Robin Elizabeth Mansell, (born 3 January 1952) is a Canadian-British scholar, who is Professor of New Media and Internet and was the Head of the Department of Media and Communications at the
LSE LSE may refer to:
Computing
* LSE (programming language), a computer programming language
* LSE, Latent sector error, a media assessment measure related to the hard disk drive storage technology
* Language-Sensitive Editor, a text editor used ...
. She is an expert on the internet and copyright and has published books on the subject.
Life
Mansell was born on 3 January 1952 in
Vancouver
Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...
, Canada. She gained her first degree in psychology at the
University of Manitoba
The University of Manitoba (U of M, UManitoba, or UM) is a Canadian public research university in the province of Manitoba. She obtained her first masters at the LSE before taking a second and earning her doctorate at
Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a public research university in British Columbia, Canada, with three campuses, all in Greater Vancouver: Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, and Vancouver. The main Burnaby campus on Burnaby Mountain, located from ...
.
In 2007 she was invited to address the
UN General Assembly
The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA or GA; french: link=no, Assemblée générale, AG) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN), serving as the main deliberative, policymaking, and representative organ of the UN. Curr ...
regarding the ability of the internet to break down global barriers. Her speech warned that this was not what she anticipated.
She has been involved in running the LSE serving as the academic Governor from 2005 until 2010 and she became the Head of the Media and Communications Department in 2006 and served until 2009. She was interim Deputy Director in and the Provost from 2015 to 2016.
She joined the International Association for Media and Communication and rose to be its President from 2004 to 2008. After that she continued to be an active member of several of its committees. IAMCR honoured her with a Distinguished Contribution Award at their annual conference in 2017 in recognition of being an "IAMCR catalyst".
Mansell has been involved in the changes required to cope with new media including the changes in the law and international communication. She has noted however that new communication systems "..have not supplanted older means of communication" including free speech in public spaces.
In 2022, she was elected a
Fellow of the British Academy
Fellowship of the British Academy (FBA) is an award granted by the British Academy to leading academics for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. The categories are:
# Fellows – scholars resident in the United Kingdom
# C ...
(FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.
Works include
*''Knowledge Societies: Information Technology for Sustainable Development'' 1998 (Ed.)
*''Mobilizing the Information Society: Strategies for Growth and Opportunity'' 2000
* ''Imagining the Internet: Communication, Innovation and Governance'' 2012
* ''The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society'' 2015