PARTICIPATION, DEMOCRACY, AND CREATING A RADICAL PROGRESSIVE UTOPIA FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: AN INTERVIEW WITH NICO CARPENTIER

Abstract

NICO CARPENTIER is a renowned researcher in the field of communication and media studies. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Media Studies of Charles University in Prague, with two additional part-time positions, at the Communication Sciences Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and at Uppsala University, along with his research fellowships at Loughborough University and Cyprus University of Technology. He was one of the four founding board members of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) in 2005, the ECREA vice-president from 2008 to 2012, the treasurer of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) from 2012 to 2016, and the chair of IAMCR’s Participatory Communication Research Section from 2016 till the day. His latest books include; The Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media Participation (2017); Cyprus and its Conflicts. Representations, Materialities, and Cultures (2018, co-edited), Critical Perspectives on Media, Power and Change (2018, co-edited), Respublika! Experiments in the Performance of Participation and Democracy (2019, edited), Communication and Discourse Theory (2019, co-edited) and Communication as the Intersection of the Old and the New (2019, coedited).