Nico Carpentier is Extraordinary Professor at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic) and Visiting Professor at Tallinn University (Estonia) and at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (Suzhou, China). He was Vice-President of the European Communication Research and Education Association (2008-2012) and President of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (2020-2024). His theoretical focus is on discourse theory, his research is situated in the relationship between communication, politics and culture, especially in social domains as war and conflict, ideology, participation and democracy. His latest monographs are The Discursive-Material Knot (2017) and Iconoclastic Controversies (2021). His last exhibition was The Mirror of Conflict photography exhibition, in October 2023 at the Energy Museum, Istanbul in Türkiye, and in October 2024 at the Hollar Gallery, Prague, in the Czech Republic. Jeffrey Wimmer is Professor of Communication Science with an emphasis on media reality at the University of Augsburg, Germany. From 2008 to 2014, he was chairing the 'Communication and Democracy' section of the European Communication Research and Education Association, and from 2009 to 2015, the 'Sociology of Media Communication' section of the German Association of Communication Science. His research and teaching focuses on the sociology of media communication, public sphere and participation, mediatization and media change, digital games and virtual worlds. Recent edited book publications include (Mis-)Understanding Political Participation (2018, Routledge) and The Forgotten Subject (2023).
