About the ECREA European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School

The summer school aims to provide a supportive international setting where doctoral students can present their ongoing work, receive feedback on their PhD-projects and establish valuable academic contacts for the future.
The ECREA European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School is a student-centered summer school. In contrast to many other summer schools, the lecturers’ main task is not to lecture, but to provide support to the participants in their PhD trajectories.

The main emphasis of the ECREA European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School is on providing structural and individuated PhD-support for young European scholars combined with numerous opportunities for informal dialogues with lecturers and peers.

The main learning format of the summer school are the student feedback workshops where students present their PhD projects and receive structured, high quality and multivoiced feedback on their work from summer school lecturers and students. The feedback consists of a series of extensively elaborated analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of the individual PhD projects, which allow PhD students to structurally improve the quality of their academic work.

The Summer School combines a constructive-supportive approach with a critical perspective. The atmosphere of the Summer School is fundamentally noncompetitive, as the talents of all participants are acknowledged, and participants and lecturers act as peers, cherishing academic collegiality and collaborative work.

The Summer School also expresses the utmost respect for academic diversity in terms of a plurality of schools, approaches, theories, paradigms, methods, and cultures in academia.

LEARNING FORMATS AT THE SUMMER SCHOOL

PhD feedback workshops
 

Lectures
 

Workshops
 

Informal discussions
 

Visits to local NGO’s and institutions

Round tables

A BRIEF HISTORY
The European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School started in 1992 as a project to  promote European dimension of  communication studies education and research programmes. Initially, the consortium, initiated by University of Stendal (Grenoble, France) and Westminster (UK), included ten (Western) European universities.

During the two decadces of continuous operation, the consortium of universities expanded to  the present-day partnership of 22 European universities (University of Bremen DE, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) HU, University of Roskilde DK, University of Tampere FI, Lund University SE, University of Arts Berlin DE, Charles University CZ, University of Ankara TR, University of Tartu EE, Vrije Universiteit Brussel BE, University of Stirling UK, University of Erfurt DE, University of Bergen NO, Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) LT, Jönköping University SE, University of Sacred Heart Milano IT, University of Helsinki FI, University Stendhal, Grenoble 3 FR, London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) UK, University of Westminster UK, Autonomous University of Barcelona ES, and University of Ljubljana, SI). Affiliated partners of the Summer School are European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), Finnish National Research School, and COST Action IS0906 “Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies”.

The summer school is currently (2010-2012) financially supported by the Erasmus Intensive Programme project grant.

The Summer School is also supported by Slovene Communication Association.
 

So far, the summer school was hosted by University Stendahl, Grenoble (1992-96), Complutense University of Madrid (1997), University of Lund (1998), Westminster University (1999-2003), University of Tampere in cooperation with University of Helsinki (2004), University of Tartu (2005-2009) and University of Ljubljana (2010-2012).