Visiting scholar Julia Jakob at the Media Use Research Group
This semester the Media Use Research Group has had its first visiting scholar since the start of the pandemic.
Hovedinnhold
Julia Jakob is a doctoral student from the University of Mannheim, Germany. She investigates the quality of online debates across different types of democracy and different online communication arenas. Her PhD project focuses specifically on the argumentative quality of these discussions, and, more broadly, is interested in whether the theory of public deliberation should be further developed to accommodate the peculiarities of public communication in the digital age.
During Jakob’s stay in Bergen she has worked on a qualitative study exploring the interplay of personal storytelling with rational justifications in citizen-generated argumentation online. She presented her study to the Media Use Group and received a lot of “food for thought” as well as discussed, her work with members of the group. She says: “The feedback of the group was very helpful to me in reworking the draft of this study, which is my “major accomplishment” for this semester”.
Julia Jakob enjoyed her stay in Bergen: “People here were incredibly welcoming to me. It was easy to get in touch with the colleagues and I enjoyed a lot of interesting exchanges both academically and socially – be in during the meetings, the Thursday lunches, in one-on-one lunches, the ICA workshop or just in the halls”.
She also enjoyed getting to know the Norwegian culture and practicing her Norwegian. To summarize her stay she says: “I am very glad to have started to build an international academic network here, which is incredibly important for young scholars but has not been easy for me during the pandemic”.
Julia Jakob’s stay at the University of Bergen was funded by the German Academic Exchange Service.