Leah Lievrouw

llievrou@ucla.edu
310.825.1840

Professor of Information Studies
The Sudikoff Family Institute Fellow for 2006 - 07

Professor Leah A. Lievrouw, Sudikoff Fellow for 2006 – 07, studies the spectrum of influences that media and information technologies bring to society and culture.  An exploration of information society issues, including social networks and differentiation, intellectual freedom, and information equity, is a key element of her work, along with the examination of how the use of communication technologies – such as PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistants), cellular phones, and email – catalyze social change.  Her research currently emphasizes two primary areas of study.  

The first, an inquiry into alternative and activist new media, explores how activists, artists and underrepresented groups use the Internet and other technologies to promote their alternative, or oppositional, views of politics and culture.  These projects employ new media technologies (such as blogs, mobile phones, social software, or wikis) to build communities, gain visibility and voice, present alternative or “marginal” views, produce and share their own DIY information resources, and to resist, talk back, or otherwise confront and engage with prevailing media culture.  Professor Lievrouw, who teaches courses at UCLA and has lectured widely on the subject, also contributed a chapter on oppositional new media projects to Media Owership: Research and Regulation (Hampton Press, 2006, Ronald E. Rice, ed).  Her book on the topic, Understanding Alternative and Activist New Media, is in preparation and will be published by Polity Press, Cambridge.

Professor Lievrouw also examines the prospects for intellectual freedom within various social situations and environments where technology has strong influence.  Collaborating with Professor Michael Curry of the UCLA Department of Geography, she examines different contexts of everyday life – such as the workplace, households, public transportation and public parks, and places like libraries and bookstores that are specifically open to the reading public, to see how they may encourage or inhibit free and open inquiry and discourse, and what difference the proliferation of new media and information technologies make in these settings.  She proposes that different places be thought of as “ecologies of attention and forgetting,” in which various interactions or movements of information are noticed, recorded and remembered, while others may go unnoticed, discarded, and forgotten. 

The particular balance of attention and forgetting in a given setting affects whether people there feel free to seek and find information, interact, and express their own opinions and views.  She argues that contemporary media and information technologies have shifted the balance toward the capture and retention of information, including information about what people read, write, listen to, and watch, as well as who they do it with.  Professor Lievrouw believes this shift has important consequences for intellectual freedom and political and social participation. 

Co-editor of The Handbook of New Media (Sage 2006) , Professor Lievrouw is currently developing an advanced text for Oxford University Press that takes a fresh approach to new media studies.  With a background in media writing and production, journalism, and instructional media development, Professor Lievrouw has served as co-editor of the journal New Media & Society, and contributed a regular column on new media issues for the International Communication Association Newsletter. 

Holding a Ph.D. in communication theory and research from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, Professor Lievrouw received an M.A. in biomedical communications/instructional development from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.  She earned a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.  She served on the faculty of Department of Communications at Rutgers University and the Department of Telecommunication and Film at the University of Alabama before joining the faculty of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies in 1995.  Professor Lievrouw is also affiliated with the Communication Studies Program at UCLA’s College of Letters and Science.  

For more information, please visit: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/members/lievrouw