Professor John Downey

MA (Cantab), PhD (Cantab)

  • Associate Pro Vice Chancellor, Climate Change and Net Zero
  • Professor of Comparative Media Analysis
  • Member of Academia Europaea

Research groups and centres

Publications
Google Scholar

John read Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University. He was a Senior Scholar at Gonville and Caius College and was the Graythorne Scholar and Beaumont Scholar at Jesus College. His PhD was about the Frankfurt School and John was a post-doc at the Graduate College for Communication Sciences at Siegen University in Germany. His work remains influenced by the rich and continuing tradition of the Frankfurt School that brings together social philosophy, economics, and cultural analysis.

John came to the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at º¬Ðß²ÝÊÓƵ in 2000. He was a Visiting Professor of Sociology at Williams College, Massachusetts in 2007 and was a Visiting Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 2015 to 2017.

As well as receiving funding as a Principal Investigator from the Economic and Social Research Council, the European Commission, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the British Academy for his research, he has engaged in research for the BBC Board of Governors, the BBC Trust, the Office of Communication, the Electoral Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality, and the Guardian newspaper. His current research interests are media and politics in India, environmental communication, and the implications of AI for the cultural industries.

He is a member of the ESRC Peer Review College (2010-present) and sits on the ESRC’s Grants Assessment Panel B (2019-present), and the Independent Danish Research Fund (2023-preseent). He also reviews for the European Commission, the Canadian, Austrian, Belgian, French, German, Polish, Portuguese and Irish Research Councils and the Volkswagen Stiftung.

John was Director of the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at º¬Ðß²ÝÊÓƵ from 2016 to 2019. He was Director of the ESRC Midlands Graduate School Doctoral Training Partnership until 2020 and was Head of Department between 2019 and 2021. He was President of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) between 2021 and 2024. In 2020-21 he served as a sub-panel member for the D34 sub-panel of the UK’s  Research Excellence Framework.

In 2022 John was elected to be a member of the Academia Europaea in recognition of the ‘sustained academic excellence’ of his research.

John’s research specialism is comparative media: the comparison of media institutions and content across time and space. In 2006 he led a project for the BBC’s Governors analysing the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2012 he led a project for the BBC Trust examining the BBC’s coverage of the Arab Spring. His work seeks to develop the field of comparative media theoretically, methodologically, and empirically. With Thomas Koenig he introduced the use of computer-aided analysis to large n frame analysis. With James Stanyer he introduced the use of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to the study of media. In 2007 he was named as one of the Top 50 Communication researchers in Europe by Communication Director magazine. Current research interests are media and democracy in India, environmental communication, sociotechnical imaginaries of AI, and uses of AI in cultural industries. Methodologically, he is working on multilingual topic modelling and its application in the field of comparative media.

John teaches primarily about innovations in digital media at undergraduate and postgraduate level. He has supervised twenty-one doctoral students to completion and is currently supervising six more. 

Doctoral researchers who have recently been awarded doctorates:

  • Chikaire Ezeru: "Representations of Africa in the UK Press 1992-2017"
  • Dayei Oh: "Comparing Online Abortion Discourse in South Korea and Ireland"
  • Thais Sarda: "Representations of the Deep Web in UK Press"
  • Lou Tompkins: "Musicians and Social Media"
  • Weili Wang: "Chinese Soft Power and Western Media Coverage"
  • Amie Weedon "The temporalities of tracking sitting time: an exploration of the influence of rhythms and biographies on behavioural change in chronically ill adults and office workers."
  • Antoinette Burchill "Exploring agonism with mischief: participatory performance in the public realm."