European Communication Research
and Education Association

ECREA EUROPEAN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION DOCTORAL SUMMER SCHOOL

Main Objectives

The main objective of the Summer School is to provide a strong and supportive learning environment for PhD students, fostering respectful but critical dialogue between students and senior academics. The Summer School aims to provide innovative mutual support for doctoral studies in the field of media and communication and to connect students to activities of European Communication Research and Education Association and its Sections, Temporary Working Goroups and Networks.

The Summer School provides a supportive international setting where doctoral students can present their ongoing work, receive feedback on their PhD-projects and establish valuable academic contacts for the future.

The ECREA European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School is a student-centered summer school. In contrast to many other summer schools, the lecturers’ main task is not to lecture but to provide support to the participants in their PhD trajectories.

The main emphasis of the European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School is on providing structural and individuated PhD-support for young European scholars combined with numerous opportunities for informal dialogues with lecturers and peers.

The main learning format of the Summer School are the student feedback workshops where students present their PhD projects and receive structured, high quality and multivoiced feedback on their work from summer school lecturers and students. The feedback consists of a series of extensively elaborated analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of the individual PhD projects, which allow PhD students to structurally improve the quality of their academic work.

The Summer School combines a constructive-supportive approach with a critical perspective. The atmosphere of the Summer School is fundamentally noncompetitive, as the talents of all participants are acknowledged, and participants and lecturers act as peers, cherishing academic collegiality and collaborative work.

The Summer School also expresses the utmost respect for academic diversity in terms of a plurality of schools, approaches, theories, paradigms, methods, and cultures in academia.

BRIEF HISTORY

The European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School started in 1992 as a project to promote European dimension of communication studies education and research programmes. Initially, the consortium, initiated by University of Stendal (Grenoble, France) and Westminster (UK), included ten (Western) European universities.

During the two decadces of continuous operation, the consortium of universities expanded to the present-day partnership of 20 European universities (University of Bremen DE, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) HU, University of Roskilde DK, University of Tampere FI, Lund University SE, Charles University CZ, University of Ankara TR, University of Tartu EE, Vrije Universiteit Brussel BE, University of Stirling UK, University of Bergen NO, Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) LT, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano IT, University of Helsinki FI, University Stendhal, Grenoble 3 FR, London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) UK, University of Westminster UK, Autonomous University of Barcelona ES, University of Ljubljana, SI, and Loughborough University, UK). Throughout this time, ECREA was an affiliated partner of the Summer School.

In 2018 the European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School was taken over by ECREA.