Call for Candidates - S&WG Head elections 2021

Mediated Communication, Public Opinion, and Society Section

The Mediated Communication, Public Opinion, and Society Section (MPS) will be holding online elections for one Chair and two Vice-chair positions, for the term 2021 - 2025.

The elections will be held online from 16 June until 14 September using the SurveyMonkey platform. Individual members and representatives of institutional members who are also registered as members of the MPS Section are eligible to stand for a position and to vote.

Interested candidates must send their name, institutional position, a statement of no more than 500 words and a photograph to elections [at] iamcr.org with a copy to the MPS section’s current officers, Corinna Lüthje (corinna.luethje [at] uni-rostock.de) and Susanne Eichner (seichner [at] cc.au.dk), no later than 16 May.

All candidates must be current members of IAMCR, and of the MPS section. To verify if you are a member of the MPS section, log in to your IAMCR account and select “My Sections and Working Groups” from the menu.

You can find the election rules at: https://iamcr.org/governance/swg-rules

Read about the Mediated Communication, Public Opinion, and Society Section

Candidates

Chair

  • Susanne Eichner (Aarhus University Denmark)

Vice-chair

  • Franziska Thiele (University of Rostock, Germany)
  • Ruchi Tewari (MICA, India)

Statements

EichnerSusanne Eichner (Aarhus University Denmark)

I’m a media and communication studies scholar and I have been vice-chair of the section Mediated Communication, Public Opinion, and Society since 2016. I have been a member (initially individual, later institutional) of IAMCR since ca. 15 and have regularly visited the section as presenter and later joined as a member. During my work at the section I have, together with the present section chair Corinna Lütjhe, established a global network of researchers who have found an academic home at the section. The section work during Corona times has been difficult and I feel highly motivated to continue the work for the section in a post-COVID era, which has, among the negative aspects, also taught us a new way to collaborate and network across the globe. This is a great chance that I see coming out of the otherwise tragic circumstances. Networking and participation are also the focus of what I would like to focus on during the next years. With regards to this, I would like to use this new period to pave the way for a more divers section head –starting with a better representation of researchers from different geographical areas. I wish and hope that this election will enable us to form a section team that represents more voices from more research communities and geographical regions, thus enabling better participation in the academic community of the IAMCR. 

Short Bio:
Susanne Eichner (Dr. phil.) is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, department of Media Studies and Journalism. She employs a cross-media approach focusing on questions of agency and reception, audience research, media sociology, production ecology and popular (serial) culture. She is co-director of the Centre for Transnational Media Research and co-director of the research program Cultural Transformations. Since 2016 she is vice-chair of the section "Mediated Communication, Public Opinion and Society" at IAMCR and vice-chair of the section Television Studies at ECREA. Her publications include: Agency and Media Reception (monography, Springer, 2014), Transnationale Serienkultur (co-editor, Springer, 2013) and Fernsehen: Europäische Perspektiven (co-editor, UVK, 2014).

Vice-chair

ThieleFranziska Thiele (University of Rostock, Germany)

My name is Franziska Thiele. I am a postdoc at the Institute for Media Research at the University of Rostock, where I have been employed since 2015. I wrote my PhD on communication strategies to accumulate power in communication science, which I completed in 2020. My work focuses on the mediatization of science communication, power relations in society and gender issues, while often taking a sociological perspective. My research interests concern mediatization studies, societal changes, power relations, communication theories and digital methods. 

I have been a member of the IAMCR and the Mediated Communication, Public Opinion and Society section since 2016. Since the beginning of my academic career, I have been a presenter in panels of this group. I have furthermore functioned as a reviewer as well as a panel chair for many years now and regularly visited the section meetings at the IAMCR conferences. 

As I am a great supporter of this group and find it very important to give back to the research community, I want to be even more involved by becoming part of the head of the Mediated Communication, Public Opinion and Society group. I think it is important that the great work done by this group fostering research emphasizing socio-psychological and cognitive-psychological processes in media production and consumption as well as in mediated communication is being carried on. I find it furthermore very important to support young scholars, who want to become part of the academic society, as they are less familiar with the scholarly life and rules of the field. Therefore, this would be one aspect I would like to focus on, if being elected and hereby stand for election as a new member of the head of the Mediated Communication, Public Opinion and Society section.

Ruchi TewariRuchi Tewari (MICA, India)

An enthusiastic research scholar, Ruchi, has been engaged in academic activities since 1997 and in true gusto, 2010 onwards. With a Masters and an M.Phil in English literature, sensitivity to public opinion and factors affecting the debate around it have always been areas of interest for her. As a part of her doctoral work, Ruchi explored the theme of social responsibility and technology in India, and has hence analysed the role of mediated communication and its impact on society. She has over 30 publications in various peer-reviewed national and international journals and has been invited to present her papers on reputed platforms. She has been invited by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK, to participate in a day long round-table on Social Media and the current world. She's a regular member of the IAMCR, Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC) and Business and Society. She’s the secretary of the Association of Development Communication (ADC), an India based organization which has had a long association with IAMCR.

Her commitment to academic research is rooted in her zest for analysing the impact of 'identity' and 'identification' on human relationships and business decision making. Being a part of the diverse milieu in India and analysing the cause and effect of public opinion, Ruchi passionately believes in the role of 'dialogue' in 'trust-building and positive 'opinion-making’ which is even more essential in a mediated communication climate. As a constituent of the section on mediated communication, public opinion and society and an educator first and foremost, Ruchi feels the need for hosting short workshops, round-tables and masterclasses for young scholars and graduate students across various regions. To gather what lies at the core of social issues it is important to align academic activities with real-world issues and partnering with firms and the third-sector can bring about the necessary change. Media-consumption and production continue to be disparate activities both in terms of cause and effect on individual and society. The loop that binds these two needs to be better dissected and therefore involvement of both a positivist and interpretative view is essential. Publication of scholarly work and simplification and dissemination of these publications in common media are the two-fold focus which can help push the agenda of the section.

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