The ESF Forward Look on Media Studies, conducted between 2012 and 2014, aimed to define, in discussion with science policy organisations, practitioners and other stakeholders, a common European research agenda that would begin to address the new research and policy challenges relating to media and communications. Four leading and critical areas of inquiry emerged in the Forward Look process. In a period in which coincident crises of economy, welfare, political participation, and private–public provision are all creating levels of uncertainty and social disquiet unknown in a generation in Europe, the role of the media in enabling, thwarting and transforming the nature of political engagement and citizenship is of critical concern. Furthermore, rather than acting as a democratising and levelling force, the diffusion of communication technologies may actually be causing what is broadly known as the digital divide to deepen rather than disappear; differences in access to and use of technologies do not only reflect existing social inequalities, in fact, they may also be an element in their reproduction. Digital media and communications technology have also been heralded as a new domain of and platform for creativity, allowing individuals to be producers and users of content and applications as never before. However, there remains much to understand about changes in content creation and the creative industries, and how they will influence cultural production, ownership regimes, business models, distribution systems and consumption practices, not to mention the economic implications of all these. Media are furthermore at once a resource, an environment and a vehicle for the construction, dissemination and expression of individual and collective identities. New media forms offer new possibilities, conditions and constraints for identity formation and association which are potentially changing the very nature of social interaction and the relationship between the physical and the virtual. It is urgent to develop research that investigates and understands the changes taking place and how they are affecting individual or collective identities and/ or promoting new forms of agency.
D.06 Final report on a foreign/international project
COBISS.SI-ID: 32647773Since March 2010, the COST Action Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies (http://www.cost-transforming-audiences.eu) has been coordinating and stimulating research efforts into the transformations of European audiences within a changing media and communication environment, identifying their complex interrelationships with the social, cultural and political areas of European societies. The final conference of the COST Action was held in Ljubljana on February 5-7, 2014 with over 100 participants. Local organisers: Igor Vobic, Boris Mance
B.01 Organiser of a scientific meeting
The research study addresses the historical processes of conceptual and institutional emergence and changing presence of sustainable development in Slovenia. Theoretically and methodologically, the research starts from the historical analysis of the emergence, the presence, the popularisation and the institutionalisation of sustainable development on the global level and from the presupposition that the Slovenian context of conceptual and institutional presence of sustainable development is embedded within the global context. It focuses upon the historical conceptual and institutional emergence of sustainable development in the context of three central socio-political spheres (economic, political and the civil society sphere).
F.30 Professional assessment of the situation
COBISS.SI-ID: 31856477