Graham Murdock

Abstract

Graham Murdock graduated from the London School of Economics, UK, with a first-class honors degree in sociology, and he went on to pursue postgraduate studies in the sociology of art and literature at the University of Sussex. He then joined the staff of the Centre for Mass Communications Research at the University of Leicester, which at the time was establishing itself as the UK’s leading research institute for the study of the relations between media systems and social change. His own modus operandi was grounded in a distinctive approach to critical inquiry that drew on insights and methods from across the social sciences and humanities to explore questions around change, power, inequality, risk, and representation. This general project generated two main strands of work. The first tackles the relations between culture, communications, power, and inequality through a distinctive critical political economy which combines research on how state strategies and corporate interests structure the organization and production of mediated communication; work on public cultural institutions as guarantors of the cultural rights of citizenship; and explorations of patterns of everyday exclusion from, and engagement with, core communications resources, focusing particularly on the social dynamics of consumption and on the organization of gift economies. The second strand, which has embraced studies of crime, political demonstrations, riots, “terrorism,” and biotechnologies, focuses on the organization of public definitions and responses to perceived threats and risks, and the dynamics of ideology.