Dr James Morrison

Associate Prof. in Journalism

Communications, Media and Culture Stirling

Dr James Morrison

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About me

I am Associate Professor in Journalism Studies at the University of Stirling. I spent over a decade as a staff reporter for regional and national news organisations including the Press Association and the Independent on Sunday, and went on to work as a freelance writer for numerous titles ranging from the Guardian, Telegraph Magazine and the Times Educational Supplement to History Today, the Ecologist and Museums Journal.

My research interests focus on the interplay between media and political representations of marginalised groups, their lived experiences and public attitudes towards them. In addition to publishing in a number of peer-reviewed journals, my books include Familiar Strangers, Juvenile Panic and the British Press (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Scroungers: Moral Panics and Media Myths (Zed Books, 2019) and The Left Behind: Reimagining Britain's Socially Excluded (Pluto Press, 2022). Scroungers was praised in The Guardian for making 'many salient and persuasive arguments, most notably regarding the abstract fetishisation of work and the grim reality of work in neoliberal Britain', while Chas Critcher (co-author with the late Stuart Hall of Policing the Crisis) described it as 'a highly original contribution to the sociology of hate' - drawing on 'a forensic analysis of ideological ploys by right-wing politicians, wilfully distorted narratives in traditional media and vitriolic outpourings on social media'. Reviewing The Left Behind, Lancaster University's Tracey Jensen described it as 'a sophisticated interrogation of how the 'left behind' are mythologised, problematised and weaponised by those whose insights rarely stretch beyond regional condescension and recycled tropes'.

I am currently UK Co-investigator on the joint AHRC/German Research Foundation (DFG) project 'Voices from the Periphery: (De-)Constructing and Contesting Public Narratives about Post-Industrial Marginalization (VOICES)'. I am also working on a new monograph for Intellect Books, provisionally titled Inactive: Stigma, Unpaid Labour and the Myth of Worklessness.

In addition to my research activities, I am also a member of the Public Affairs Board of the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) and the author of a set textbook for journalism students and trainees: Essential Public Affairs for Journalists (OUP), now in its eighth edition.

My research interests focus on the interplay between media, political and pop cultural representations of marginalised groups, their lived experiences and public attitudes towards them. I am particularly interested in the ways in which disadvantaged minorities - from working-aged benefit recipients to economic migrants and refugees - are problematised through narratives of othering, stigmatisation and moral panic. My interests also include the ways in which real-time data-driven market intelligence and the evolving dynamics between news audiences, produsers, journalists and sources is transforming the newsgathering practices, cultures, ideologies and identities of news professionals. Much of my empirical work adopts an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach combining analysis of media, political and/or social media discourse with individual interviews, focus groups, authored testimonies/journals and other forms of participatory research.

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