ECREA Visual Cultures
Management Team 2021-23
Joanna Kędra, University of Jyväskylä, Chair
Patricia Prieto-Blanco, Lancaster University, Vice-Chair
Maria Schreiber, University of Salzburg, Vice-Chair
Hadas Schlussel, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Acting YECREA Representative
Pre-Conference Team 2022
Maria Schreiber, University of Salzburg
Suay Melisa Özkula, University of Trento
Danka Ninković Slavnić, University of Belgrade
Doron Altaratz, Hadassah Academic College
Hadas Schlussel, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Acting YECREA Representative
Tom Divon, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Joanna Kędra (PhD) works as Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Language and Communication Studies, in MultiLEAP (Multiliteracies for social participation and learning across the life span) profiling area of the University of Jyväskylä. Prior to this position, Joanna worked in the Academy of Finland project, researching digitally mediated (visual) communication practices of Polish-speaking transnational families in Finland. Joanna’s research interest is in visual literacy education and pedagogies, visual digital culture, and visual research methods. She co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Visual Literacy on visual teaching practices in higher education; currently working on the edited volume Teaching Visually: A Guidebook to Visually Immersed Higher Education. Joanna is also chairing the International Presence Committee for the IVLA (International Visual Literacy Association). She recently received the 2021 IVLA Research Award. Joanna has served as YECREA Representative for Visual Cultures TWG, and from May 2019 to Sept. 2021 as Vice-Chair of the Visual Cultures Section.
Patricia Prieto-Blanco (PhD) lectures Digital Media Practice in the Sociology Department at Lancaster, UK. Her areas of expertise are visual methods of research and photographic practices. She has worked ethnographically with transnational families and explored how they incorporate photography in everyday routines, addressing media practices in the contexts of migration, kinship and intimacy. Her latest research inquires into the performativity of images in the context of activism, online and offline. She serves as Technology Advisor in the board of IVSA (International Visual Sociology Association), and has been part of the steering group of ECREA Visual Cultures since its inception. She is an advocate of interdisciplinary, participatory and practice-based research.
Maria Schreiber (https://kowi.uni-salzburg.at/ma/schreiber-maria/) gained her PhD in Communication at the University of Vienna. In her thesis, she analysed the entanglement of visual communication practices with age-specific life challenges and technical affordances. She is now a Post-Doc Researcher at the Department of Communications at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Her work focuses on visual and digital media cultures and qualitative methods.Previously, she worked at the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna, investigating ‘Visual Biographies in a networked lifeworld’. Before that, she held a scholarship of the Austrian Academy of Science as part of the DOC-team ‘Pictorial Practices’. She is part of the interdisciplinary research groups ‘Visual Studies in the Social Sciences’ and the DFG-network ‘Transformative Visuality’(https://bild-netzwerk.net/ ).
Twitter — academia.edu / Publications
Hadas Schlussel is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (https://smart.huji.ac.il/people/hadas-schlussel) and a member of “The Evolution of Attention” research group at the Mandel Scholion Research Center. Her dissertation studies videos on social media as embodied multi-sensorial experiences, which rise to the challenges of attention in the digital age. To this purpose, Hadas integrates media studies and visual cultures with the anthropology of the senses. In her MA thesis, she analyzed Tasty’s recipe videos on Facebook as sensory experiences. Hadas is also the YECREA representative of ECREA’s visual cultures section.
Suay Melisa Özkula is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Trento (https://webapps.unitn.it/du/en/Persona/PER0234336/Progetti) on the project “International experiences of digital empowerment in a climate justice frame”. She is an interdisciplinary digital sociologist with a PhD from the University of Kent (Canterbury, UK) and experience as a postdoctoral researcher and university teacher at the University of Sheffield (UK). Her research focuses on digital activism with a particular focus on political empowerment, digital social research methods, and climate change debates.
Twitter — Google Scholar Publications
Danka Ninković Slavnić is an assistant professor at the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Political Science. She holds a Ph.D. in Media and communication studies. Her main academic interests are news audience studies, identity representation and identity politics, and visual communication. She participated in numerous national academic and applied research. The last research projects she participated in were Journalistic Role Performance (global, ongoing research), Gender Structure of Managerial and Chief Editorial Positions in the News Media Outlets (2021), Global Media Monitoring Project 2020, and Information in a Digital Environment in Serbia (2020).
Doron Altaratz holds a PhD from the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research deals with computational systems’ cultural and social impacts on photographic practices. Doron also holds a B.A. in Photography from The Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and an M.P.S from New York Universities’ Interactive Telecommunications Program. Additionally, Doron is a faculty member at the Photographic Communications Department at Hadassah Academic College, Jerusalem.
Personal site – Twitter – Google Scholar
Tom Divon is a Social Media and Culture researcher at the Department of Journalism and Communication at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. Divon’s research focuses on the evolution of social media platforms, social-political youth cultures on social media, and their potential for education processes. Divon’s uses a qualitative approach for multimodal examination of TikTok cultures in three key areas: TikTokers engagements with Holocaust Commemoration and Education, TikTokers Performative Combat in Antisemitism, and TikTokers Memetic Participation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The overall goal of Divon’s research is to enable visibility for TikTok’s educational potentials among its users.
Twitter: @TomDivon
Visual Cultures 