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Our mission

The Centre for Media Futures is a hub for interdisciplinary research on media, communication, and society. Building on Leicester's trailblazing tradition, we bring rigorous, theory-informed inquiry to bear on the most urgent questions raised by today's media environment, from AI and platform power to journalism, community-led representation, and the climate crisis.

We work in close partnership with academic colleagues, industry, schools, communities, and policymakers, and we consider audiences as active agents rather than passive consumers.

Our legacy

In 1966, Professor James D. Halloran founded the Centre for Mass Communication Research at Leicester: the first Centre of its kind in the UK. From that foundation came the UK's first MA in Media and Communication (1978), foundational research on television's social effects, and influential analyses of news media including Halloran, Elliott and Murdock's Demonstrations and Communication (1970).

Between 1972 and 1987, Leicester served as the international headquarters of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). Under successive directors, the Centre continued to innovate, launching one of the UK's first distance-learning MA programmes and pioneering teaching in globalisation and media.

The Centre for Media Futures is the next chapter of that legacy: forward thinking in its questions, distinctive in its commitment to careful theoretical inquiry, and global in its outlook.

What makes us distinctive

• Sixty years of pedigree. The only Centre in the UK with this depth of history in media research.
• Theory meets practice. In an age of accelerated technological change and never-ending hype around new media, our commitment to deep, theory-informed inquiry rooted in Leicester's intellectual traditions is the antidote.
• Audiences as active agents. We connect Leicester's traditional emphasis on audience studies to today's questions of power, publics, and platform politics.
• Mentorship as a core activity. Cultivating the next generation of critical media scholars is built into the Centre's ethos, not an add-on.
• Working across boundaries. We collaborate with the Institute for Digital Culture and the Institute for Environmental Futures to extend the Centre's interdisciplinary reach.