Research Projects

Current

The Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS) The Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS) is an academically driven project that was founded to regularly assess the state of journalism throughout the world. The Study’s primary objective is to help journalism researchers and policy makers better understand worldviews and changes that are taking place in the professional orientations of journalists, the conditions and limitations under which they operate, as well as the social functions of journalism in a changing world.

The International Media Concentration (IMC) project - Media Concentration Around the World Media concentration is a controversial subject. One side focuses on media empires and their negative impacts. The other side believes the Internet as having opened media to unprecedented diversity. The goal of our project is to go beyond the rhetoric to an academic, empirical, dispassionate, and data-driven analysis of trends and their drivers.

Social Media and the ‘Arab Spring’: content analysis (using Lexicoder) of front page stories in selected Irish, British, American, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese newspapers, comparing newspapers’ references to social media with academic studies of the actual use of such media inside Libya and Egypt during the period. A key research question: was social media of more value to international audiences than to citizens in affected states?

The Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Children in Ireland: an exploratory study. Funder: Irish Research Council Research Development Initiative (Linked to ISS21 Children and Young People Research Cluster). The project is a collaboration between the School of Applied Social Studies, School of Education and ISS21 (University College Cork) and the School of Communications (Dublin City University).

Ireland in the EU: monitoring international media coverage of the Irish Presidency of the EU Council Jan-Jun 2013. The research question: whether is Ireland is seen by publics and media in our EU partners as a central or peripheral nation in tackling the financial and economic crisis.

Enterprise Ireland Innovation Voucher Scheme in collaboration with The Turning Institute – Users’ perceptions and effectiveness of an online programme of treatment for Eating Disorders

Teaching Ethics using Film and Literature, capacity building fund with Dr. Brigitte Le Jeuz, School of Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies

Someone Else’s Shoes – Digital game project

The Media Ownership Monitor

DiNA – Digital News Media Archive

Irish Social Sciences Platform (ISSP) Knowledge Society Strand - ISSP is an all-island platform of integrated social science research and graduate training, focusing on the social, cultural and economic transformation shaping Ireland in the 21st century

Ireland partners in EIGE (European Institute for Gender Equality) project entitled ‘Study on Area J of the Beijing Platform for Action: Women and the Media in European Union’ (EIGE/2012/OPER/07), consortium led by the University of Liverpool (Karen Ross).

Recent

The MEDIVA Project The MEDIVA project seeks to strengthen the capacity of the media to reflect the increasing diversity of European societies and thus foster a better understanding of immigrant integration processes at a time when social cohesion and integration policies are put to the test by an acute economic crisis.

The New Media-New Pleasures’ project New media proponents –be they marketers, theorists, or practitioners – argue that the formal characteristics of new media enable experiences and pleasures that old media simply do not provide. The authors suggest that the pleasures of new media are heterogeneous and while they are in most cases far from revolutionary in a broader social and political sense, they have facilitated the development of a range of new media production and consumption habits. In addition, one of the most striking findings to emerge from this study was the impact new media are having on people’s perception of, and use of, more traditional media like terrestrial analogue television, videos and radio.

Representing Women Project Irish parliament has currently one of the worst gender balances in the democratic world with women holding only 13.9%.of seats in Dáil Éireann. This places Ireland, alongside Cameroon, in a global position of 83rd and lower than current European (21.9%) averages. This is the first interdisciplinary research project to examine the factors that influence this continuous and atypical pattern of representation of women in Irish national politics. It draws on the expertise of three Research Centres in the areas of Linguistics, Political Science and Communication Studies located in The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at DCU to investigate the gender dynamic operating within Irish parliamentary democracy; specifically the representation, role(s) and performance of women politicians in Dáil Éireann. The project will make a significant contribution not only to Irish national politics but will also advance the development of both a European and international comparative research framework.

Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland The NPHFI exists to facilitate contact between researchers and writers in the field of newspaper, periodical, journalism and printing history, and to strengthen institutional links between third level teaching and research institutions, libraries and other organizations concerned with media history. It serves as a valuable network for those interested in developing collaborative works and also provides a platform for emerging academics to present their work to the country’s leading media historians in a formal, but supportive environment.