Non-Resident CMDS Fellows
Susan Abbott is the director of Cross-Pollinate Consulting. She has more than 15 years working in the media development and digital rights sector, providing consulting services in the areas of fundraising and development, monitoring and evaluation, project management, and capacity building. As a consultant, she has worked with Albany Associates, the Center for International Media Assistance at the National Endowment for Democracy, Fondation Hirondelle, IMS, Internews, IREX, Media Legal Defense Initiative, IWPR, and WAN-IFRA. She is non-resident fellow at CMDS and an adviser for the Communication for Development Network. Prior to becoming an independent consultant Abbott worked at Internews in Washington, DC, and the Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Abbott received her BA from The American University in Washington, DC, and MA from Central European University, and is currently working on her PhD related to measuring the impact of media development programs in transitioning societies at the Communication and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster in London.
Joan Barata is an international expert in freedom of expression, media freedom and media regulation. He provides regular assistance to different international organizations and entities, including the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Broadcasting Union, the Organization of American States, UNESCO and USAID among others. He has been the Principal Adviser to the Representative on Freedom of the Media at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Dr. Barata is an affiliate to the Center for Global Communication Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Human Rights at European University Viadrina. Previously, he has been a professor of communication law and vice dean of international relations at Blanquerna Communication School. He has also been a Professor at the University of Barcelona, the Open University of Catalonia and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, as well as visiting scholar at the University of Bologna and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His areas of expertise include topics such as freedom of expression, media regulation, public service broadcasting and political and legal media transitions. He has provided assistance to several institutions and organizations regarding these issues in countries such as Thailand, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Jordan, Albania, Hungary, Liberia, Egypt, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Ecuador and the United States. He also has a strong regulatory experience as head of president’s cabinet (2005-2009) and secretary general of the Catalonia Audiovisual Council (2009-2011) and member of the Permanent Secretariat of the Mediterranean Network of Regulatory Authorities (2006-2011).
Benedetta Brevini is a journalist, media reformer and Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Sydney. Before joining the academy she worked as journalist in Milan, New York and London for CNBC and RAI. She writes on The Guardian’s Comment is Free and contributes to a number of print and web publications including South China Morning Post, OpenDemocracy and the Conversation. Since 2010 she has been involved in a number of Public Inquiries into media diversity, public interest journalism and pluralism in the UK and Australia and has consulted, inter alia, for the Open Society Foundations Media Program, Access Info Europe and Getup. A political economist doing comparative research on media systems, she is the author of Public Service Broadcasting online (2013) and editor of Beyond Wikileaks (2013). Her latest volumes are Carbon Capitalism and Communication: Confronting Climate Crisis (2017), Climate Change and the Media (2018), Amazon: Understanding a Global Communication Giant (2020) and Is AI good for the planet (2021). She is currently completing new volumes on Newscorp and Media Concentration in Australia
Binod Bhattarai is a media development and communication consultant. He wrote, edited and produced content for newspapers, radio and television from the mid-1980s till 2009. He has reported for different media in Nepal, and also wrote from Nepal for the Financial Times (UK), and did political and economic analysis for the Economist group. He has trained and taught journalists on conflict sensitive reporting, peace journalism and investigative journalism, among others. He has Master’s Degrees in Business Management (Nepal) and Journalism and Mass Communication (Wisconsin-Madison), and is now a PhD candidate at Tribhuwan University, Nepal. He has taught journalism courses in Nepal and China, and since 2009 he has served as an adjunct faculty at the Ace Institute of Management where he teaches graduate level courses in managerial communications and business writing.
Haris bin Aziz is a journalism trainer working with the Women Media Center Pakistan for gender equality in media since 2012. He is also a Senior Producer at Geo News, Pakistan’s biggest news TV channel and has worked with several news organizations since 2004. He was a Knight-Salzburg Fellow in 2009, FES Af-Pak Journalism Fellow in 2012 and Dora Plus Visiting Doctoral Scholar in 2018. He is pursuing his PhD at the Area Study Centre for Europe, University of Karachi, he was also accepted as Visiting Research Student by King’s College London. Haris has taught International Relations to the graduate students at the University of Karachi and conducted research at the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs and Social Policy and Development Center Karachi. His current project of study at the Center for Media, Data and Society is “Freedom of Expression Debates in Europe and the Muslim World after 9/11.”
Emma L Briant is a scholar in political communication who researches contemporary propaganda and information warfare, its governance in an age of mass-surveillance and its implications for democracy, security, inequality and human rights. She has a PhD from the University of Glasgow and is currently an associate at the Centre for Financial Reporting and Accountability at the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School, and an adjunct professor at the American University. Previously, she served as a Research Associate at Bard College, Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Essex, and Lecturer in Journalism Studies at University of Sheffield, among other positions. Dr Briant is owner of Maven of Persuasion LLC a consultancy that advises and trains on disinformation threats and ethics in influence. She has published extensively on propaganda and influence operations and her most recent book is ‘Propaganda and Counter-terrorism: Strategies for Global Change’. She has two forthcoming books including the Routledge Handbook on the Influence Industry (with Vian Bakir) and ‘Propaganda Machine: Inside Cambridge Analytica and the ‘Bad Influence’ Industry’. Aiming to have a policy impact, she advises and briefs policy-makers and governments in the UK and in the US on security, defense and information operations and on platforms, ‘fake news’ and digital influence operations. She has given evidence to various official investigations on both sides of the Atlantic including evidence that was central in revealing the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018.
Silvia Chocarro Marcesse is a consultant on freedom of expression and media development issues for international organizations and NGOs. She is currently global advocacy strategist for IFEX, providing strategic advice to the international network of more than 100 NGOs defending free speech worldwide. She also worked for the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), editing a toolkit on international standards on freedom of expression and access to information. Silvia is also a journalist. From 2013 to 2017 she was the US Correspondent for Radio France Internationale (RFI) – Spanish Service –where she covered the latest US elections. She recently moved to Paris where she will continue to report for RFI on media freedom issues. From 2009 to 2013, she worked at UNESCO managing projects related to the promotion of freedom of expression and free, independent and pluralistic media. While at UNESCO, she participated in the development of the UN Plan of Action on The Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity and its implementation strategy.
Benjamin De Cleen is associate professor at the Department of Communication Studies of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he coordinates the English-language master on 'Journalism and Media in Europe'. He has also taught at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His research is situated within discourse studies and focuses on political rhetoric and on the intersections between media and politics. He has analyzed populist radical right rhetoric, and has worked on the discursive conceptualization of populism, conservatism, and nationalism. A list of publications can be found here: https://vub.academia.edu/BenjaminDeCleen
Jovana Davidović is a teaching assistant and a doctoral student at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Montenegro. She obtained an MA degree at the Department of Political Science at Central European University, where she investigated the relationship between authoritarian submission and party preferences in Montenegro. Jovana received CEU’s academic excellence award, and the best MA thesis award. She was a coordinator of the international project Executive Approval Database (2017-2018) for Central and Eastern Europe, and a president of the Montenegrin Association of Political Science Students (2015-2016). Jovana was associated with several public and private Montenegrin media. As an awardee of the Montenegrin Ministry of Science, Jovana currently investigates patriarchal attitudes and media representation of gender roles, with a specific focus on sex-selective abortion in Montenegro. Her research interests include psychology of communication, media, political psychology, political communication, psychological and political anthropology.
Dr Lina Dencik is Reader at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University, UK and is Co-Founder of the Data Justice Lab. She has published widely on digital media, resistance and the politics of data and is currently Principal Investigator of the DATAJUSTICE project funded by an ERC Starting Grant. Her publications include Media and Global Civil Society (Palgrave, 2012), Worker Resistance and Media (Peter Lang, 2015), Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015) and Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society (Polity, 2018).
Amer Džihana is director for Media Policy and Research at Internews in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was a visiting research fellow at CMDS (2009-2010) and worked for Mediacentar Sarajevo (2005-2010). Amer is the co-editor of Media Law in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Internews, 2012), with Mehmed Halilovic, and Media and National Ideologies: Analysis of reporting on war crime trials in the former Yugoslavia (Mediacentar Sarajevo, 2011), with Zala Volcic. Since 2012, Amer has been a regular lecturer at media law and policy workshops at law and journalism faculties in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Francesca Fanucci is an Italian and British lawyer specialised in freedom of expression and comparative media law. She is a member of Internews' Internet Freedom Expert Register and has consulted, inter alia, for the American Bar Association, ARTICLE 19, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, the Open Society Foundations Justice Initiative and Media Program, the International Press Institute, Access Info Europe and International Media Support and is regularly invited by the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford, UK, as a senior judge at the annual International Rounds of the Monroe E. Price Media Law Moot Court Competition. She currently serves as Senior Legal Advisor at the European Center For Not-For-Profit Law (ECNL), where she mostly works on projects at the UN, Council of Europe and EU level aimed at developing standards and regulatory frameworks addressing the impact of new technologies and artificial intelligence on civic freedoms. Francesca also represents the Council of Europe (CoE) Conference of International NGOs as a member participant in the CoE Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CAHAI), which is tasked with preparing potential elements for a legal framework for the development, design and application of artificial intelligence based on the CoE’s standards on human rights, democracy and the rule of law.
Peter Gross, Ph.D., is professor emeritus and former Director of the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism and Electronic Media (2006-2016). He now teaches a class in qualitative research methodologies as an adjunct at his alma mater, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, The University of Iowa. A columnist for Transitions Online, a Czech-based journal on East and Central European politics, economics, society, culture and media, in 2019 he was named co-editor of the Journal of Romanian Studies. His research focus is East and Central Europe society, media and journalism and among his books, textbooks and book collections are, Entangled Evolutions. Media and Democratization in Eastern Europe (2002) and, with Karol Jakubowicz (eds.), Media Transformations in the Post-Communist World: Eastern Europe’s Tortured Path to Change (2013). His scholarly articles appeared in U.S. and European academic journals; his journalistic writing was published in general circulation and professional publications on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1996, he was a research fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C. He frequently lectured at the U.S. Department of State's National Foreign Affairs Training Center and served as consultant to the International Media Fund, The Freedom Forum, and other governmental and non-governmental organizations. He serves/ed on the editorial boards of 15 American, British, Hungarian, Romanian and Spanish academic journals, Ratings Review Advisor for the Freedom House's Freedom of the Press Index (USA), and Grant Proposal Reviewer for the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright Awards Program (Romania).
Eszter Hargittai is professor in the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich where she heads the Media Use and Society division continuing to direct the "Web Use Project". She is also fellow of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Hargittai's research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media with a particular interest in how differences in people's Web-use skills influence what they do online. Her work has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association and the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. In 2010, the International Communication Association selected her to receive its Outstanding Young Scholar Award. Hargittai is editor of Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have" (University of Michigan Press 2009), which presents a rare behind-the-scenes look at doing empirical social science research and co-editor (with Christian Sandvig) of Digital Research Confidential (The MIT Press, 2015), which presents more behind-the-scenes experiences of social scientific research in the digital age. She writes an academic career advice column at Inside Higher Ed called Ph.Do.
Arne Hintz is a lecturer and director of the MA Digital Media and Society at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC). His research connects communication policy, media activism, citizen media, globalization, and technological change. He currently leads the collaborative research project "Digital Citizenship and Surveillance Society". He is chair of the Community Communication Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). He has practical experience in journalism, public relations, and media activism. As a citizen media expert and communication rights advocate, he has been involved with advocacy organizations such as the Community Media Forum Europe (CMFE), the Open Rights Group (ORG), and policy fora such as the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Arne was Program Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS, formerly CMCS) from 2007 to 2009.
Philip N. Howard is a professor at Oxford University and the University of Washington and a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. From 2013-2015 he worked as director of the Center for Media, Data and Society and as professor of the School of Public Policy at Central European University. At the Oxford Internet Institute he is managing a 5-year policy project on computational propaganda funded by the European Research Council that focuses on how algorithms are used to manipulate public opinion. He investigates the impact of digital media on political life around the world, and he is a frequent commentator on global media and political affairs. Howard’s research has demonstrated the ways digital media is used in social control and political activism in countries around the world.
Ellen Hume is a Boston-based journalist, teacher and civil society activist who works on the front lines of democracy around the world. Before moving to Budapest (2009-2016) where she mentored journalists and founded a project on Roma integration, she was research director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT (2008-9), and creator of the New England Ethnic Newswire (2007-2009). Hume’s analysis of why independent journalism hasn’t done well in post-Communist countries “Caught in the Middle: Central and Eastern European Journalism at a Crossroads” was published in 2011 by the Center for International Media Assistance. Her earlier report “Media Missionaries” was the first comprehensive study of U.S. efforts to train foreign journalists, published in 2004 by the Knight Foundation. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the advisory aboard of the Center for International Media Assistance, the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University, and DIREKT36, a Hungarian investigative reporting group.
Kristina Irion is assistant professor at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam and Postdoctoral Researcher to the project Personalised Communication. Previously, she was associate professor at the School of Public Policy of Central European University and she was a core faculty member at CMDS. Kristina obtained her Dr. iuris degree from Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), and holds a Masters degree in Information Technology and Telecommunications Law from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow (UK). She was a part time Legal Officer at the Data Protection Authority in Berlin and worked as Senior Regulatory Counsel for a German mobile network operator. Kristina also gained working experience as a trainee at the European Commission in Brussels and she was a visiting fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington. Her research covers EU law, regulation and public policy in the fields of electronic communications, online media, content and services as well as privacy and data protection. As a Marie Curie Fellow she accomplished her individual research project on Governing Digital Information which explores how cloud computing transforms the (legal) relationship between individuals and their personal records. She is intrigued by the combined effects of individuals' online activities and commercial surveillance on society and global information governance.
Tarik Jusic is lecturer and guarantor of the study program at the School of Communication and Media, University of New York in Prague, Czech Republic. He is a co-founder and research fellow at the Center for Social Research Analitika, an independent think tank based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary. From 2009 until 2013, he worked as Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Sarajevo School of Science and Technology. From 2009 until 2012, he was a guest lecturer at the European Regional Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Democracy in South East Europe (ERMA) of the Center for Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies at the University of Sarajevo. He has also worked as researcher, executive director and program director at Mediacentar Sarajevo from 2002 until 2011. Tarik holds a Ph.D. from the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, University of Vienna, Austria; an MBA degree and an MA degree in political science, both from the Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary; and a BA degree in journalism from the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. His interests are in the areas of media and democratization, international media assistance, and strategic communication. His most recent publication is an edited volume, Media Constrained by Context: International Assistance and the Transition to Democratic Media in the Western Balkans, prepared together with Kristina Irion, published by Central European University Press in 2018.
Victor Khroul is a professor from the Russian National Research University higher School of Economics. He has been a full professor at the Russian National Research University Higher School of Economics. Previously, he was an associate professor at the Journalism Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he was also chair of Sociology of Mass Communication. He was also a Visiting Professor at CEU in 2011. During his academic career, he has been the principal investigator of 11 local and international research projects in the field of religion and media. He is also the author of 15 books and founding editor of Lomonosov Moscow State University’s Media and Religion book series. His personal profile is available here (in Russian).
Markos Kounalakis is a print and network broadcast journalist and author who covered wars and revolutions, both civil and technological. His latest book is Spin Wars & Spy Games: Global Media and Intelligence Gathering (Hoover Institution Press, 2018) and has written three other books, Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton (1993), Beyond Spin: The Power of Strategic Corporate Journalism (co-author, 1999), and Hope is a Tattered Flag: Voices of Reason and Change for the Post-Bush Era (2008). He is President and Publisher Emeritus of the Washington Monthly and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a guest foreign policy columnist for the Miami Herald and McClatchy-Tribune News. He served as Chairman of Internews Network and for two terms on the Board of Visitors at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He remains active on the Board of Councilors at the University of Southern California’s (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism; and the Board of Advisors at USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy. His website is markoskounalakis.com
Becky Lentz is an associate professor of Communication in the Department of Art History/Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal. She specializes in media policy studies from a civil society perspective. Her research explores the types of expertise that public interest policy advocates need to acquire, mobilize, and teach others in order to build the capacity to effectively influence national and international decision-making concerning information and communication technologies (ICTs) and media infrastructures. Her work is deeply influenced by her experiences before coming to McGill serving as the first program officer for media and technology policy at the Ford Foundation in New York City between 2001-2007. There she designed and directed a multi-million dollar domestic and international grantmaking initiative advancing freedom of expression and social justice through community organizing, legal advocacy, collaborative scholar/activist research, and philanthropic investment in the media policy field. Professor Lentz has also contributed to several edited collections that include the Oxford Handbook of Civil Society; the Blackwell Handbook of Global Media and Communication Policy; the Sage Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media; Inequity in the Technopolis: Race, Class, Gender, and the Digital Divide in Austin; Communications Research in Action: Scholar-Activist Collaborations for a Democratic Public Sphere; and the forthcoming book, Strategies for Media Reform: International Perspectives.
Timothy Libert is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. His research focuses on privacy-compromising information flows on the web, and he is the author of the open-source software platform webXray. He is currently researching the underlying technical mechanisms of online behavioral advertising in the journalism industry. He completed his doctorate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. He was previously a research fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin, resident fellow at CMDS and the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. Dr. Libert received his B.A. degree from New York University. His work has received international press coverage and he has been interviewed by National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Good Morning America, and other outlets. In addition to numerous academic talks he has spoken at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) and the c-base hackerspace in Berlin. He has provided expert testimony on issues of online privacy for class-action cases. His publications may be downloaded at his personal website.
Davor Marko currently works as Western Balkans program manager for the Thomson Foundation. He is an experienced communication and media development expert, with experience in managing international projects aiming to support media outlets in their efforts to become more sustainable. He has expertise in public media, strategic communication, social media and audience trends, community building, online fundraising and innovative business models, and an extended experience in the region of South East Europe, especially in the Western Balkans region. Prior to this post, he worked as Media System Lead for IREX in Serbia, as well as with other donors and development organizations such as UNDP, Open Society, OSCE mission, etc. He has a strong academic background, holds a PhD in domain of communication and culture from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and has been profiled as one of the leading solution-oriented researchers in the SEE region. He was awarded for demonstration of extraordinary research and analytical potentials, by Open Society Fund, UNESCO, OSCE and ZEIT Foundation Hamburg. He is the author of many local and regional media landscape assessments, research papers and publications. In his book entitled Zar na Zapadu postoji drugi Bog? (Does another God exist in the West?), he analyzes dominant stereotypes and prejudices on the Islam in the media of the Western Balkans. He is also co-editor of State or Nation? Challenges for Political Transition of Bosnia and Herzegovina (2011).
John Masuku is the executive director of Radio Voice of the People (VOP) in Zimbabwe. He started his broadcasting career at the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) in 1974 as a radio announcer/producer, rising through the ranks to become general manager of radio services, responsible for four national radio stations.He left ZBC in 2002 to join Radio VOP, an independent alternative radio station focussing on free expression, human rights and lobbying for the licensing of independent radio stations. A holder of a BSc Honours in Politics and Administration from the University of Zimbabwe and an MPhil in Journalism from Stellenbosch University in South Africa, John trained in radio broadcasting and broadcast management at BBC, London, UK and Deutsche Welle, Cologne, Germany. He intends to document his broadcasting experience through academic writing while pursuing research and commentary on broadcasting policy, management, training and media for development projects. John has extensively profiled radio stations and programming trends in Zimbabwe, Southern African countries and Jordan for the Radio World International magazine. While at ZBC he won the Union of Radio and Television Organisations in Africa (URTNA) Nelson Mandela Prize for his radio documentary, Beira Corridor-Zimbabwe's Eastern Trade Passage, a joint Prix Futura award for the drama "Changes" dealing with challenges faced by professional women in Africa. He led Radio VOP to win the BBC sponsored international One World Media prize for promoting human rights in a politically volatile environment. In 2013 he was awarded the Press Freedom prize for his work of promoting free expression and ethical journalism while working in a polarised, repressive media situation. John has trained many journalists and even established a journalism school in his native Zimbabwe.He attended CEU summer courses on Media Capture, 2017 and Funding Journalism this year at the Center for Media Data and Society, Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.
Stefania Milan is associate professor of new media and digital culture. Her research explores the interplay between digital technology and participation, and activism and social movements in particular, cyberspace governance, and data epistemologies. She is the Principal Investigator of the DATACTIVE project, funded through a Starting Grant of the European Research Council (Stg-2014-639379). Stefania holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences of the European University Institute, and a Master in Communication Sciences from the University of Padova, Italy. Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam, she worked at the Citizen Lab (University of Toronto), Tilburg University, Central European University, and the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, and the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies (European University Institute). Stefania is also associate professor (II) of Media Innovation at the University of Oslo, and a research associate at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (Tilburg University), the Internet Policy Observatory of Annenberg School of Communication (University of Pennsylvania), and the Center for Center for Media, Data and Society (Central European University). Stefania is the author of Social Movements and Their Technologies: Wiring Social Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; released in paperback in March 2016), and co-author of Media/Society (Sage, 2011). Her work has appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, including Information, Communication & Society, the International Journal of Communication, Internet & Policy, the Internet Policy Review, Social Media + Society.
Jozef Michal Mintal is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Political Science and International Relations at UMB. He is also a Co-founder of the UMB Data&Society Lab, where he is the IBM CARWST Research Fellow and Co-Director of the Lab. In addition, Jozef is also a fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society at CEU. Jozef’s research focuses on social media platforms, and the interaction of new technologies with society. He is particularly interested in the topics of net state actors, the platform structure of social media, and digital platform regulation. Prior to academia he worked at senior positions in various NGOs in the field of foreign and security policy. Jozef tweets from @jozefmmintal
Muhammad A. Z. Mughal is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Saudi Arabia. Previously, he taught Development Anthropology at Riga Stradins University, Latvia and has worked on socioeconomic development at the World Bank and Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the Durham University, UK. His research interests include the cultural perceptions of time and space, critique on development, globalization, Pakistan, digital humanities, and innovative social research methods. He is currently working on a project that deals with the issues related to new media and the changing expressions of national identity.
Gina Neff is a media and communication scholar whose work centers on the social and organizational impact of new communication technologies. She previously worked as a core faculty of CMDS and as associate professor at the School of Public Policy of Central European University. Trained as an organizational sociologist, her research is at the intersection of concerns about work, technologies, communication and organizing. Her book Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries (MIT 2012) won the Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Communication and Information Technologies. With Carrie Sturts Dossick at the University of Washington, she runs the Project on Communication Technology and Organizational Practices, a research group studying the roles of communication technology in the innovation of complex building design and construction. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and she is currently at work on a three-year research project funded by Intel studying the impact of social media and consumer health technologies on the organization of primary health care. She also co-edited Surviving the New Economy (Paradigm 2007). Neff holds a PhD in sociology from Columbia University, where she remains an external faculty affiliate of the Center on Organizational Innovation. She has held appointments at Princeton University, New York University, Stanford University, UC San Diego and UC Los Angles.
Pooran Chandra Pandey has a background in international Politics. He is currently an international visiting fellow, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan. Previously, he held senior leadership executive roles in Asia, Africa and Europe with United Nations, Nippon Denro and Times of India, country’s largest media house, including a 3-year-stint as a Chief Executive Officer of DOC Research Institute, in Berlin. He is a visiting professor at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town, South Africa, a professor of practice in sustainable development and management at Nalanda University in India, and a non-resident fellow, Nkafu Policy Institute, Cameroon, among others. He is also a member of the board of trustees of the World Food Programme Trust for India and a Resident Representative of US-based international climate action and policy think tank- Climate Scorecard. Pooran is a fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue, UNISA, Pretoria, South Africa, and an associate of the Global TechnoPolitics Forum in California. His wide-ranging research interests include, among other things, media-state relations, business ethics, the private sector, democratization and human rights, development cooperation, sustainable development and climate change. He has also chaired and co-haired government committees, and served as a member of human rights committee, UNHRC, Geneva. Having received scholarships and distinctions in UK, China, Sweden, Japan and Taiwan, Pooran is a widely published author, and an expert at drafting of policies, special reports, policy briefs, impact research studies and policy evaluation techniques. He is also a Chevening Scholar.
Sejal Parmar is Lecturer at the School of Law and a fellow at the Centre on Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield. Until May 2020, she was Assistant Professor at the Department of Legal Studies and Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy at the Central European University, as well as Core Faculty Member at CMDS. Her main field of research, policy engagement and teaching is international and European human rights law, with a particular focus on freedom of expression and media freedom. She previously worked as Senior Adviser to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Representative on Freedom of the Media (on secondment from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and Senior Legal Officer at ARTICLE 19. Alongside her academic activities, Parmar regularly acts as a consultant and legal expert for intergovernmental organizations and NGOs on issues related to her research. She currently serves as consultant to the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect and as an independent member of the Council of Europe Committee on Combating Hate Speech.
Vibodh Parthasarathi maintains a multidisciplinary interest in media policy, creative industries and policy literacy his most recent work being the edited double-volume The Indian Media Economy (Oxford University Press 2017). He has been at the forefront of media policy research in India and his work has found support from the Ford Foundation, Canada’s IDRC, Social Science Research Council, HIVOS, India New Zealand Education Council, University Grants Commission, and Indian Council of Social Science Research. Currently on extraordinary leave from Jamia Millia Islamia, his recent visiting positions include the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities at the University of Queensland, the Metaforum Institute at KU Leuven, and the Swedish South Asian Studies Network at Lund University. His ongoing research explores media regulation in the longue durée, digital transformation in media infrastructures, risks to media diversity, and emergence of the platform economy. His international collaborations involve academics, policy advocates, and journalists variously in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, and Sweden. He has been invited to the Boards of the Centre for Internet & Society, the India Open Data Association, and The Media Foundation. He serves in editorial advisory roles with MIT Press and Oxford University Press, and at the public intellectual platform ‘The Conversation’.
Gill Phillips is a media law specialist. She currently works in-house as the Director of Editorial Legal Services for Guardian News & Media Limited (publishers of the Guardian and Observer newspapers and theguardian.com). She advises on a range of content-related matters including defamation, privacy, contempt of court and reporting restrictions. She was a member of the Ministry of Justice’s Working Group on Libel Reform. She was involved in the Trafigura super injunction case and was a member of the Master of the Rolls Injunction Committee. She has advised Guardian News & Media on phone-hacking, Wikileaks, the Leveson Inquiry, the NSA leaks from Edward Snowden, the HSBC files, the Panama and Paradise Papers and, most recently, the Pegasus Project.
Sam Phiri is a former journalist with the Times of Zambia and now lectures in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Zambia (UNZA) where he teaches Communication Theory; Critical Media Analysis; Introductory courses in Media and Communication Studies, and Strategic Communication Management. He is also attached to the joint Doctoral programme of the UNZA Institute of Distance Education and the Zimbabwe Open University (ZIOU). He is a former Permanent Secretary in Zambia’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Services, and previously headed the training department of the Nordic-SADC Journalism Centre in Maputo, Mozambique; and the Media Programme of the Johannesburg-based Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA). He has a unique mixture of journalism practice, management, academic teaching and media development expertise. His research interests are in Media Development, Digital Rights, Gender, and their nexus with Political Communication. He holds PhD from the University of South Africa (UNISA), MA from Leicester in Britain and BA from the UNZA, all in the Communication Sciences.
Giulia Priora is an Assistant Professor in Private Law at the NOVA School of Law in Lisbon, where she teaches intellectual property law, ethics and regulation of emerging technologies, legal research methods, and EU digital policies. Her research focuses primarily on EU and comparative copyright law, judicial reasoning over digital technologies, and distributive justice theories in the digital economy. She is a permanent contributor at the Kluwer Copyright Blog and an affiliated researcher at the CEU Center for Media Data and Society. Prior to joining NOVA School of Law, she served as Postdoctoral Researcher at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies Pisa, as Visiting Lecturer at the universities of Münster, Padova, and Bocconi, as Global Teaching Fellow at Yangon University Department of Law, and as Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School, Hamburg University, and CIPPM Bournemouth University. She holds an S.J.D. in International Business Law summa cum laude (CEU), an LL.M. in Comparative Law, Economics and Finance (IUC Turin), and a double master’s degree in Italian and German Law (University of Turin/University of Münster). A list of her publications is available at SSRN and ResearchGate. Twitter: @giuliapriora.
Courtney C. Radsch, PhD, is a journalist, scholar and practitioner whose work focuses on the intersection of technology, media, and human rights. Currently, she is a fellow at UCLA’s Technology, Law and Policy Institute; a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS); and a 2022 visiting scholar at Annenberg’s Center for Media at Risk. Her research focuses on internet governance and the geopolitics of technology, media sustainability and the future of journalism, and power dynamics in digitally inflected information ecosystems. She is the author of f Cyberactivism and Citizen Journalism in Egypt: Digital Dissidence and Political Change (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016) based on her pioneering doctoral research and her work has been published in top media outlets and peer-reviewed journals. She is a frequent public speaker and media commentator including for CNN, Al Jazeera, NPR, and other global media outlets. Dr. Radsch has led advocacy missions to more than a dozen countries and has provided expert testimony to Congress, the OSCE, OECD, and the United Nations. Dr. Radsch's research and work are informed by a commitment to human rights and ensuring the sustainability of independent media. She specializes in transforming research and ideas into action while building cross-functional organizational strategies and alliances to advance policy objectives and knowledge. She spent seven years as Director of Advocacy and Communications at the Committee to Protect Journalists and previously worked at UNESCO and as a journalist in the Middle East. Dr. Radsch holds a Ph.D. in international relations from American University, a M.S. from Georgetown University and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr Roxana Radu is a Research Associate at the University of Oxford’s Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy, working on Internet regulation, algorithms and knowledge production in the public sphere. Until May 2018, she was Programme Manager at the Geneva Internet Platform, a dialogue and capacity building center for Internet governance and digital policy and was chairing the non-for-profit Internet Society-Switzerland. Roxana holds a PhD in International Relations/Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Switzerland). Her interdisciplinary research and publications focus on international governance and global Internet policy-making.
Andrey Rikhter (Andrei Richter) is Senior Adviser at the OSCE Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media. Richter holds university degrees in law, journalism and foreign languages, a doctorate in Russia and a professorship in media studies from Slovakia. He has authored more than 200 publications on media law and policy in Russian, English, Armenian, Azeri, Bosnian, Croat, German, French, Serbian, Slovak, Tajik and Ukrainian, including the only standard media law textbook for journalism students in the Russian Federation (2002, 2009, 2016), a textbook on international standards of media regulation (2011), a textbook on online media law (2014), and a book on censorship and freedom of the media in post-Soviet countries, published by UNESCO (2007). Dr Richter sits on the editorial boards of a number of international journals on communications and the media. Andrei Richter was a long-time professor at the School of Journalism, Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he chaired a department in media law and history. He also served as a commissioner at the International Commission of Jurists and the Chair of the Law Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research.
Sandra Ristovska is an Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. She sees her research and filmmaking as interrelated endeavors through which she explores how visual media facilitate processes of knowledge acquisition and social change. In particular, her work examines issues around global media activism, human rights, visual epistemologies and media ethnography, and it has been featured in Javnost – The Public, Journal of Human Rights, Media, Culture & Society, Journal of the Oxford Center for Socio-Legal Studies and The Communication Review. She is also a co-editor of a forthcoming Palgrave volume Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice, and is working on a book titled, Seeing Human Rights: Video Activism as a Proxy Profession. Ristovska is the recipient of the NCA’s Outstanding Dissertation of 2016 in Visual Communication Award, IAMCR’s 2013 Herbert Schiller Prize and ICA’s 2013 Top Paper Award by the Philosophy, Theory and Critique Division. Prior to joining CMCI, she was the George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and she has held visiting fellow appointments with the Information Society Project at the Yale Law School — where she served as an advisor to the Visual Law Project — the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University and the Center for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University.
Marta Rodríguez-Castro (Santiago de Compostela, Spain) holds a degree on Audiovisual Communication from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC, Spain) and a Master’s Degree on Research applied to media from the University Carlos III de Madrid (Spain). She is currently a PhD student on Contemporary communication and information at USC, where she is part of the research group “New Media” and she collaborates with the research project “Governance, funding, accountability, innovation, quality and public service indicators of European Public Service Media applicable to Spain within the digital context”. Her main research line is the critical and comparative analysis of public value tests across Europe, although she has also approached issues regarding public media funding, production, proximity media, pluralism and identity.
David Ruzicka is the Founding Editor of Datalyrics, a small Prague-based investigative boutique. The focus of his work has been on countering common misconceptions, describing causalities and possible solutions in the domain of divisive topics like migration and democratic governance for semi-professional audiences. Having a background in economics and comparative political science, he pursues an EMBA program at CEU. Prior to joining CMDS with the aim to help reach a shared understanding of standards of internal plurality among professionals in Central Europe, he has done research on migration portrayal in newscasting. He is also a co-founder of the Czech & Slovak Club of the European Forum Alpbach.
Lidija Sabados is a media development consultant and researcher. She is currently the executive director of Syria Direct, an independent media organisation based in Amman, Jordan. She has over ten years of experience in media development and freedom of expression, having worked for various non-governmental organisations and intergovernmental agencies, including International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX), UNRWA, and the UNESCO Office in Amman, where she worked on a three-year project funded by the European Commission to help Jordan's efforts in advancing the media to further increase its independence, freedom, and professionalism. She has also worked as a writer, editor and communications consultant. Lidija holds a Bachelor's degree in International Relations and Modern Languages from the University of Ottawa, and a Master's degree in Global Public Policy from the University of Toronto.
Julia Sonnevend is assistant professor of sociology and communications at the New School for Social Research in New York. She has held fellowships at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, and the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology in New Haven. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of media studies, the sociology of culture, and international relations, and focuses on the “re-enchantment” of society, on the magical moments, qualities, technologies and artifacts of contemporary social life worldwide. Sonnevend’s work aims to show that we are far less rational in our political, social and mediated lives than we imagine ourselves to be. In her first book, Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event (Oxford University Press, 2016) she writes about how particular news events become lasting global myths, while others fade into oblivion. Focusing on journalists covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and on subsequent retellings of the event (from Legoland reenactments to the installation of segments of the Berlin Wall in shopping malls), Sonnevend discusses how storytellers build up certain events so that people remember them for long periods of time. She also shows that the powerful myth of the fall of the Berlin Wall still shapes our debates about separation walls and fences, borders and refugees, most recently in the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe.
Primavera Téllez Girón García has dedicated much of her professional life to support the development of public policies, as well as promoting the reform of the laws that regulate the right to information; media, broadcasting, telecommunications and internet in Mexico, to achieve a more democratic society. Her work is firmly rooted in reaching social justice and the respect of human rights (right to information, freedom of expression, privacy) empowering civil society through advocacy and raising investigations with a trans-disciplinary perspective, and for this she has been involved professionally with congressmen, grassroots groups, non-profits and civil society organizations, politicians, journalists, lawyers, academics and researchers. Her research, with a trans-disciplinary point of view, is focused on analyzing the capture of media systems and industries in Latin America and untangling the knots of the difficult relations between media (broadcasting and newspaper companies; public media; telecoms and technology manufacturers; internet providers; community media) and power (politicians, regulation, governments, businessman, industries, organized crime) and how it impacts society and communities.
Tobias Thomas is Director General of Statistics Austria, adjunct Professor of Economics at the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and Fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) of the Central European University (CEU). Internationally, Thomas represents Austria in the European Statistical System Committee (ESSC), the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), the United Nations Conference of European Statisticians (UNCES), and the OECD Committee on Statistics and Statistical Policy (CSSP). In 2021, he was also elected by the ESS member states to the Partnership Group (ESS-PG), which provides strategic advice to the work of the ESSC. Thomas is Vice President of the Austrian Statistical Society (ÖSG), Vice Chair of the Austrian Productivity Council, scientific expert at the Austrian Pension Commission, and member of the High-Level Group on the Strategic Development of the German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis). In addition, Thomas is member of the Science Advisory Board of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH), and member of the Committee on Economic Systems and Institutional Economics of the Verein für Socialpolitik. After studying economics at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn and Technische Universität Berlin, Thomas earned his doctorate summa cum laude from the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, where he later also completed his habilitation. Thomas was visiting scholar at, among others, Columbia University in New York (USA) at the invitation of Nobel Laureate in Economics Joseph E. Stiglitz and Anya Schiffrin as well as at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance in Munich at the invitation of Kai A. Konrad. In his research at the interface between economics and psychology, Thomas analyses decision-making processes and behavior in economic and political contexts. His research interests include public finance, reforms, and media impact. Other areas of focus include data science, data governance of complex data ecosystems, as well as building and improving research data infrastructure facilities. Thomas regularly presents his research findings at scientific conferences and in scientific journals. Furthermore, Thomas appears regularly in national and international media. In the economist ranking of the most influential economists of Die Presse, F.A.Z. and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Thomas ranked 5th in Austria in 2019 (2018: 6th). Since 2020, he has no longer been listed in accordance with the ranking's regulations due to his position as Director General of Statistics Austria.
Rian Wanstreet is a PhD Candidate at the University of Washington studying the growth of 'Precision Agriculture' in the United States and beyond. Using a multi-modal qualitative and critical methodological toolset, she conducts artefactual and ethnographic research on the discursive and material ecologies emerging around datafication and automation in Ag. She pays special attention to the security and environmental ramifications of implementation and adoption. In 2019/2020, Wanstreet is both a University of Washington Presidential Fellow and a Mozilla Open Science Fellow. With Mozilla, she will be working with global stakeholders to explore ethical and sustainable best practice models of Big Data use in agriculture. Of particular concern is ensuring that power inequities are not reproduced and reinforced within new algorithmic sociotechnical systems. Prior to matriculation at UW, Rian worked at the international digital rights NGO Access Now, where she launched a multi-million dollar small grants program and ran the human rights / technology conference 'RightsCon'. She was an European Commision Erasmus Mundus Scholar, and has an MA in Public Policy from the University of York and an MA in Public Administration from Central European University, where she continues to maintain a non-residential Fellowship at the Center for Media, Data, and Society. She also served in the Peace Corps/Moldova as a Community Development Volunteer.