Benefits of Cross-National Collaborative Research

Hamburg.
This morning’s keynote at ECREA 2010 is by Peter Golding, who will discuss the processes of building European research networks. Much of the research in media and communication studies is inherently international; the media are largely dominated by a handful of major transnational corporations, for example. Europe is interesting as a testing ground for the ideas that stem from this – current developments take place especially in areas that exist beyond a mere focus on national public service broadcasting.

Only collaborative research can effectively explore to examine the future shape of the media industries – especially their economic structures. Similarly, many issues that we need to address exist beyond the confines of the nation state: the systematic disengagement from political processes, the retreat of public intellectuals, soundbite culture, the fragmentation of the news media, disappearing news audiences, and the rise of ‘unreason’ are all transnational phenomena, for example, and must be addressed by collaborative research networks. Such collaboration takes place through pan-European scholarly vehicles like the European Journal of Communication and ECREA itself, for example, as well as through European research programmes.

But there are some pitfalls in this as well. First, there is danger in an undue fascination with technological change – this technocentrism may obscure rather than reveal new insights. On the one hand, new technologies may just offer the same affordances, just more quickly, better, or more efficiently; on the other, it may engender real shifts in what is possible. There are conflicting views about the digital life as either consumer- or producer-led, and that contradiction can only be resolved through collaborative cross-national research.

And national differences matter, too – and through collaborative research, those differences become instructive. The nation state is not always the best unit of analysis, although national higher education policy can certainly affect what researchers from different countries will be able to work on. Of course, research on Europe as an entity may also be interesting, but often also reveals a substantial lack of knowledge about Europe and its institutions.

A growth of pan-European media may address that problem, but such media still exist largely in the margins, and national and local media still dominate Europeans’ media diets. In this, the national differences in journalistic activity in Europe need to be considered: between what may variously be described as empirical, political, rhetorical, or commentatorial journalism. Working together in large, cross-national teams addresses such questions; it is productive, rewarding, and fun, too.