Institute for Communication Studies

Communication studies at the UDE understands interpersonal communication processes as a specific and genuinely social practice whose structural and functional characteristics are understood as an independent object of investigation. This means that communicative processes are not examined solely with reference to the specific semanticity of communication media, the cognitive competencies of the communicators or the socio-structural framework conditions. Rather, the situation- and organization-specific formats, their multimodality and multimediality, their synchronicity and sequentiality, the semiotic resources used by the actors and their realization conditions determined by digital and technical infrastructures form the subject of research and teaching at the Institute. Communication research in this way is necessarily in close exchange with sociological, psychological, ethnological, linguistic and media studies research, whose findings it integrates in order to further develop its independent research questions and methods.

With this conceptual structure and in contrast to the mass communication science perspectives, the Institute at the UDE is able to take into account the knowledge interests of innovative communication research under the new challenges of its subject area in the social transformation fields (digitalization, globalization, diversity and participation, work and mobility, etc.). This is also reflected in technologically changed methodological approaches in research and teaching. This research and teaching profile gives the Institute a unique selling point in Germany. The Institute of Communication Studies at the UDE is part of the Faculty of Humanities, which is one of the largest faculties at the UDE with over 300 employees.

Networking

# Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI), Essen
# Data Campus /Digital Humanities/Multimodal Corpora, UDE
# Society for Applied Linguistics | Conversation Research Section
# Scientific network “Artistic-creative gainful employment”, DFG
# Joint project: Center Ass. Technologies Rhine-Ruhr
# Sub-projects within the DFG research group “Practices of Personal Reference” (Essen, Hamburg, Münster)
# European Academy of Sciences and Arts

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