Media and Communication Research in the Current European Context

Today's plenary session at ECREA 2014 starts with Kirsten Drotner, whose interest is in research policy for media and communication studies in Europe. There are plenty of interesting current debates about media and communication studies directions, and research policy and research organisations serve as the infrastructures to facilitate such research.

This is also related to the hybridisation of media and communication research, with infusions from related disciplines, challenges from new methodological trends, and the emergence of new digital media technologies and resources, including 'big data' and their commodification. In some ways, there is an organisational and educational diffusion and dispersal of media and communication research across a range of related contexts, then, but such research remains a significant success story in its own right, too.

The European Science Foundation's Forward Look report also provides important data on media and communication research, and recommendations for its future. More generally, how is such research positioned within the wider European research landscape, though?

The European Science Foundation, created in 1974, has offered important funding for network programmes, and media and communication research funded by its humanities and social sciences committees has generated significant outputs emerging from cross-networking initiatives. The European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) has similarly funded substantial research in the field through nine COST Actions networking a wide range of scholars from many European countries.

Funding for research programmes is largely under the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme; such funding fosters innovation and research activities that benefit Europe into the future, and focusses on research that delivers innovation and impacts in the short term. Social sciences and humanities research is positioned across the identified key challenge areas for such funding, rather than as a major area in its own right, but many advertised research topics fail to include the social sciences and humanities in any significant way, beyond merely instrumental dissemination roles.

The European Research Council funds curiosity-driven frontier research, and funding for it has increased in recent times; it provides support for early-career as well as senior researchers. There have been 13 media and communication grants within the 774 social sciences and humanities grants; this represents 1.4% of all ERC grants. The success rate of social sciences and humanities grant applications has declined from 2009 to 2013, too.

Other grant schemes include Norface, a collaboration between 16 national research funding agencies, which funds a number of specific research themes. It has funded only one media and communication research project within the 22 projects funded overall. Additionally, the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) network has funded 6 media and communication research projects out of a total of 37.

What stands out from this overview is that the major, well-funded support schemes have largely failed to fund media and communication research; smaller schemes have seen a better success rate. Humanities- rather than social science-led schemes tend to produce better success rates, and UK-based research projects have been disproportionately successful.

Substantial funding cuts at national as well as EU levels have not helped this situation; nor has the move to break down disciplinary silos – disciplines as levers of excellence are no longer especially effective. The focus on short-term payoffs is also problematic, also as it adds to the precarity of early-career researchers' job prospects. There is a spectre of non-media-centric media research here.

Europe has many internationally leading media researchers, but they are unable to exercise their excellence on the international stage because of this difficult environment. In European research policy, there is a competition between perceptions of science as a social good, and a concept of 'fast science' that must return on investment as soon as possible; media and communication research in Europe can speak to both those discourses. But we have yet to harness these strengths as a discipline, and must engage in much stronger lobbying at the European level, especially in the present context of media transformation.

ECREA could and should play a leading role in this effort. This would also require partnering with other research groups in the humanities and social sciences, to balance short-term thinking and more strategic research. This must involve lobbying in Brussels: all other disciplines do it, and media and communication research is missing out if it does not do so itself. It is possible to document the existing impacts of media and communciation research – ECREA needs this; the discipline needs this; and European citizens need this.