IAMCR - International Association for Media and Communication Research

Roger Silverstone who has died at the age of 61 was an outstanding contributor to the field of media and communications studies.  He was deeply committed to understanding the power of the media and its centrality in our lives.

In the 1980s his ideas for research on innovation, culture and new information and communication technologies received the support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council. His was one of six research centres to be funded at Brunel University under a ten year Programme on Information and Communication Technologies. In 1991 he moved to Sussex University as Professor of Media Studies, founding the Graduate Research Centre for Culture and Communication, a new interdisciplinary programme.  After joining the London School of Economics in 1998 as its first Professor of Media and Communications, he built with his colleagues what would become a new Department of Media and Communications. Launched in August 2003 it has grown in three years to embrace a thriving suite of taught and research postgraduate programmes with strong links to the disciplines in the LSE, to institutes in London specialising in journalism and the arts, and to universities in the US and China.

Roger’s political acumen was keenly felt.  Within the LSE it was not a simple matter to give birth to a new department, especially not one that would promote interdisciplinarity.  Roger not only won the resources for it in a highly competitive setting but, under his stewardship, initial resistances melted away. Once initiated, he encouraged many new projects through which he sought to etch the distinctive boundaries of the LSE’s contribution to the field of media and communications.

His enthusiasm for the research projects of the PhD students he supervised, and those whom he mentored through his leadership of PhD programmes, was remarkable. He might offer criticism – constructively demanding explanations of theoretical and empirical arguments - but he was quick to give his support intellectually and often just simply as a human being. He sometimes encouraged research – supervised by his colleagues - in areas where he would modestly claim to know very little – yet he actively acknowledged and welcomed differences in perspective.  With his beginnings in geography and sociology – and possibly as a result of his early direct contact with broadcast production - he welcomed those whose training was professional or disciplinary into the fold – awkwardly sometimes, but always asserting that challenges to disciplinary wisdom should be the foundation of our research excellence.