Dr Alistair Duff
Former Visiting Fellow
Dr Alistair Duff
Former Visiting Fellow
Alistair Duff is an academic visitor in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh. From March to September 2021, he was a visiting professor in the Communication Networks and Social Change research group at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), Open University of Catalonia. He is emeritus professor of information policy at Edinburgh Napier University and also acts as an external examinar at Aberystwyth University.
From Nottingham, he read philosophy at the Universities of London and Glasgow. He was a research officer for an NGO before engaging in part-time research and tutoring in political theory. He then completed a master’s degree in information studies at the University of Strathclyde and worked professionally in academic libraries. He subsequently became a lecturer at ENU, teaching on journalism, publishing, communication, and information and social science programmes.
Duff is the author of Information Society Studies (Routledge, 2000) and A Normative Theory of the Information Society (Routledge, 2012), and of approximately sixty articles in journals, edited books and encyclopaedias. He is also editor of the interdisciplinary Research Handbook on Information Policy (Elgar, 2021). He has presented his research many times in Japan and the United States, as well as a dozen European countries.
During his visiting fellowship at the Oxford Internet Institute, funded by the Art and Humanities Research Council, he researched information policy and the societal distribution of information and news.
As a freelance journalist, he has presented community radio series, as well as contributing to a range of national media outlets, such as Newsnight, Scotland Tonight, Reporting Scotland, Good Morning Scotland, The Independent, Ethical Census News, AllMediaScotland and the Sunday Express. He has spoken in debates on various platforms, including the Oxford Union.