Sonia Livingstone

Sonia Livingstone OBE
Awards	OBE, for services to children and child Internet safety
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Oxford
Academic work
Main interests	Social Psychology
Notable ideas	The opportunities and risks afforded by digital and online technologies, particularly for children and young people

Sonia Livingstone OBE is a professor of Social Psychology and former head of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science and has dedicated much of her research to children, media and the Internet. 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. From 2007 to 2008, she served as President of the International Communication Association (ICA). Sonia Livingstone was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2014 "for services to children and child Internet safety".

Sonia Livingstone holds a BSc degree in psychology from University College London and obtained her PhD in Psychology from the University of Oxford. Her doctoral research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and her dissertation examined the "social knowledge and programme structure in representations of television characters". In 1990, Sonia Livingstone joined the London School of Economics in the Department of Social Psychology as lecturer, from 1997 as senior lecturer and from 1999 as professor. Since 2003, she has been a professor in the then newly founded 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. Throughout her career, Livingstone has won numerous awards and taken up more than 15 academic appointments, most recently as guest professor at the University of Oslo (2008), as visiting professor at the University Panthéon Assas Paris II (2009) and completed a faculty fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University (2013-2014).

Sonia Livingstone stated that one of her research interests is exploring how people "maintain a sense of themselves in a communication environment replete with meanings they didn't create". In her earliest research, Livingstone focused on how television audiences respond and create meaning from various television genres, focusing specifically on soap operas. This work was recognized for the innovative way in which she combined critical and social psychological theoretical frameworks and employed qualitative interview research methodologies, traditions that she still identifies with today. Taking a comparative, critical and contextualised approach, Sonia Livingstone's current 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. More broadly, she is interested in how citizen values (public sphere, rights-based, equity-focused, diversity-promoting) can be better embedded in information and communication infrastructures in institutions, regulators and the lifeworld. Livingstone is renowned for her multi-methodological approaches and she has overseen projects incorporating both large-scale quantitative and qualitative methods in the study of media engagement and reception.

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