right to free speech. If it is right and well applied it could do the opposite. The seminar will discuss the criteria by which these judgements can be made and the challenges involved.
Biographies
Peter Cunliffe-Jones is a visiting researcher at the University of Westminster, focused on the nature and effects of fact-checking, regulation and the effects of misinformation for individuals and society. His most recent book, Fake News – What’s the Harm? was published by University of Westminster Press in June 2025. Before joining Westminster as a visiting researcher, Cunliffe-Jones had a 25-year career as a senior news journalist and editor at the AFP News Agency in Europe, Africa and the Asia-Pacific. He reported on the wars in Bosnia and Croatia in 1995, was bureau chief during the end of military rule in Nigeria (1998-2002) and AFP chief editor for Asia-Pacific (2003-2006). In 2012, Cunliffe-Jones founded Africa’s first non-partisan fact-checking organisation, Africa Check, setting up offices in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Senegal. In 2017, he launched the Africa Facts Network which today supports 50 organisations across the continent.
Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster and the Official Historian of the BBC. Since 2007, she has served as Director of the Orwell Foundation, succeeding Sir Bernard Crick. She is the author or co-author of many influential books, most recently Guardians of Public Value: How Public Organisations Become and Remain Institutions(Palgrave, 2021), and most recently the ninth edition of Power Without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain (Routledge, 2025, co-authored with James Curran). She has also written widely on the history and role of the media in politics, wars, atrocities, the Holocaust, revolutions, security issues and religion as well as news and journalism and is particularly interested in the impact of the media on children. She has contributed to policy debates and formulation especially concerning public service content and freedom of speech.
Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), for our final research seminar of 2025.
Location: University of Westminster, Marylebone Campus (Room MG28).
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Over the past decade, forms of popular politics once seen as confined to the geographical south or the historical past have come to threaten liberal tenets and institutions everywhere. From the Brexit referendum in 2016 to the phenomena of ‘Trumpism’ and ‘Putinism’, there has been much speculation about the role played by new media technology in this apparent return of illiberal politics and primordial identities. In India and elsewhere, an earlier optimism about decentralised forms of collective mobilisation enabled by social media has by now curdled into anxieties about more insidious types of manipulation and control of information.
In The Technopolitics of Communication in Modern India: Paper Chains and Viral Phenomena, Pragya Dhital argues these developments could best be understood by not taking identity for granted as a static and exclusive form of affiliation. She also emphasises how the technical and material are interwoven into human thought and action rather than acting upon them externally. She accordingly focuses on the technopolitical means by which groups have been ventriloquised during critical periods in Indian political history, across various media – from newspapers and magazines to radio broadcasts, speeches and online platforms.
Chapters cover prison writing produced during the emergency of 1975-77, regulation of public speech during the 2014 general election, and the Citizenship Amendment Act protests of 2019-20. Through these case studies, Dhital works towards an alternative, more reflexive, basis for popular representation, one that does not sacralise ‘the people’ and assume power in their name.
The Technopolitics of Communication in Modern India: Paper Chains and Viral Phenomena is published by Bloomsbury.
Biographies
Pragya Dhital is a lecturer in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She joined SAS from the UK National Archives, where she was Records Specialist for Empire and Commonwealth, and UCL, where she taught in the Sarah Parker Remond Centre. She has also been a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2018-22), worked as a Hindi and Urdu cataloguer in the British Library (2016-17), and taught in the Politics and Anthropology departments at SOAS for several years.