02.B66.035 Seminar: Latest Developments in Communications

Lehrende/r: Nora Denner; Dr. Johanna Elisabeth Möller; Prof. Dr. Leonard Reinecke

Veranstaltungsart: Seminar

Anzeige im Stundenplan: SE LatestDevelopment

Credits: 5,0

Unterrichtssprache: Deutsch

Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 84

Kontingentschema: Auswahl FB03

Inhalt:
Kurs A (Reinecke):

Communication is an impressively dynamic and fast developing field of research. The course “Latest Developments in Communication” aims at keeping up with the constant flow of communication research by reviewing the latest theory building and the empirical findings of the field. For this purpose, students will read, present, and discuss numerous research papers presented at the Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) in June 2016.

The ICA is the most influential academic organization of international communication researchers worldwide. The research represented at the ICA conferences represents the state of the art of the field. Research presented at the conference is subject to strict peer-review, granting highest standards of academic excellence. The course will cover research from various divisions of ICA, among them the Mass Communication, Communication and Technology, Political Communication, and Journalism Divisions. All papers reviewed in the course have received Top Paper Awards from their respective Division. The seminar thus provides students with the chance to get to know the latest top research from the field of communication even before the results have been published in academic journals.

The course will be held in English.


Kurs B (Möller):

As a consequence of the the latest transformations in media environments communication and media researchers are confronted with a number of new key questions. Notions such as digtization or information society are attempts to describe current developments in the interaction of information and media technologies on the one hand and democratic societies on the other hand. This course provides students with an overview over some key aspects in this transformative process. We will look into civil society by addressing cyber-activism and hacktivism as well as privacy engineering. Beyond that, we will discuss transformations in the field of journalism, such as the hybridisation of news media or the role algorithms play as agents and agenda-setters. Another field is the transformation of politics. Here, we will dive into new actor constellations, internet governance and phenomena such as twitter politics.

In this course students will learn to identify, understand and differentiate both the potentials and risks of current developments in information and media technologies for democratic societies. The course will be held in English. Active participation and extensive reading are required.


Kurs C (Denner):

Since the 1990s there has been a substantial international growth in research on crisis communication. This can be seen for example in a growing body of publications in scientific journals and an increasing academic institutionalization (An & Cheng, 2010). Research on crisis communication is interdisciplinary and has a multi-perspective character. The management of crisis communication is already an important subdiscipline of English-speaking PR research (Coombs, 2010).
In crisis communication literature, there are several streams of research which illustrate certain ways to both look at and explain crisis situations. A crisis can be defined as the perception of an unpredictable event that threatens important expectations of stakeholders and can have a serious impact on an organization’s performance and generate negative outcomes (Coombs, 2007). Hence, crisis communication is designed to collect, process, and disseminate information to address a crisis situation as well as protect and defend an individual, company, or organization.

In this course we will look at crisis communication from different perspectives and within different communication research fields. In order to do that, we will focus on the objects of, and reasons for crisis communication as well as its manifestation. We also look at strategies and tactics which can be applied. The course will be held in English.