Visible Cities: International Media Portrayals of Cities in the Global South:
a multidisciplinary panel discussion at LSE, sponsored by Urban@LSE, including speakers from the Guardian and LSE CITIES.

May 16th: LSE New Academic Building - Wolfson Theatre
6:30pm - 9pm

Speakers include (more tba):
Dr Fatima El-Issawi- Visiting fellow at LSE Polis.

Dr. Vandana Desai - Senior lecturer in Geography, Royal Holloway

Dr. Shaku Banaji - Lecturer in Media and Communications, LSE

Dr. Suzanne Hall - Lecturer in Sociology and Research Fellow, LSE Cities

Dr. Susan Parnell - Director of 'CityLab' and urban geographer at the African Centre for Cities; current Leverhulme Visiting Professor at UCL

Dr. Scott Rodgers - Lecturer in Media Theory, Birkbeck

Jamal Osman - Award-winning independent journalist and filmaker focusing on East Africa

*********Pre-registration is full, but there will still be seats available on the evening of the event, first come first served, so if you haven't been able to register through Eventbrite, don't worry -- just arrive a bit early******

For event updates, see the facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/300539470019423/

Also, see coverage of the event and share your 'best' and 'worst' examples of media coverage of cities in the Global South at: http://www.thepolisblog.org/2012/04/best-and-worst-of-media-on-cities-in.html

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Poster by Spencer Wilton

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Teeming slums. Environmental meltdown. Crime and protest. World-class aspirations. Such images proliferate in mainstream media representations of cities across Africa, Asia and Latin America. International media coverage often relies on hackneyed stereotypes, lacks grounded knowledge and local voices, and frames urban issues through a Western lens. Despite the pace of urbanization and the growing importance of cities in the global economy, journalists rarely adopt an explicitly urban frame, instead subsuming coverage under "environment," "health," "crime," or another established section.

What narratives populate international media coverage of cities in the Global South?

What factors frame and constrain reporting?

Which aspects of cities are highlighted, and what is obscured?

Who gets to speak, and who is made invisible?

"Visible Cities: International Media Portrayals of the Cities in the Global South," a multidisciplinary symposium sponsored by Urban@LSE, will tackle these questions. The event will bring together urban geographers, media scholars and practicing journalists and editors, with diverse geographic perspectives, to critically examine the ways in which cities in developing countries are currently portrayed and consider alternatives.

The images that dominate mainstream media define how we think about cities and citizens and the urban futures we imagine. As cities grow and global media organizations become increasingly monopolistic, it is crucial that we critically examine how the media invites us to "see" cities.

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Currently confirmed speakers (more tba):

Dr Fatima El-Issawi-
Fatima El-Issawi is a visiting fellow at POLIS, the journalism and society think tank in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She is leading a research project on ‘Arab revolutions: Media Revolutions’ looking at the transformations in the Arab media industry under transitional political phases within the current uprisings. She has over 15 years experience covering the Middle East for international media outlets, including the BBC World Service, Asharq al Awsat, Agence France Presse, and An Nahar in Lebanon. She also works as an independent journalist, analyst and trainer for journalists in the Arab world.

Dr. Vandana Desai -
Vandana Desai is a senior lecturer in the geography department at Royal Holloway. She conducts cross-disciplinary research on infrastructure and security of tenure in slums; aging, livelihoods and poverty; and gender and development, with a regional focus on South Asia.

Dr. Shakuntala Banaji-
Shaku Banaji is a lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. Her research interests include the meaning, history and textual study of cinema, particularly South Asian media and Hindi films; the socio-political contexts of audiences, representations of gender and ethnicity; tensions between popular and elite media; internet cultures; online civic participation; young people and cultural identities. She is the editor of "South Asian media cultures: audiences, representations, contexts" (2010).

Dr. Suzanne Hall -
Suzanne Hall is an urban ethnographer, and has practised as an architect and urban designer in South Africa. Her research and teaching interests include social and economic forms of inclusion and exclusion, urban multiculture, the imagination and design of the city, and ethnography and visual methods. She is a recipient of the Rome Scholarship in Architecture (1998-1999) and the LSE's Robert McKenzie Prize for outstanding Ph.D. research (2010). She co-edited (with Dinardi and Fernández) Writing Cities (2010, LSE), and her research monograph, City, street and citizen: The measure of the ordinary, is forthcoming.

Dr. Susan Parnell -
Susan Parnell is an urban geographer in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at the University of Cape Town and is the Director of the 'CityLab' at the African Centre for Cities. She is currently the Leverhulme Visiting Professor at UCL. Her research interests include contemporary urban policy research (local government, poverty reduction and urban environmental justice). Sue is also on the boards of several local NGOs concerned with poverty alleviation, sustainability and gender equity in post-apartheid South Africa.

Dr. Scott Rodgers -
Scott Rodgers is a lecturer in Media Theory in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck. His research interests include the idea of a specifically ‘urban’ politics or public culture, and especially its constitution through media and processes of mediatio and the ways in which urban life has been a longstanding focus for, as well as a milieu of, professional and amateur journalism In 2008 he hosted a two day workshop on media practices and the political spaces of cities entitled "Mediapolis".

Jamal Osman -

Jamal Osman is an award-winning independent journalist and filmaker focusing on East Africa, including extensive work in Somalia. He has produced stories for Channel 4 and the Guardian, and is the recipient of the Royal Television Society (RTS) Independent Award 2012, the Amnesty International Gaby Rado Memorial Award 2010, the news story of the year prize at the Foreign Press Association (FPA) Awards 2009. His work for the Guardian on Al-Qaida's aid distribution in Somalia was recently shortlisted for the 2012 Broadcast Digital Awards "Best News of Current Affairs Content".