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Culture and Communication Research Centre

The Culture and Communication Research Centre (CULCORC) is a research unit affiliated to the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague. CULCORC was established in 2022, as part of the Institute’s CEMES research structure.

The objectives of CULCORC are to engage in and facilitate research on culture and communication, with an emphasis on the multitude of meaning-generating processes, enabled by communicational exchanges, the power dynamics that characterise them and the conflicts that surround them, the intersections with the material worlds of technologies and infrastructures, and with embodied practices and non-human realities.

CULCORC members work in a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional way, acknowledging the importance of academic fields, disciplines and other academic structures, but simultaneously searching for ways to overcome their limitations, and establish interactions and networks beyond the field of Communication and Media Studies, beyond the Social Sciences and beyond Academia.

CULCORC is deeply committed to its remit of knowledge production but is equally aware and respectful of the many existing trajectories and assemblages to collaborate in the production of always-situated knowledge. This renders CULCORC members mindful of the existing diversities in Academia and beyond, and the need to support groups that are in less powerful positions, including early-stage scholars and scholars from the global South.

PROJECTS

MeDeMAP

ICSJ is one of the partners of the EU-funded MeDeMAP.

This project studies the extent to which certain media perform democratic functions for audiences as well as the conditions under which this takes place. Specifically, the project will draw from large-scale quantitative analyses, in-depth qualitative approaches and participatory action research. It will explore the entire range of news media, regardless of distribution channel, and consider the media’s potential to promote and support political participation. The findings will be used to create a multi-layer map of European political information environments, highlighting good practice examples.

EUMEPLAT

ICSJ is one of the partners of the Eumeplat Research Programme.

This project studies how media platforms or TV series on streaming services contribute to the ideas that we have about Europe and to what it means to be European. We are looking at anti-European fake news, the representations of immigration and gender in European media, and the struggle between US-based platforms and European policies. The project points out that the European dimension has never been obvious in the media landscape. This manifests itself at various levels in the so-called creative industry. The film industry counts more on national productions or cultural imports from the most influential countries, while American companies own commercial web platforms.

MISTRA-EC@ICSJ

ICSJ is one of the partners of the MISTRA Environmental Communication Research Programme.

At ICSJ, we do research on the communication of environmental and sustainability issues in Swedish arts and media. We are particularly interested in the discursive struggles between the different environmental and sustainability discourses that circulate in Swedish arts and media. In addition, we work on developing strategies to open up existing discursive patterns and constellations for a constructive engagement with new or marginalised perspectives. Moreover, we focus on how materiality intersects with these discourses on the environment, looking at how the material is entangled with the discursive, and how the material can play a primary role in dislocating particular discourses, but also in how the material invites for particular discourses to be assembled with it.