About
Gianfranco Polizzi is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool, where he works on multiple projects relating to issues of digital inclusion and digital literacy. Some of these projects have been funded by bodies such as the Nuffield Foundation, British Academy, and Ofcom.
Gianfranco has a PhD (fully funded by ESRC) from the London School of Economics and has held positions at the University of East Anglia and at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include media and digital literacy, media education, digital inequalities, digital resilience, digital citizenship, civic engagement and democracy.
Gianfranco recently co-led the evaluation of the second iteration of NewsWise – a school programme delivered by the Guardian Foundation to improve primary school children’s levels of news and digital literacy in the UK. Another project that he has been working on is the Minimum Digital Living Standard, while he has also been co-leading Round 'Ere – a participatory research project (funded by Liverpool City Region Combined Authority) focusing on issues of wellbeing, participatory data governance and data literacy.
Gianfranco’s research has been published in academic journals including, but not limited to, New Media & Society, Computers & Education, Education and Information Technologies, Ethics and Information Technology, and Journal of Human Trafficking. Gianfranco is a member of Ofcom’s Making Sense of Media Evaluation working group. As part of this, he advises Ofcom on digital literacy provision and interventions.