The Digital Media and Society Fellowship Program enables research stays at the Institute for Communication and Media Studies at the University of Leipzig. It serves to strengthen collaboration with international scholars in the study of networked communication and digital media. The focus is on (1) media cultures, in particular the theory and analysis of media-related forms of practice in their cultural, socio-technical and temporal contexts; (2) digital communication, primarily the study of the production and appropriation of digital networked media technologies and forms of communication; (3) media analysis, especially the reconstruction of media content, its (multimodal, transmedia) modes of representation and discourse formations in a comparison of different forms of communication and media systems.
The Digital Media and Society Fellowship Program is supported by the Chair of Media and Communication Studies and funded by the University of Leipzig.
Fellow 2023: Aljosha Karim Schapals, School of Communication der Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
Dr. Schapals is a Senior Lecturer and Departmental Coordinator of Journalism and Political Communication in the School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia, and a Senior Researcher at the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC).
He is also Book Reviews Editor at Media International Australia and Academic Supervisor at the Queensland Parliament.
He was previously a visiting lecturer in the Department of Journalism at City University of London. He also has experience as a practicing journalist and has worked for the Financial Times and the Federal Agency for Civic Education .
His research interests lie in the changing nature of news production and consumption through the internet, with a particular focus on social media, algorithms and automation in contemporary news production, and political communication more broadly.
Fellow 2023: Christine Lohmeier, Department of Communication Studies, University of Salzburg
Christine Lohmeier is a university professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Salzburg. She is the third visitor in the Digital Media and Society Fellowship program launched in 2022.
In Salzburg, Christine Lohmeier heads the Department of Media Use and Digital Cultures. Her research focuses on the intersections of media, identity, and processes of community. Current research projects focus on digital placemaking, media and memory, Web 3 developments and NFT communities.
Fellow 2022: Eedan Amit-Danhi, Department of Communication and Journalism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Eedan Amit-Danhi is a postdoctoral researcher at the PROFECI, ERC-funded project. Her doctorate, awarded in late 2021, traced the rhetorical functionalities, informational modalities, digital affordances, and political implications of digital political visualizations. With her dissertation-based publications appearing in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society and IJOC. Eedan’s work is informed by her previous work in digital social change, user experience research and political marketing, striving to uncover the political and rhetorical strategies that foreground the visuals and visualizations we so often encounter on social media.
Combining PROFECI’s work on the social, political, and cultural dynamics around collective projections, with her own work on visuals and visualizations, Eedan’s work as Digital Communication and Society Fellow will center around the consolidation of several analytical perspectives into a holistic model for the analysis of predictive visualizations.
Fellow 2022: Anne Kaun, Department of Communication and Media Studies, Södertörn University, Sweden
Anne Kaun is professor in media and communication studies. Her research interests include media theory, mediated temporalities, algorithmic culture, automation and artificial intelligence from a humanistic social science perspective. In earlier projects, she has investigated media practices of protest movements such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, Occupy Stockholm and Occupy Latvia. She is particularly interested in how media technologies changed practices and tactics of the movements over time.
Besides her interest in political mobilization she has been engaging with the notion of media memories and their changing nature in the context of social media such as Facebook. Is the way we remember changing fundamentally since we are doing it online, in connection with others and in public? And what are commercial platforms offering and suppressing when it comes media memories?