Sharon is a Senior Lecturer in Media Psychology at the University of Salford. She has recently joined the Media Psychology team to continue and expand her research interests in Media Psychology at the heart of the media and digital scene at the University’s MediaCityUK campus. She obtained her ‘Laurea’ degree in Psychology at the Universita’ degli Studi di Padova, where she worked under the supervision of Professor Anne Maass on a Master level project entitled ‘Attitude measures and behaviour: Which connection? A study about religious intergroup relations’. In 2007 Sharon obtained her PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Sussex where she worked under the supervision of Professor Rupert Brown. Her thesis was entitled: ‘Collective Guilt and Shame in Intergroup relations. The effects of group based guilt and shame on intergroup attitudes and prosocial behaviour’. Between October 2007 and January 2012 she worked at Christ Church University in Canterbury as a Lecturer and then a Senior Lecturer in Psychology.
Sonia Livingstone is a full professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. She teaches master's courses in media and communications theory, methods, and audiences, and supervises doctoral students researching questions of audience, publics and users in the changing media landscape. She is author or editor of eighteen books and many academic articles and chapters. She has been visiting professor at the Universities of Bergen, Copenhagen, Harvard, Illinois, Milan, Paris II, and Stockholm, and is on the editorial board of several leading journals. She is past President of the International Communication Association, ICA. Sonia was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2014 'for services to children and child internet safety.' Taking a comparative, critical and contextualised approach, Sonia's research asks why and how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action, identity and communication rights. Her empirical work examines the opportunities and risks afforded by digital and online technologies, including for children and young people at home and school, for developments in media and digital literacies, and for audiences, publics and the public sphere more generally.
Stephen King is a Professor of Economics and former Dean at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is also a part-time member of the Economic Regulation Authority of WA and the National Competition Council. Prior to joining Monash University, Stephen was a Member of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Before that, he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Melbourne and a Professor of Management (Economics) at the Melbourne Business School. Stephen’s main areas of expertise are in Trade Practices economics, regulation and industrial organization. While at the ACCC, Stephen chaired the Mergers Review Committee and was closely involved with a wide range of merger decisions. He was involved in the full range of activities undertaken by the Commission. These included both on-going functions – such as authorisation decisions, regulatory determinations and enforcement actions under the Trade Practices Act – and ad hoc activities undertaken by the Commission. For example, Stephen was one of the three Commissioners who undertook the Part VIIA inquiries into the price of unleaded petrol in Australia and into the Australian grocery industry. He was also one of the two Commissioners presiding over the Services Sydney-Sydney Water Access Dispute. This was the first arbitration completed under Part IIIA of the Trade Practices Act.
Shabbir is a senior lecturer in economics and manages the MSc Economics suite of programmes (MSc Economics, MSc Financial Economics and MSc Business Economics) in University of Huddersfield.
I work on two main lines of research. The first deals with political behaviour and comparative politics questions in Europe, and the second deals with the impact of migration processes on public attitudes and political outcomes. More specifically, I have devoted some time now to analyse how the immigration issue is incorporated into patterns of political competition and affects electoral outcomes, both in countries with and without a prominent anti-immigrant party in Parliament. Regarding my political behaviour and comparative politics line of research, I am working on a number of projects assessing the conditional effect of institutions, media discourse and party system characteristics on different forms of voting, including proximity, directional, and valence voting. I am also studying the interaction between power-sharing institutions and traditional individual-level predictors of electoral turnout. Finally, I am also interested in the formation of subjective perceptions of the national economy, and the moderating effect of personal socioeconomic circumstances and party messages in this process. As for my research on immigration, I mostly analyse patterns of xenophobia and racism from a comparative perspective in Europe. More specifically, I deal with the direct or indirect impact of several predictors on attitudes towards immigration, namely personality traits, local and national levels of ethnic diversity, and ideological predispositions. More recently I have also implemented longitudinal analyses of xenophobia over individual life cycles using panel data, and survey experiments assessing the impact of different forms of ethnic diversity on the willingness to redistribute resources in a given community.
I was born in Germany while my father was on sabbatical there, but grew up in Melbourne and then Adelaide, where I did my undergraduate studies in Mathematical Physics and Pure Mathematics. I went to Oxford to do graduate study with Roger Penrose on general relativity and conformal field theory (although both of these reduce to differential equations if you stare at them hard enough!) Since my return to Australia I've lectured at Adelaide University, worked as a radar signal processor at DSTO, and bayesian analyst at CSIRO before joining CSEM to work on iterative optimisation of parametric bayesian models for medical image analysis. Since then I have also found fun people to work on mathematical models of high-rate algal ponds and lithium polymer batteries.
