EXECUTIVE BOARD (Governing body)

Herminder is the Director of Criminology and Sociology Programmes in the School of Business and Law at Middlesex University, London. She obtained her doctorate from Loughborough University in digital sociology funded by Loughborough University’s Doctoral College studentship. Her doctoral research has used and developed ethnographic and visual methods to study digital inequalities among young people with physical disabilities in educational and domestic settings.

As a Member of Digital Skills and Inclusion Research Working Group for the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Herminder has worked on a team project to update a national digital engagement toolkit titled ‘What Works’. As a Principal Investigator she has led a funded project by the Higher Education Initiative Fund at Middlesex University, to explore digital access and use among South Asian people in England. In her various roles and areas of research interest, Herminder has been advocating for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and has published in journals such as New Media and Society and Mobilities.

Tetyana researches threats to digital rights, networked authoritarianism, digital resistance, networked citizenship, internet freedom and internet governance in Eastern Europe. She is the author of Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (2021), an in-depth study of protest and digital media in Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity. She has held visiting fellowships at the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre, University of Sydney, Australia and the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum, Germany. She has published in Information, Communication & Society; Social Media + Society; Digital Journalism; Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, among others. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and The Irish Independent, and she regularly contributes expert commentary to Wired, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Bloomberg.

Tetyana previously served as Vice-Chair and Chair of ECREA's Media, Cities and Space Section between 2016 and 2022. She is currently the Vice-Chair of the ECREA Ukraine Task Force. She is also on the Board of Directors for Places of Sanctuary Ireland. She received her PhD from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Detailed CV: online here.

Indrek Ibrus is Professor of media innovation at Tallinn University’s Baltic Film, Media and Arts School (BFM) in Estonia. He is also a member of Tallinn University’s Council, curates BFMs doctoral programme and serves as a member of doctoral councils of Tallinn University (humanities) and Estonian Academy of Arts (arts and design). He regularly advises the Estonian government via various formats, currently mainly as a member of the Ministry of Culture’s Digital Cultural Heritage committee and of the Steering Committee of the Estonian Cultural Development Plan 2021-2030. Previously he has advised the Council of Europe and the European Commission on media and cultural policymaking. In his past career as a civil servant and advisor of audiovisual affairs at the Estonian Ministry of Culture, he represented Estonia in the Council of Europe Steering Committee on Media and Information Society (CDMSI) and the Audiovisual and Media Working Party of the Council of the European Union.

He obtained his PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in media and communications with a thesis exploring the early evolution of the mobile web. His work has always been interdisciplinary, linking cultural semiotics and other approaches to cultural dynamics with innovation economics in order to interpret cultural and media change. His current research interests include media innovation, the evolution of the internet and Public Service Media, media datafication and the public value of media services and data. He has published on mobile media, media innovation/evolution, metadata evolution, transmedia and cross-media production. He is currently a principal investigator in the Estonian government-funded 5-year research project “Public Value of Open Cultural Data” and is a work package lead in the Horizon Europe project CresCine. He has been a co-editor (together with Carlos A. Scolari) of Crossmedia Innovations (Peter Lang, 2012), editor of Emergence of Cross-Innovation Systems (Emerald, 2019) and co-author (with John Hartley and Maarja Ojamaa) of On the Digital Semiosphere (Bloomsbury, 2021). He is also one of the editors of Baltic Screen Media Review and leads the editorial committee of Tallinn University Press book series Bibliotheca Mediorum et Communicationis. In 2024 he was awarded Estonian Goverment award in Social Sciences - the highest national award for research in Estonia.

Beata Klimkiewicz is Jagiellonian University Professor in the area of media and social communication studies, based at the Institute of Journalism, Media and Social Communication, JU, Kraków. She held Jean Monnet Chair for 2019 – 2024 (Media Freedom, Trust and Transparency in the European Union). Recently, she became a member of the Euromedia Research Group (EMRG).

Her research interests include media pluralism and diversity; media policy and regulation in Europe; media systems in Central Europe. Since 2012, has been involved in co-operation with the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom at European University Institute in Florence as a member of Scientific Committee and national expert in Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM). Beata has also provided expertise for the past UNESCO’s report on World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development, EMFA-related Study on media plurality and diversity online and other policy-based studies. She is an author of books “A Polyvalent Media Policy in the Enlarged European Union” published by the Jagiellonian University Press and “Media Freedom and Pluralism: Media Policy Challenges in the Enlarged Europe” published by the CEU Press”. Recently, she is involved as a principal investigator in two international research projects: PANCOPOP (Pandemic Communication in Times of Populism), covering USA, Brasil, Poland and Serbia, and MeDeMAP (Mapping Media for Future Democracies - EU Horizon 2020 project), covering 10 EU countries.

Asko serves as Professor of Visual Studies and is director of the Visual Studies Lab at Tampere University, Finland. His work focuses on the intersection between visual studies and media studies, with a special interest in media anthropology and digital cultures. He is particularly interested in the interrelations between images, bodies and visual technologies, with a special interest in the interrelations between seeing and knowing.

Asko studied cultural anthropology at Philipps-Universität Marburg and image science (Bildwissenschaft) at the Dept. of Art History and Media Theory, Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. He received his PhD (YTT) at the School of Communication, Media and Theatre in Tampere, and was awarded in 2016 the Title of Docent in Visual Studies. Asko has studied and worked in Spain, Germany, the US, UK and Finland, and held several visiting fellowships abroad, including as Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley and at the Sussex Humanities Lab in the UK. He has also served as Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany and as Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the UK.

At ECREA, Asko has chaired the TWG Visual Cultures, as well as the Section Visual Cultures, which he co-founded. Asko has over 50 academic publications and has co-curated two exhibitions based on his research work: #snapshot (2014-15) and Documenting the body: A history of the Finnish Passport (2020). For more information, see: https://visualstudieslab.fi

Dariya received her Ph.D. degree in media and communications from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2013. Her recent research projects explored transformation of media and journalism in Ukraine, journalists’ professional identity in post-Euromaidan Ukraine, journalism in times of war, media use among border populations in Ukraine. Dariya held visiting fellowships at the Center for Media at Risk, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, in 2022-2023 and Stanford University’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies in 2016. Her articles have been published in Journalism Studies, Journalism, Post-Soviet Affairs, among others. Dariya has served as an independent media expert and researcher with NGOs and international organizations and development agencies. She is also currently a Secretary of the ECREA Ukraine Task Force.

Tereza's main research interests are media audiences, media users and the diverse practices of people’s engagement with media. She obtained her PhD from Charles University in Prague in Media studies. Her doctoral project theoretically and empirically explored people’s understanding of authors – the complexity of productive practices behind a text – and how this is brought up and reflected in their understanding and use of media.

Her work primarily focuses on sense-making practices as an inherent part of media consumption, and the mutual dynamics of agency and structure in audiences’ relations to (digital) media, she explores how can we conceptually imagine, and empirically explore people’s agency in relation to data-driven infrastructures, including interested in the audience-centric exploration of media materiality and its environmental impact.

Within ECREA, she served as vice-chair of ECREA’s Young Scholars Network (YECREA) between 2016 and 2018.

Andreas received his Ph.D. degree in Political Communication from the University of Amsterdam in 2009. Between 2016 and 2021 he has been Chair of the ECREA Political Communication section. His research focuses on media effects on political opinions, attitudes and behavior. More in particular, research topics include public opinion dynamics during election campaigns, media effects on political participation, citizen (de-)mobilization and behavioral change, and the role of emotions in political communication. He has been visiting scholar at the University of Technology Sydney and The School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. His work has been published in internatonal peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Communication, Political Communication, Communication Research, European Union Politics, Electoral Studies, Journalism, British Journal of Political Science and International Journal of Press/Politics. In Amsterdam he is program manager of the international Erasmus Mundus MA program in ‘Journalism, Media and Globalisation’ (for more information see: www.mundusjournalism.com).

Her main field of research has to do with the opportunities and risks surrounding internet use, social media usage practices, datafication of childhood, new media audiences, privacy and cybercrime. Her forthcoming monograph “Datafied Childhoods: Data Practices and Imaginaries in Children’s Lives”, co-authored with Giovanna Macheroni, will be published by Peter Lang in autumn 2021. Andra has engaged in various international research projects and networks (e.g. EU Kids Online) and acted as expert consultant on Estonia for projects initiated by the European Parliament, European Commission, European Council and OECD.

Andra is a member of the Estonian Young Academy of Sciences (since 2016), and in 2021 she was nominated to become a member of Film, Media and Visual Studies section of Academia Europaea.

Sergio Splendore (PhD in Sociology) is an Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Department of Social and Political Science of the Università degli Studi di Milano. His fields of expertise are journalism and political communication. Since 2015 he is member of the Worlds of Journalism study (www.worldsofjournalism.org), that assesses the state of journalism throughout the world. Since 2018 he is member of the Nepocs network (The Network of European Political Communication Scholars).

Recently he has been part of different research projects that gained grants among others TASKS (Trust, Authority, Sense and Knowledge), PHARM (Preventing Hate Against Refugees and Migrants) and I-POLHYS (Investigating POLarization in HYbrid media Systems).

He has authored or co-authored several articles published in high rank scientific journal. He has also published 5 Italian books.

She obtained a PhD in Media and Communication Studies in 2022 (VUB) on the transnational flow of audiovisual content online, which established her expertise in media industries studies, and specifically audiovisual production and distribution, streaming video services, and European audiovisual policy. Currently, she is conducting postdoctoral research in the PSM-AP: Public Service Media in the Age of Platforms project (funded by the CHANSE-Horizon Europe, 2022-2025). In 2024, she held a visiting research fellowship at the Audiovisual Diversity research group, at University Carlos III Madrid.

Catalina is also a Guest Professor at the Department of Communication Sciences in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Solvay Business School (VUB), where she teaches a course on European Media Markets, supervises master theses in the MSc. Digital Media in Europe programme, and co-supervises two PhD candidates. In 2024 she was re-elected as vice-chair of the Media Industries and Cultural Production ECREA section, after two years of tenure.

Her research interests have been in media and democracy, media systems, media in post-socialist Europe, and news media audiences. She holds a PhD in Political Science and graduated in Sociology from the University of Zagreb. 

She has published in journals such as Central European Journal of Communication, Contemporary Southeastern Europe, International Journal of Communication, Journalism, etc. She received the Croatian annual science prize for the book Comparing Post-Socialist Media Systems: The Case of Southeast Europe (Routledge, 2021, in co-authorship with Zrinjka Peruško and Antonija Čuvalo). She participated in many comparative research projects and networks in media and communication and organization of several international conferences.

Dina previously served as a vice-chair of the ECREA CEE Network and is currently chair of the same Network. 

Maarit Jaakkola's research focuses on questions of media, cultures and learning, with research interests in cultural journalism and criticism, journalism education, pedagogies of emerging technologies, media, digital and cultural literacies, as well as minority-language media. 

Recently, Jaakkola has authored the monographs "Reviewing Culture Online: Post-Institutional Cultural Critique across Platforms" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and "Pedagogical Opportunities of the Review Genre: Learning in Cultures of Evaluation" (Routledge, 2024), as well as edited the book "Reporting on Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Journalism Educators" (UNESCO, 2023). Jaakkola is the editor-in-chief of NordMedia Network, a digital platform for media researchers funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers and run by Nordicom, and of the leading Finnish journal in cultural studies that was awarded the title of the Scientific Journal of the Year 2024 in Finland. 

At ECREA, Jaakkola is the co-founder of the temporary working group Media Literacies and Communication Competencies (MLCC). Moreover, she is the founder and coordinator of the national Swedish Academic Forum of Media and Information Literacy Research, a member of the planning committee of the Nordic NordMedia Conference with a responsibility for the biennial doctoral pre-conferences, and the Swedish national coordinator of the EU Kids Online network. She is also engaged in international networks such as the UNESCO MIL Alliance and the UNESCO Media & Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue (MILID) University Network, which she co-led in 2021–2023. She has worked as a journalism educator and a journalist, and she is an adjunct professor in journalism at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences (ITC) at Tampere University in Finland.