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Kees Brants

Title of the presentation:
Potentials and Pitfalls of Comparative Research

Short abstract of the presentation:
This is a workshop on the beauties and the beasts of comparative research: the surplus value, on the one hand, of looking at other countries to understand one’s own, to develop typologies, concepts and frameworks, dimensions and operationalisations in order to make sense of and explain similarities and differences between countries, systems, effects, and, on the other hand, the risk of sloppy conceptualization and methodology, denial of cultural specificities, misunderstanding in language and approach of conceptual notions, media content, framing of questions, etc. The workshop tries to discuss and evade the pitfalls while developing and building on the potentials, by confronting workshop participants with their own cultural biases, by discussing research examples and by developing specific research designs for exemplary topics.

Short biography:
Kees Brants is director of the MSc-programme in European Communication Studies and senior research fellow at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research, both at the University of Amsterdam. At Leiden University he holds the chair in political communication. Before studying political science and mass communication at the University of Amsterdam, he studied journalism in Utrecht and worked for several years as a reporter for local and national newspapers in the Netherlands. His research focuses on political communication (notably in elections, as infotainment and e-democracy), communication policy (in comparative perspective), political journalism, the representation of multiculturalism, and media and criminal justice. He wrote and edited more than ten books (with one exception – The Media in Question, edited with Joke Hermes and Liesbet van Zoonen - all in Dutch) and published extensively in journals and edited books. He also edited special editions of Political Communication (on the internet and the public sphere) and Javnost/The Public (on auditing public broadcasting). With his wife Chrisje Brants he not only shares an interest in media and crime, but also a (what some call morbid) fascination for the social construction in memory, history and lieux de memoires of the First World War, about which they published two books.