I’m an Associate Professor (Juniorprofessor) for Communication and Media Studies with a focus on Media Society at ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Sciences, University of Bremen, Germany. Prior to that, I was a Post-Doc researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Media Research at Technische Universität Chemnitz, Germany. I have studied media and communication at Technische Universität Chemnitz and the University of Stirling, UK. Funded by the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung) my doctoral research looked at practices and institutions of successful online communication and cooperation.
Overall, I’m interested in the social construction and appropriation of digital media forms and technologies. My work is based in communication research and cultural sociology and it links to insights coming from economics, linguistics, socio-legal studies as well as science and technology studies. I have done research in the fields of computer-mediated communication, communication policy and regulation, creative industries, media cultures as well as media analysis. Currently, my projects look at frames in multimodal discourse, internet-assisted cooperation, governance of digitally networked environments, and mediated memories. Beyond that, I’m interested in applying theories of practice to the study of media and communication and in linking qualitative with quantitative social science methods. As a Post-Doc I was involved in the Research Training Group “CrossWorlds” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In May 2014 I received the dissertation award of the Sociology of Media Communication Section of the German Communication Association.
I have designed and taught a number of bachelor-level and master-level courses in social science methods, media analysis, media systems, social connections in networked communication, media and cultural theory, organizational communication and public relations. In 2009, I was an EPSRC-funded doctoral visitor to the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and a visitor to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School. Since 2012 I have been an Associate Researcher at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet & Society, Berlin and in the academic year 2015 I was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King’s College London.
I am a member of the International Communication Association (ICA), the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) and the German Communication Association (DGPuK). Together with Christian Katzenbach I’m chairing the Digital Communication section of the German Communication Association. I’ve been reviewing for New Media & Society, Memory Studies, the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Information, Communication & Society, Continuum, Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung, Media, Culture & Society, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Sociological Forum, Telecommunications Policy, Mobile Media and Communication, Big Data & Society, the Internet Policy Review, the Journal of Pragmatics, the International Journal of Communication, Communications – The European Journal of Communication, the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, the German National Academic Foundation and the European Commission.
More about my publications can be found on Google Scholar. You can find me at the ResearchGate