Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Adam Shehata, whose interest is in the extent to which the news media influence gaps in political participation between socioeconomic groups, and how this can be analysed from a cross-national comparative perspective. The study examines nine European countries, and builds on an institutional framework that examines the joint impact of institutional mechanisms on participation.

There are two dimensions of influence here: institutional strength (the effects of news consumption on political participation, which is a necessary condition for influencing gaps), and the distinctiveness of the population base of the media (the socioeconomic characteristics of news consumers). The hypothesis here is that news media use has a positive effect on political participation, and that news media institutions with a low-education bias (targetting less educated audiences) will narrow gaps in participation between socioeconomic groups, while those with a high-education bias will widen such gaps. Further, news media use is likely to narrow gaps in voting participation than other, less widespread forms of political participation. These hypotheses were tested using European Social Survey data.

Hamburg.
The next speakers at ECREA 2010 is Emiliana de Blasio, whose focus is on Italian politics in the age of Web 2.0. Key themes here are access, interaction, and participation. Participation here means both participation in content production (co-deciding on content), in content producing organisations (co-deciding on production), and in technology producing organisations (co-deciding on technology).

Advantages of these shifts are greater interactivity, connectedness, participatory deliberation; disadvantages include a loss of control, and other negatives. The present research examined the information, fundraising, involvement, and mobilisation functions of Italian political Websites, to determine the interrelationships between social networking and political participation. This was done through questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and participant observation.

Hamburg.
The next session at ECREA 2010 starts with Elisabeth Stúr, whose interest is in the mediated debates in the lead-up to a referendum in a small community in Sweden about the extension of a hydroelectric power scheme. In this case, public opinion was communicated both through old and new media, as well as through public meetings, raising the question to what extent political debates moved to new media platforms.

Hamburg.
We move on to Elisabeth Klaus and Ricarda Drüeke as the next speakers at ECREA 2010; their focus is on media coverage of Austrian migration policy. This is a question of cultural citizenship, concerning cultural belonging and identity formation, and conducted through cultural and media participation. Cultural citizenship entails all those cultural practices that allow or prevent cultural participation.

Media present spaces of identity that offer certain positions to people according to their markers of identity. So, the question arises which identities are presented in the media. In the context of Austrian migration policy, citizenship is based on the citizenship of one’s parents as well as a number of other social and cultural conditions (examined in a citizenship test), but can also be granted to persons with extraordinary achievements in science, economy, arts, or sports without other conditions being met.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Leen van Brussel, who shifts our focus from the world stage to northern Belgium, and the debate about euthanasia and the right to die being played out in newspapers there. The relevant players in that debate are the ‘right to die’ and ‘palliative care’ movements, with their respective, opposing, points of view. This is a struggle for meaning, played out in good part through the mainstream media.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Lina Dencik, whose focus is on BBC World News and its implications for global civil society. Global civil society has grown out of a cosmopolitan notion that privileges public deliberation and involves non-state actors as key transformative agents, resisting and overcoming the attempt at imposing a state-based international order. In this context, the media have three main functions: providing the basis for global citizenship, global public deliberation, and global public opinion and governance. This follows a globalised liberal narrative of media.

But how does this correspond with actual developments in news narratives. BBC World News provides a useful case study here: it is one of a handful of major global news broadcasters, with a substantial audience reach and a mission to provide a global news perspective to a global audience (and yet, compared to CNN and Al Jazeera it has been underresearched so far).

Hamburg.
The second keynote speaker this opening morning at ECREA 2010 is Paolo Mancini, whose focus is on cross-national comparative research. This builds on two main assumptions: that comparative research is crucial to media studies, but also that such comparative work is often delayed. The latter may apply more to some forms of comparative research than others.

Any observations about specific national systems ultimately build on comparisons with other countries (even if such comparisons are mainly implicit rather than explicit); most scientific statements in social science and related fields are relativistic: researchers who know only one country know none. Media studies have often been only implicitly comparative, however; there is a delay in the move towards cross-national comparative work, as acceptance of the comparative approach has taken some time to take hold.

Hamburg.
The main ECREA 2010 conference starts with a keynote by Kevin Robins, whose focus is on transcultural communication. In this, ‘transcultural’ is a very specific term, and different from transnational, international, intercultural, and other similar terms: this is not about an interaction of one supposedly distinct entity (for example, of one nation with another, or of ‘Europe’ and ‘Islam’) with another, but about a more complex traversing of boundaries that more closely describes the interchanges and crossovers that actually do happen. Recent research, especially in Europe, has been pushing especially in this direction, not least also to deal with the complexity of a changing Europe.

The key difficulty with this is that it has been connecting with agendas beyond communication research – sociological and anthropological migration research, for example. Crucial to such transcultural research in Europe is that Europe itself has changed – it has become larger and more complex, and is facing the challenges of global migration. Germany, for example, is currently experiencing some very acrimonious debates about migration, and especially some ugly right-wing islamophobic dog-whistling about migration from Muslim countries.

Bremen.
The final speaker at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference is Friedrich Krotz; he begins by noting our conservatism in using methods – once we have learnt them, we tend to utilise the same methods each time, regardless of the specific object of study.

Friedrich draws on the work of Clifford Geertz and Norbert Elias in approaching the study of culture and society; Elias’s main concepts are figuration (of various groups of actors – nations, families, groups of people in specific social situations) and habitus. It is not enough to simply measure cultural exchanges, of course, but we must aim to understand their meaning; this is complicated also by the fact that researchers themselves are embedded in their own cultures, of course.