University of Vienna · Department of Communication
Univ.-Prof Dr. Katharine
Sarikakis
Professor of Communication Science with Specialisation in Media Governance, Media Organisation and Media Industries
About
Katharine
Sarikakis
Katharine Sarikakis is Professor of Communication Science at the University of Vienna, where she held the Jean Monnet Chair of European Media Governance and Integration. She leads the Media Governance and Industries Research Lab which she founded in 2011.
Her work asks a single, urgent question through many registers: who controls communicative space, and what does that mean for citizens? Over three decades, she has pursued this question across regulatory frameworks, digital platforms, cultural industries, gender and rights — producing scholarship that refuses to treat media governance as a technical or neutral enterprise.
Katharine has shaped the field not only through her research but through the institutional structures she has built for it. She is the founding and twice-elected Chair of the Communication Law and Policy Section of ECREA, a section she created, and has served as elected Chair of the Communication Law and Policy Division of the ICA, and as the youngest ever elected Vice President of IAMCR. These are a record of sustained, peer-recognised leadership at the highest levels of the international discipline.
Her career has spanned the United Kingdom at Coventry University and later Leeds University, where she headed the Centre for International Communication Research, and Vienna, where her research now runs across multiple European funded projects examining video games regulation, platform governance, and democratic accountability. She is co founder and Editor of the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics and currently a Visiting Professor at King's College London. Katharine has been a Senior Visiting Fellow at LSE and held the Santander Chair of Excellence at UC3M. She was also an associated researcher at the University of Witwatersrand South Africa and held the inaugural Anders Chair for Global Media at Karlstadt University in Sweden.
She teaches through the Socratic method underpinned by the conviction that rigorous enquiry and lived social experience are not in tension but indeed they are the same thing.
There is a struggle for control over communicative spaces — perhaps more pertinent and urgent than ever: it is the struggle of social actors, private entities and states.
If the aim of democracy, as opposed to authoritarianism, is the utmost participation of citizens in public life, then this public life can only be conducive to meaningful citizens' participation when openness, humanity, compassion and commitment are the pillars upon which institutions and processes are based.
Scientific Output
Research Publications
Active Research
Current Projects
GameHearts.eu
Investigating the social, cultural, and economic role of the European videogame ecosystem.
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Developing sustainability pathways for video-on-demand platforms and media ecosystems.
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Strengthening international visibility and discoverability of European animation industries.
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