Phil Hammond London South Bank University We were delighted to welcome delegates to London South Bank University (LSBU) for the MeCCSA 2018 conference (10-12 January 2018). We would like to thank everyone who contributed to making the event a success. Delegates were welcomed on 10 January by the outgoing chair of MeCCSA, Professor Natalie Fenton, …Continue Reading

Sonia Livingstone LSE Children’s rights online are finally getting traction. While the struggle to protect children online is as old as the internet itself, with a trail of only modest wins along the way, it is children as rights-holders, as agents rather than victims in the digital age, whose claims are finally being heard. A …Continue Reading

Eva Giraud Keele University Reports about the ‘banning’ of Iceland’s 2018 Christmas advertisement resulted in it becoming one of the most viewed Christmas advertisements ever on social media. The advertisement itself – a Greenpeace-produced animated critique of palm oil production, from the perspective of a young orangutan – was reportedly banned for being ‘too political’. …Continue Reading

Elizabeth Poole Keele University This article outlines some of the findings from a British Academy small grant that examines the dynamics of a racialised hashtag, #stopIslam, following the Brussels attacks in 2016. The hashtag caught our interest when mainstream media organisations (e.g. BBC, CNN, Nigeria Newsdesk and Al Jazeera) reported that it was being used, …Continue Reading

Eugenia Siapera Dublin City University Political developments in core countries of the Global North, such as the UK and the US, have been accompanied by a significant rise in incidents of violence against people of colour and migrants, clearly documented in reports by NGOs and think-tanks such as Tell Mama (2017) and Demos (Bartlett et …Continue Reading