Principal Investigator: Dr Sarah Maltby

Sarah Maltby is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex.

Her core academic interests centre upon the intersection between contemporary military practice and media practice. This includes the tactical and strategic role of mediated information in the implementation of security provision, and representations of conflict in military, journalistic and artistic output.

She is author of Military Media Management: Negotiating the ‘Front’ Line (2012) and co-editor of Communicating War: Memory, Military and Media (2007) with Richard Keeble. She is also co-editor of the Sage International Journal ‘Media, War and Conflict‘.

Sarah has extensive experience in the conduct of research through contracted work with a wide range of organisations including the British military, the Metropolitan Police, the Department of Health and the probation service. She is dedicated to constructive knowledge transfer and the continual development of research relations with user communities within and beyond the academic sphere.

She is also Founder and Co-ordinator of The War and Media Network, an international and multi-disciplinary online resource and networking forum that aims to promote productive dialogue between academics and practitioners interested in the intersection between war, terrorism and the media, and currently has over 350 members worldwide.

Co-Investigator: Dr Helen Thornham

Helen Thornham is a Research Fellow at the University of Leeds.

Her research interests centre are around gender and (new) media; narrative theories and mediation of technology; transformative use and appropriation of (new) media; feminist film theory and feminist new media theory.

Helen is author of Ethnographies of the Videogame (2011), Content Cultures (2012) with Simon Popple and Renewing Feminisms (2012) with Elke Weissmann.

She is currently leading a £1.5 million RCUK Digital Economy Network+ investigating the digital transformations of communities and culture. www.communitiesandculture.org This research extends interests around embodiment and technology and lived mediations of technology into areas of policy and practice, working with third sector industries, the public sector, users, communities and private institutions.

Her work with the D.U.N project develops her interests in imagining and articulating power relations, technology and the lived realities of being positioned. Both of these projects offer long term and sustained work into mediations with digital technologies as they intersect with organisations in various ways.

Research Fellow: Dr Daniel Bennett

Daniel Bennett is a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex.

His research interests lie in the representation of conflict through digital media including new forms of media coverage of warfare and the use of social media by military organisations.

He is the author of Digital Media and Reporting Conflict (2013), a detailed study of the BBC’s evolving coverage of war and terrorism. His research in this area has also been documented on his blogs, Mediating Conflict and Reporting War for the Frontline Club.

He completed his PhD at the War Studies Department, King’s College London in 2012.