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Risto Kunelius

Title of the presentation:
Media in Power: a dialogue on designing a research project

Short abstract of the presentation:
This presentation and dialogue (re)constructs the process of how to design and frame a research project. I will talk us through an ongoing research project (focusing on media and power in Finland) how its central concepts and questions have been formulated and operationalized for actual, empirical research. We will do this through four thematic discussion outlined shortly below. By discussing key concepts – 1) power and 2) mediation – the session will look at how strategic choices of research design build a “narrative” which helps to 3) operationalize questions into practical research tasks and 4) interpret the findings.

Short biography:
Risto Kunelius is professor of journalism at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at University of Tampere. His research projects have lately focused the challenges of professional journalism, ranging from increasing the participatory role of the public (research project on public journalism) to the demands of increasingly transnational media and political conditions (comparative research projects of journalists and EU, and on transnational media events). He is currently working on an international comparative project on media coverage of the climate change and on a large interview-based study the role of media in practices the elite decision makers in Finland. Broadly speaking, most of this work aims at contributing on understanding the dynamics of the “public” or “public sphere” and particularly journalism’s role in it. His earlier work has focused on textual analysis of journalism, and he also teaches media history.