Dr. Nick Couldry will be delivering the Dallas Smythe lecture Saturday evening, June 21, at UDC 2025.

Dr. Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory Emeritus and Professional Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. He is also a Faculty Associate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. A prominent and prolific sociologist of media and culture, he has written extensively on both the concentrated structures of media institutions and the symbolic power of their output and their implications on democratic function, public spheres, individual subjectivity, and collective action.

While already renowned for such works as Media, Society, World (2012), The Mediated Construction of Reality (2017) amongst numerous others, in the last decade he has turned to questions around Big Data, AI and data collection practices more broadly and their ethics, politics, and deep social implications. With Dr. Ulises Mejias, the rigorous The Costs of Connection (2019) and its update Data Grab (2024) offer powerful critiques and theorizations of current practices by Big Tech and their implications for social life, governance, democracy and possibilities for activism in what they call an era of ‘data colonialism.’ Most recently, in late 2024, he published The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can’t? (Polity, 2024), the first volume in a trilogy entitled Humanizing the Future, which offers a radical new vision of how to design our digital spaces so that they build, rather than erode, both solidarity and community.

Alongside his rigorous scholarship, Dr. Couldry has sought to craft global conversations around these topics, co-founding the Tierra Comun project (https://www.tierracomun.net/), writing solo and with numerous co-authors in popular press on these pressing topics. We are thrilled to welcome him to our conference and to continue these conversations together.