Dr Price will lead the Journalism Studies Section which supports research on the cultural, political, economic, social and professional aspects of journalism, whilst Dr Heywood will lead the Radio and Sound Section and will organise the biennial Radio and Sounds Conference in Istanbul in September 2025.
I was delighted to have been elected as the chair of the ECREA Journalism Studies section management team in September.
Our division, journalism studies, is one of the largest in ECREA with 581 members. I will be leading a diverse team of four other scholars from leading universities in Europe and the United States. We have already met to discuss our plans for the next academic year, and our priority for 2025 is to organise an event for early career researchers and for PhD students that will provide them with a platform to present their work and with mentorship and support during their journey into academia.
Looking ahead, we are also going to be working towards our next journalism studies section conference, which will take place in April 2026, at the University of Groningen. In September 2026 we will also have our annual main ECREA conference, which will take place in Brno in the Czech Republic. For the conference that our school at Sheffield University hosted in April 2024, we received more than 130 submissions, whereas for the conference in Ljubljana in September 2024, we had more than 398 paper submissions of which we accepted 180, so this is important work.
I look forward to leading the section and ensuring that this community of researchers continues to thrive in the future."
Dr Lada Price
Senior Lecturer
I am delighted to have been elected Chair of the ECREA’s Radio and Sound Section and am very excited by the prospect of working with a new team of scholars from Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Turkey.
My aim as section Chair is to promote the vital role of radio and sound globally and their evolution as new listening platforms, habits and tools are adopted by listeners. I was previously the Chair of MeCCSA’s Radio and Audio Studies Network and I am working to create new, and reinforce existing, links with other radio, audio and sound networks and associations internationally.
Additionally, I am starting work on facilitating new collaborations between practitioners, including radio journalists, international aid organisations, journalist protection groups, and academic researchers. PhD students and ECRs will form a core part of our section and will be integrated into our plans and activities.
As a team, we have already started work on our forthcoming Radio and Sounds Section conference which will take place on 8-10 September 2025 in Istanbul hosted by the Faculty of Communication at Istanbul Bilgi University. This is going to be a great event bringing together a large international community of passionate and dedicated radio and sound scholars and practitioners.”
Dr Emma Heywood
Senior Lecturer
ECREA is a community of academics devoted to the development of communication research and higher education in Europe. It’s organised into 25 thematic sections, each of which is dedicated to a distinctive field of communication studies.
Many congratulations to Lada and Emma on their unanimous elections as ECREA Section Chairs.
ECREA is a key association in our field and one that we have close ties to already - having hosted their Journalism Studies Section Conference in Sheffield earlier this year.
Lada's and Emma's elections as Section Chairs is a major achievement that shows international recognition of their work and leadership and also expands the global visibility and research networks of our School.”
Dr Dmitry Chernobrov
Director of Research and Innovation in the School of Information, Journalism and Communication
