The Jean Monnet Network
European Media and Platform Policy (EuromediApp) is a Jean Monnet network dedicated to studying, analysing and discussing benefits and challenges of digital platforms in Europe and world-wide. Companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are currently setting universal standards for online services, including media and communication. But their practices not always comply with European values such as openness, inclusivity, transparency, privacy, cooperation, and protection of data.
By bringing together knowledge and research capacity from all over Europe and beyond, EuromediApp provides space for national and transnational deliberation on how future digital services should and will be governed. Working papers, teaching material, workshops, conferences and dedicated schools for advanced students are our working tools (see below).
Core partners of the EuromediApp are the Universities of Leuven (Belgium), Minho (Portugal), Padova (Italy), Budapest (Hungary), Kaunas (Lithuania), Helsinki (Finland) and Salzburg (Austria). It draws on the experience of the Euromedia Research Group, a long-standing network of researchers on media policy in Europe.
Modules
EuromediApp operates for three years (2020 – 2023) along three modules:
- European political democracy (inclusion and exclusion, diversity and uniformity, trust and distrust);
- Quality of European (news) ecology, including journalism, individualised procedures of political information, populism, polarisation and depolarisation, personalisation, scandalisation, information/propaganda/misinformation; and
- European governance models of digital media and the internet by media/platform companies and governments, utopian and dystopian views of digital media and democracy.
Workshops and conferences
Academic experienced professors work in teams with young and early-career academics in each module. Findings are discussed in interdisciplinary workshops at the university level by all partners. Furthermore, findings and results are taken to the national level, where three dissemination conferences with stakeholders are organised by the network in Leuven, Kaunas and Braga. Participants and addressees are (media policy) politicians, journalists, editors, academics, communication professionals, lobbyists, civil society representatives, activists etc.
Finally, in 2023, a European dissemination conference will be held in Leuven, Belgium, with input from the research work of the network members, addressing the European policy level, European parliamentarians, representatives of the European Commission, media companies and global platform players.
Summer and winter schools
In parallel, the network disseminates its work in two academic summer and winter schools, in Salzburg, Austria, and Venice, Italy, following an open call for participants. Outstanding academic staff from the network and beyond will teach at these summer and winter schools and give advice to PhD projects and other research projects in the field.
Audio-visual teaching material
Network members develop audio-visual teaching material based on the latest publication by members of the Euromedia Research Group, “Comparative Media Policy, Regulation and Governance in Europe. Unpacking the Policy Cycle” (2018). All book chapters will be supplemented by professionally recorded audio-visual material produced by the network, and made available online in teaching units, available open access on this website.
