ZeMKI Research Report 2019

Editorial

The year 2019 was the first year that ZeMKI was recognized as a Central Research Unit (ZWE) of the University of Bremen. This makes us one of eight outstanding cross-departmental research units with a focus on a specific topic, which is of central strategic importance for the University of Bremen.
We hope that this report will make it clear which developmental steps ZeMKI has taken in recent years: We are not only active in interdisciplinary research across the faculties. The projects, publications and conferences presented here show that we are also making an internationally relevant contribution to one of the most important questions in communication and media research: How are our societies and cultures being impacted by the increasing spread of digital media?

ZeMKI addresses this question from different (disciplinary) perspectives. We are engaged not only in basic research. Our aim is to ensure that, where it makes sense, this research is also geared towards transfer. In this context, we should not only think of the various public events such as the ZeMKI media talks. It is also important to conduct applied research that makes the results of basic research available to society.

We are proud to welcome another new professor at ZeMKI this year: Coming from the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans Bredow Institute, Cornelius 
Puschmann has accepted the call to the professorship of Communication and Media Science with the focus on Digital Communication and has established the Lab “Digital Communication and Information Diversity”. We are very pleased to welcome him here and thus to be able to further profile the area of Digital Methods in Context.

Once again we had many guests. Our Fellowship Programme has become an established institution internationally and enables ZeMKI to adopt a multifaceted approach to the day-to-day operation of research. A great enrichment was the stay of Jan Fuhse, who in 2019 represented the Chair of Communication and Media Studies with a focus on media society as interim professor. His research and teaching, anchored in sociology, was stimulating for our joint work. We had many more international guests through the Data Power conference, the BRESTOLON network, our research seminar and the various workshops we realized. This report gives a small insight into such activities.

Our work has also received a big boost through two further developments: On the one hand the increasing number of highly innovative dissertation and habilitation projects, of which we can unfortunately only present a selection. On the other hand, the further anchoring of research-based teaching and learning in our study programmes, which is why we have made it a focus of this report.

We hope you enjoy reading this report!

The ZeMKI Research Report 2019 is available here.