Project Team

Václav Štětka is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at the School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, where he has been working since 2016. Having started his academic career at Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic, he was Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford between 2009-2013, working on an ERC-funded project Media and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Between 2013-2016 he was leader of the Political Communication Research Group (PolCoRe) at Charles University in Prague. His research interests encompass political communication and the role of new media, media systems in Central and Eastern Europe, media… [Read more]

Sabina Mihelj is Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis in the School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University. Sabina’s research focuses on the comparative study of media cultures across both traditional and new media, with a focus on nationalism, identity, memory, and Eastern and Central Europe. She has written extensively on the relationship between mass communication and cultural identity, on comparative media research, and on the role of media and popular culture in the Cold War. Her latest book is entitled From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Sabina’s research was funded by the Arts… [Read more]

Fanni Tóth is Research Associate at the School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University. Her research concentrates on democratisation, political attitudes, Europeanisation, public administration and public policy, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe. Fanni holds an ESRC-funded PhD in International Relations from the University of Nottingham. Her thesis examined the transformative power of the European Union on political attitudes in post-communist Europe, considering the impact on support for democracy and the EU. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the thesis concentrates on the attitudes of both elites and the general population, demonstrating that the EU has a measurable effect in… [Read more]

Katherine Kondor is a Research Associate at the School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University. Her research is focused on radical right social movements and collective action, with particular interest in methods of radicalisation and pathways to activism. With a background in Anthropology, Katherine holds a PhD in Criminology from the University of Huddersfield where she conducted a mixed-methods comparative analysis of radical right organisations in Hungary and Great Britain. Using secondary survey analysis, online analysis, and qualitative interviews, the thesis examined drivers to far-right attitudes, methods of recruitment and identity formation by radical right organisations, and pathways to activism in… [Read more]

Markéta Doležalová is a Research Assistant at the School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University. Her research concentrates on migration, public policy, exclusion and marginalisation, with a focus on migration from Central Europe to the UK. Markéta holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester. Markéta’s doctoral research was funded by the ESRC through a CASE award and was a collaborative project between the University of Manchester and Advocacy Support. Her thesis is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and looks at the lives of Czech and Slovak Roma who moved to Leeds in England after the expansion of… [Read more]

Damian Guzek is an associate professor at the Department of Journalism and Media Communication, the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. His research is driven by questions related to digital media, religions, and politics. Between 2015-2019  he was conducting the Polish National Science Centre project ‘Media towards the idea of a secular state.’ In 2018 he was a visiting fellow in the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. In 2017 he conducted a Visby postdoctoral research project at the Centre for Religion and Society, Uppsala University, Sweden. He collaborates within the project as a local research assistant. [Read more]

Ana Stojiljkovic is a Research Assistant managing data collection and analysis in Serbia for the ‘Illiberal turn’ Project. Her research interests revolve around strategic communication, election campaigns, democratisation contexts, and audience/reception research. She holds a PhD in Media and Communication awarded at the University of Leeds in 2017. Her thesis ‘Collective Identities and Election Campaigns’ was supervised by Professor Katrin Voltmer and Dr Giorgia Aiello. The thesis looks at how election campaigns communicate the meaning of collective identities, especially how national narratives are communicated in election campaigns. Ana had previously collaborated with the ‘Media, Conflict and Democratisation’ Project at the… [Read more]