Research, projects
The departmental research hubs reflect the three main foci of research at the Department:
- Visual Culture Research Hub (led by Andrea Kárpáti);
- Digitalization & Media Communication Research Hub (led by Tamás Bokor);
- Communication & Cognition Research Hub (led by Réka Benczes).
The objectives of these research hubs are twofold. On the one hand, they pull together research projects at both the departmental and the doctoral level to enhance research potential; on the other hand, they contribute to making departmental research more visible to both the academia and the general public. Research projects can belong to more than one research hub (and some fall necessarily outside of the hubs).
Visual Culture Research Hub
The Visual Culture Research Hub focuses on the development and assessment of visual language use for professional and personal communication. Current research areas include:
- visual language use of children, adolescents and young adults through process-portfolio documentation and analysis of signs, symbols, narratives, and multimedia pieces (e.g., development of media iconographies on Instagram).
- new media and the visual communication of culture: the potentials of social media and AR/VR technologies in exhibition communication; Museum 3.0: transforming the museum experience into a more inclusive, fair, and enjoyable edutainment space.
- fashion communication: self-expression through dressing, accessorizing and make-up of adolescents and adults: cultural (historical) analysis and current case studies of iconic “style tribes” (dress codes of generations); integration of arts and social issues in fashion branding.
Benefits of research activities: all three areas perform both fundamental and applied research. The description of “new child / adolescent art” has been changing educational concepts of how young generations enter the emerging Age of the Image. Our skills development studies influenced curricula and textbooks in public education. Exposition communication is an important area of media and marketing practice, and our results support more effective transmission of cultural messages through current (and relevant for younger audiences) technology. As fashion strives to integrate “high art” and thematise social problems, our results may be used to improve education in and practice of fashion communication.
Collaboration with research hubs at the Department of Media and Communication: our expertise and interests overlap with the Digitalisation and Media Communication hub through the study of social media, and the Communication and Cognition research hub through the interpretation of the synergies of verbal and visual communication.
Digitalisation and Media Communication Research Hub
One significant research area of the Department of Communication and Media Science can be summarised as digitalisation and media communication. This research area rests on three main pillars. The research capacity and expertise of the colleagues cover the following:
- Digital (media) competencies, their enhancement potential and trans-generational observation in relation to disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality and deepfake.
- Digital learning in terms of education, arts, and rhetoric, seeking for answers to effective learning, enhancement of argumentative capacity, or participation and understanding of arts.
- Media representations and their impact on the ways of thinking, studying how media frames, taboos and conceptualisations work and how they influence the attitudes and mental frameworks of media consumers.
These pillars provide a stable framework in communication and media science both on the level of fundamental and applied research. Such studies in digitalisation and media communication can bear fruits –among others – in digital journalism, in the education of children and adults, in the communication of technological innovations, museum pedagogy, healthcare-related social communication, marketing communication of different sectors, in the creation of policy strategies, and in the research of applied behavioural psychology.
Communication and Cognition Research Hub
The Communication and Cognition Research Hub concentrates on the cognitive aspects of communication. Broadly speaking, it aims to describe and explain how the human mind makes sense of incoming messages and how new messages are generated by the mind. The hub contributes to a number of subfields within Communication Science, such as political communication, health communication, cross-cultural communication and organizational communication. Major research questions include the following:
- How do communicative messages reflect our conceptualizations and thus our knowledge of the world?
- How does figurative language in the form of metaphor/metonymy/etc. contribute to the efficiency of messages?
- How is meaning constructed/communicated via different frames and across different platforms?
Current research projects include both international collaborations with top-ranking universities, such as Monash University, as well as partnerships with national research centres, such as the Eötvös Loránd Research Network. The hub works closely together with the Corvinus Metaphor Workshop, which has been established with the aim to disseminate results of applied metaphor research carried out by Corvinus faculty and students.