Research Projects

DeCon - Dynamics of Public Democracy Contestation (Aug 2023-Jul 2024)

The DeCon project proposal is funded by the Dutch Research Foundation (NWO) in the Open Competition XS Funding Scheme. With a volume of 50.000€, the project implements a pilot study to map and explain public democracy contestation in Dutch and US online news. 

Specifically, the expert questionnaire of the Varieties of Democracy projects will serve as a blueprint to create resources for automated content analysis (seed words) to trace the visibility of different democratic principles over time. 

'Contestation of Truth - Public Discourses on Migration in Central Europe in the Post-Truth Era' (Jan 2019 - December 2022)

For the project 'Contestation of Truth', I was co-applicant together with the project's principal investigator Alena Kluknavská from Masaryk University in Brno (CZ). The project took Austria and the Czech Republic as case studies to look at the contestation of truth in different media outlets - mainstream news media, social media, and alternative right-wing media. Methodologically, we started with more qualitatively-oriented manual claims-coding and expanded this to an automated analysis of six years of media data.

The project was led by Alena Kluknavská, funded in the Junior program of the Czech Funding Agency for three years. For more information on the project, please follow this link. 

TransSOL - Transnational Solidarity at Times of Crisis (Jun 2015 - May 2018)

From May 2017 on, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the EU project TransSOL which was concluded in May 2018. The project dealt with questions of solidarity in Europe and how different types of crises have affected it. My main responsibilities were in Work Package 5, dealing with a large-scale comparative media analysis of solidarity claims and Facebook comments during the 'refugee crisis' of 2015/2016. 

I was member of the coordinating team; TransSOL's coordinator was Christian Lahusen at Siegen University. Publication originating from TransSOL can be found on the Project Homepage.