Advisory board

Afonso de Albuquerque is a Full Professor at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Fluminense Federal University. He leads the Media and Democracy Laboratory (Lamide). He served as the president of the Brazilian Communication Graduate Studies Association (Compós), from 2005 to 2007 and the Brazilian Political Communication Association (Compolítica). His research interests include political communication, journalism studies, and comparative media studies. In particular, he has discussed the asymmetries existing in the international scholarship in Communication Studies, which benefit western Anglophone views to the detriment of others. His present research focuses on political polarization and the crisis of institutional politics in Brazil. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the PANCOPOP Project.

András Bozóki is Professor of Political Science at the Central European University and research affiliate at the CEU Democracy Institute. His research interest include political ideas, political change, Central European politics, and the role of intellectuals. His articles appeared in leading international academic journals. His books include Post-Communist Transition (1992, 2016), Democratic Legitimacy in Post-Communist Societies (1994), Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (1999), The Roundtable Talks of 1989 (2002), Political Pluralism in Hungary (2003), Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (2006), Virtual Republic (2012) and others. He was recurrent visiting professor at Columbia University, he taught at Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and the universities of Nottingham, Bologna and Ljubljana. He was a research fellow at UCLA, IWM in Vienna, EUI in Florence, Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, Sussex European Institute in Brighton, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar. In 2009 he received the István Bibó Prize from the Hungarian Political Science Association. His new book Rolling Transition and the Role of Intellectuals is published by the Central European University Press in 2022.

Antoinette Fage-Butler holds a PhD in Knowledge Communication from Aarhus University, Denmark, where she is an Associate Professor. Her research interests include trust and mistrust related to scientific expertise, the communication of trustworthiness and risk, and cultural aspects of health communication. Methodologically, her research spans qualitative approaches to critically investigating discourses, narratives and genres, and, more recently, quantitative approaches that scale up cultural analyses using large data sets. Her research includes qualitative analyses of national and international institutional public health communication about the pandemic. She is currently Principal Investigator of the (Mis)trust of Scientific Expertise group at Aarhus University, funded by Aarhus University Research Foundation, which explores public trust in science from a cultural perspective. She has been awarded a Carlsberg Foundation Scholarship to write a research monograph in 2022 on risk and responsibility relating to the pandemic and climate change. She is also co-editing a book on knowledge communication that will be published by Routledge. She is Co-Investigator on the part of the SHAPE project at Aarhus University whose aim is to deepen our knowledge of how citizenship is affected and transformed by digitalisation and datafication and especially how vulnerable citizens are affected. She is an expert at the UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab.

Elizabeth Stokoe is Professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University, UK and Professor II at the University of Southeastern Norway. She conducts conversation analytic research to understand how talk works – from first dates to medical communication and from sales encounters to hostage negotiation. She has worked as an industry fellow at Typeform and at Deployed. In addition to academic publishing, she is passionate about science communication, and has given talks at TED, New Scientist, Google, Microsoft, and The Royal Institution, and performed at Latitude and Cheltenham Science Festivals. Her book, Talk: The Science of Conversation, was published by Little, Brown (in 2018) and she has a co-authored book on Crisis Talk coming out later this year. Her research and biography were featured on BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific. During the Covid-19 pandemic she has participated in the Policing and Security sub-group of SAGE SPI-B and is a member of Independent SAGE behaviour group. She is a Wired Innovation Fellow and in 2021 was awarded Honorary Fellowship of the British Psychological Society.

Jacques Mick is Professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil, teaching graduate programmes in Journalism, Sociology, and Political Science. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism, a master’s and PhD in Political Sociology, and postdoctoral degree from the University of Lisbon. Visiting professor at the Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) in Grenoble. Mick coordinates the Journalistic Role Performance – Brazil and flexMediaLives research. Deputy director of the Center for Philosophy and Human Sciences at UFSC (2020-2024).

Roseli Figaro is Professor at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. Coordinator of the Center for Research in Communication and Work. President of the National Association of Graduate Programs in Communication (Compós). Visiting professor at Celsa – Sorbonne Université and Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, ITESO, Mexico. Editorial director of the Communication & Education Journal. Head of the Postgraduate Program in Communication Sciences at USP (2017-2021). Director of international relations of the Brazilian Society of Researchers in Communication (Intercom, 2017-2020).

Silvio Waisbord is Director and Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. He is the author or editor of eighteen books, as well as articles on journalism, politics, communication studies, media policy, and global social change. His most recent books are El Imperio de la Utopia (Peninsula) and the co-edited The Routledge Companion to Media, Disinformation and Populism (Routledge). He is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communication and the International Journal of Press/Politics. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association. Waisbord received a Licenciatura in Sociology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and a Ph.D in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego.  

Mari Velsand is Director General at the Norwegian Media Authority, a position she has held since 2017. Since 2019 she has also been Vice-Chairperson of EPRA, a network of European media regulators.

Before entering the Norwegian Media Authority, she came from the media business, where she for more than 20 years held different management positions. She has been a part of the top management team at NRK (the Norwegian public broadcasting company), Chief Editor of the national newspaper Nationen and Executive Vice President at Amedia, one of the largest media companies in Norway. Mari has studied journalism and has a master of management from the Norwegian School of Management, BI. She has also over the years held a number of board positions within the Norwegian media industry, and she has been Norway’s representative in the board of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN IFRA).

Sasha Scott is Head of Transformation Services at the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the world’s leading alliance of Public Service Media (PSM) with 112 member organizations in 56 countries. The EBU provides content services, advocacy and legal support, research, and training to strengthen and uphold the values of public service media. Sasha leads the Digital Transformation Initiative, a consultancy service for strategy development in response to changing operational pressures and digital disruption. In this context Sasha has ongoing projects with the national broadcasters in a large number of countries including Bulgaria, Georgia, Lithuania, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, and Switzerland. Previous to joining the EBU in 2017, Sasha was an Associate Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. His research interests cover the digital disruption of media industries, media management and transformation, political communications, and mediated cultural memory. Sasha holds a Ph.D. in Media and Communications from the University of London. His most recent publication is a study of social media rituals in fearful times.

Maja Sever started her professional career as an intern and a war reporter for the Croatian public broadcaster. After her graduation, she became a political reporter and, later, an editor of Hrvatska uživo (daily magazine), where she focused on social problems. For over twenty years, she has been fighting for professional and independent public service in Croatia. She became President of the Trade Union of Croatian Journalists in 2019, where she actively participated in EFJ activities particularly focusing on journalists’ worker rights. She has also continuously advocated for the improvement of local media in Southeast Europe, which included the fight for the journalistic profession as well as efforts to provide accurate and reliable information and democracy to every citizen. She was elected President of the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) on 14 June 2022 during the EFJ General Meeting. Throughout her career, Maja has received a number of awards and recognitions. In 2018, Maja was elected “Journalist of the Year” by the Professional Journalists’ Association. She was also a winner of the Pride of Croatia award for humanitarian work in 2020 and was awarded the Fierce Women prize for her significant contribution to gender equality and social justice in Croatia.

Dr Fernando Oliveira Paulino is Professor in postgraduate and undergraduate courses at University of Brasília (UnB) and visiting Professor at TU Dortmund (2020-2021) and George Washington University (2022). He is also the President of the Brazilian Federation of Scientific and Academic Associations of Communication (SOCICOM), which has the goal of developing actions aimed at consolidating communication as an area of knowledge and expertise, working together with the institutions responsible for public policies on science and technology, as well as the regulatory and evaluators of higher education at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The federation also seeks to establish dialogue with strategic organisations representing industry, commerce, professions, civil society and popular movements which work in the fields of media and social communication.

Samuel Plantoja Lima is Professor and researcher in Journalism at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). He is the president of Brazilian Journalism Researchers Association (SBPJor), an institution that seeks to bring together scholars from specific areas of knowledge and aims to work together with scientific, academic, and professional associations. SBPJor has implemented a series of projects to institutionalise research in the field of journalism such as launching Brazilian Journalism Research – a scientific journal in English for international dissemination of the Brazilian research, and hosting annual congresses, the main Brazilian forum for the academic discussion of journalism as a scientific field.

Maria Donde has been a member of the EPRA Executive Board since May 2018 and was re-elected as EPRA Senior Vice-Chairperson on 20 May 2021. She was also the EPRA contact for the Illiberal Turn research project. Maria works for the UK Office of Communications (Ofcom) as the Head of International Content Policy, covering media, content and broadcasting issues. She leads on Ofcom’s engagement with other European media regulators, most particularly through EPRA as well as international bodies, and represents Ofcom on the full range of media policy questions including media literacy. She oversaw Ofcom’s input into the negotiations on the AVMS Directive and oversees Ofcom’s relationship with European and global institutions on questions of media and content policy. She recently served as Chair of the Council of Europe Committee of Experts on Media Environment and Reform. 

Her regulatory background is in advertising, having spent four years at the Advertising Standards Authority before joining Ofcom’s Broadcasting Standards department. Prior to that, she worked in media analysis, and before that as a radio producer for the BBC World Service. She has a Modern Languages degree from Cambridge University and a Master’s degree in Literary Translation.