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16.02.2015 On March 6, 2015 at 12.20 (room 233) Professor Nico Carpentier (Free University of Brussels, Belgium) will deliver a public talk «How to research participatory processes?»š

About the public talk

Participation is a frequently used notion, which has many different meanings. In the first part of the talk, a stronger theoretical foundation for our reflections about participation will be developed, based on an analysis of how the concept of participation is used in different academic fields. This will allow articulating the concept of participation as a contingent political-ideological notion, intimately related to power. In this theoretical approach, the dimension of minimalism and maximalism, and the differences with access and interaction will be used to support a more rigorous theoretical elaboration of participation. This theoretical elaboration on (and more restrictive definition of) participation also has methodological consequences, which will be developed in the second part of the lecture. Illustrated by small case studies, this discussion will result in a step-wise analytical model which can serve as a toolkit for the analysis of participatory practices in a wide variety of societal fields.š

About the lecturerš

Nico Carpentier is Associate Professor at the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB - Free University of Brussels) and Docent at Charles University in Prague. He is a Research Fellow at Loughborough University and the Cyprus University of Technology. He is also an executive board member of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and he was vice-president of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) from 2008 to 2012.

His theoretical focus is on discourse theory, his research interests are situated in the relationship between media, journalism, politics and culture, especially towards social domains as war & conflict, ideology, participation and democracy. This has been translated into the following five topical areas of research: 1/Media, participation and democracy; 2/Media, death and war; 3/Journalism and identity; 4/Audience and reception; 5/Discourse theory.

His publications include the following books Media and citizens on the same wavelength. Journalism enhancing civil participation (2002, in Dutch & French, co-authored with Grevisse Benoît and Harzimont Michaël); Media in movement, 22 journalistic experiments to enhance citizen participation (2004, in Dutch & French, co-authored with Grevisse Beno?t); The ungraspable audience (eds.)(2004, combined Dutch & English); Towards a Sustainable Information Society. Deconstructing WSIS (eds.) (2005); Researching media, democracy and participation (eds.) (2006); Reclaiming the media: communication rights and democratic media roles (eds.) (2007); Culture, Trauma & Conflict. Cultural studies perspectives on contemporary war (ed.) (2007); Alternatives on media content journalism, and regulation. The grassroots discussion panels at the 2007 ICA Conference (eds.) (2007); Understanding Alternative media (co-authored with Olga Bailey and Bart Cammaerts) (2007); Media technologies and democracy in an enlarged Europe (eds.) (2007); Participation and media production. Critical reflections on content creation (eds.) (2008); Discourse Theory and Cultural Analysis. Media, Arts and Literature (eds.) (2008); Democracy, journalism and technology (eds.) (2008), Communicative approaches to politics and ethics in Europe (eds.) (2009), Trans-reality television. The transgression of reality, genre, politics and audience (eds.) (2010), Media and Participation. A Site of Ideological-Democratic Struggle (2011), Audience Transformations (ed.) (2014), Social engagement, civil society and online media (in Dutch and French) (2014), Media Practice and Everyday Agency in Europe (eds.)(2014) and The Social Construction of Death (eds.) (2014). A new publication, expected to be ready in 2014, is the second (revised) edition of Culture, Trauma & Conflict. Cultural studies perspectives on contemporary war (ed.).š