The MEDIAdelcom project officially started in March 2021, but Covid-related restrictions made it impossible for the international team of researchers to meet in person. The first research steps had to be coordinated in a series of online meetings. Only now, in September 2021, the project consortium came together in Tallinn, Estonia, for a first on-site workshop. CMC was represented by project leader Tobias Eberwein and Christina Krakovsky.
The acronym MEDIAdelcom stands for “Media-related risks and opportunities for deliberative communication: Development scenarios of the European media landscapes”. The three-year project is financed by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme. It includes 17 international partner institutions from 14 European countries, coordinated by the University of Tartu, Estonia. The overall objective of the project is to develop a diagnostic tool for policy makers, educators, media-critical bodies and institutions, as well as for media experts and journalists, which enables the provision of holistic assessment of risks and opportunities concerning deliberative communication and consequently social cohesion in Europe.
The on-site workshop in Tallinn helped all project partners to finalize the underlying theoretical concept of the project and discuss the innovative methodological approach for the next research steps, which will include fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and agent-oriented modelling procedures. CMC will contribute to the project both with Austrian country studies and with comparative insights.
More background information on the MEDIAdelcom project is available here and on the official project website: https://www.mediadelcom.eu.