Pollyanna Ruiz is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. She is interested in the media’s role in the construction of social and political change. Her research focuses on the ways in which protest movements bridge the gap between their own familiar but marginal spaces, and a mainstream which is suspicious at best and downright hostile at worst. Her work in this area has been presented internationally and published widely. She is a founding member of the AHRC-funded Afterlife of Protest network, the ESRC-funded Publics; Then, Now and Beyond network, and the University of Sussex MFM Women’s Reading Group. See relevant links on the left-hand side panel of this profile for more information about this projects.

Her first book Articulating Dissent; Protest and the Public Sphere examines the ways in which protest groups are represented in the mainstream and explores the way in which contemporary protesters stemming from very different traditions maintain solidarity across difference. The book was based on an ethnographic study of coalition movements, in depth interviews with activists/journalist and analysis of media platforms such as Indymedia and Sukey. The book has been reviewed in numerous international peer reviewed journals such as The European Journal of Communication, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics and Society and Space, where it was described as ‘unusual and ambitious’, ‘admirable and refreshing’ and ‘thoughtful and convincing’.

Her collaborative project ‘You Can’t Move History. You Can Secure the Future’: Engaging Youth in Cultural Heritage examines different generations of activists’ involvement in the campaign to save the Undercroft from re-development. This project produced a number of publications and two short documentary films, one of which won the AHRC’s award Best Film in Research award. Both films have been screened extensively across the UK and the project has featured in various public exhibitions. It will become a feature of the Museum of London’s permanent exhibition on Young People in city spaces. See the links on the left side panel for more information.

Her current work takes some of the dynamics explored in both Articulating Dissent and You Can’t Move History, and extends them over time by asking how communications technologies maintain memory across generations of activists/activisms. She is writing a monograph called Remembering and Forgetting; Media, Memory, Activism which is underpinned by 20 in-depth interviews with activists, a protest-specific directive with the Mass Observation Archive and responses to an online questionnaire. This work will focus in particular on the role played by ‘ordinary’ protesters and their understanding of protest as a cultural, rather than political, practice. This research underpinning this work was funded by the Leverhulme Foundation.

Pollyanna has a BA from the University of Liverpool in English Literature and Language and an MA in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex where she also completed her doctoral thesis. She has been teaching in Higher Education Institutions since 2002 and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.