2025 Jay Blumler Lecture with Guest Speaker Professor Shani Orgad

In search for ambivalence in contemporary media culture

Against the emphasis on order, certainty and control in media culture, Shani Orgad examines the value of ambivalence in public discourse and as a critical sensibility in the classroom and in research.

Across domains of social and cultural life, contemporary media discourse emphasises the production of order, certainty and control. Ambivalence, on the other hand, is cast as a sign of weakness, a deficit of certainty or a failure of definitive thinking.

What is being lost by the investment in certainty, order and control and what might be gained if we withdraw from this investment that exterminates ambivalence? In this talk Shani Orgad examines the value of ambivalence and the opportunities to be derived from looking for and fostering ambivalence in contemporary media culture and public discourse. Orgad also discusses the promise of ambivalence as a critical sensibility in the classroom and in research.

Shani Orgad is a Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).  Her research focuses on media, gender and inequalities, representations of suffering and migration, and the relationship between media discourses and people’s lived experience. She is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and five books, including Confidence Culture (with Rosalind Gill, 2022) and Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality (2019).