Dr Marco Scalvini

Biography

Marco Scalvini is a Senior Lecturer at London College of Communication (LCC), University of the Arts London. His work asks who gets to be visible in moments of crisis and who controls that visibility. He studies how corporations and platforms shape the way we see distant suffering, whether through brand campaigns that claim political positions or AI-generated imagery in humanitarian appeals.

Marco is the author of Brand Activism: Advertising and the Ethics of Visibility (Routledge, 2024) and the forthcoming Consumer Activism: Legibility, Resistance and Justice (Routledge, 2026), which examines how consumers in the Global South contest corporate power through practices of resistance and refusal. His research has been published in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Media, Culture & Society, Social Media + Society, and The BMJ, among others.

Before entering academia, Marco worked in the advertising and communications industry and as a consultant for Netflix, the NHS, Saatchi & Saatchi, UNESCO in Bethlehem (Palestine), the United Nations in Kosovo, and the G8/G20 Summits during the 2008 global financial crisis. He has held academic posts at Birkbeck (University of London), Erasmus University Rotterdam, the London School of Economics, and New York University.