Critical Political Economy of Communications – A Mid-Term Report: The First Fifty Years and the Future Jonathan Hardy University of Westminster Harrow Campus (tube stop: Northwick Park, Metropolitan Line) Wed, March 26. !4:00-16:00 Room A6.08 Registration at latest until Monday, March 24, per e-mail to christian.fuchs@uti.at Abstract If we take the late 1960s as a starting point an explicitly defined ‘critical political economy of communications’ is fifty years old. How salient today are the core concerns that shaped this tradition? What are the emergent themes in contemporary critical media studies? Jonathan Hardy will discuss his book-length review of critical political economists’ work (Hardy, Jonathan. Critical Political Economy of Media: An Introduction. London: Routledge.), and reflect on what their approaches can offer for contemporary investigations into the problems of the media. Biography Dr Jonathan Hardy is Reader in Media Studies at the University of East London and teaches political economy of media at Goldsmiths College, London. He is the author of Critical Political Economy of Media: An Introduction (Routledge, forthcoming; Cross-Media Promotion (Peter Lang, 2010), Western Media Systems (Routledge, 2008) and writes on media, marketing communications, regulation and policy. He is Secretary of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, a UK media reform group.