Goals and Practice

Based on a social scientific approach, our work at NIMCS is guided by five main goals:

• Community. Our first goal is to create a strong, intercultural, and supportive community of young scholars who work together to promote systematic and empirical knowledge in the field of media and communication.
• Collaboration. Our second goal is to promote the importance of research collaboration within and across disciplines and boundaries. This relates not only to theoretical perspectives, but also to methodological approaches to empirical research issues.
• Comparability. Our third goal is to promote the need for comparative perspectives between countries, across social groups, and over time.
• Criticality. Our fourth goal is to promote a clear, critical perspective on contemporary research and theory in media and communication, based on the first three pillars — collaboration, community, and comparability.
• Diversity. Our fifth goal is to promote cross-boundary critical and comparative research by working to promote a diverse group of issues and participants in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, socioeconomic status, physical abilities, religious beliefs, and political beliefs.

In Practice

While the mission and goals above may sound noble, it is up to us, the members of NIMCR, to breathe life into them. In doing so, we will call upon social scientists in fields such as anthropology, computer science, economics, geography, law, psychology, and sociology, all of whom share an interest in interdisciplinary media and communication research and are willing to examine issues from a comparative perspective.

We foresee regular meetings at approximately six-month intervals, during which we will develop and advance our joint and individual research. Additionally, we plan on implementing digital tools that allow us to share contacts and to discuss our interests and ongoing projects at any time.

In initiating this group, we will invite scholars from different countries and with different expertise to meet and discuss the nature of the network, our aims and the ways we will operate, with the goal of representing as diverse a group of scholars as possible worldwide.

In doing so, this collaborative effort may take on many different forms — the creation of a common research question, peer-to-peer feedback on current projects or methodological challenges of comparative research, common conference submissions or co-organized workshops, for example. However, it is up to the members of NIMCR to determine how we can work together and to share their needs and interests.