Advisory Board
Professor Mia Lövheim
Professor in the Sociology of Religion, at the Department of Theology, Uppsala University, Sweden. After completing her doctorate in 2004 with the dissertation ”Intersecting Identities: Young People, Religious Identity and Interaction on the Internet”, she did postdoctoral work at the Institute for Media and Communication at the University of Oslo, in Norway. Her project “Between Postmodernity and Tradition: Young Women's Values in Mediated Stories on the Internet” focused on young Swedish popular female blogger and pursued further the theme of her dissertation on changing arenas for and tendencies in constructions of identity, with a particular focus on performances of gender, values and religion. He current research focuses on the use of religion as a category for negotiations of values and political positions in Swedish press and public service broadcast media, carried out within the research projects “The Impact of Religion: Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy”(Uppsala University, http://www.crs.uu.se/Research/impactofreligion/Theme_1/) and "Engaging with Conflicts in Mediatized Religious Environments (University of Oslo, http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/research/projects/comrel/). She is the president of the International Society for Media, Religion and Culture 2016-2018 (http://ismrc.colorado.edu/).
Associate Professor Amit Pinchevski
Amit Pinchevski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem,Israel, where he has been teaching since 2004, after completing his doctoral research at McGill University, Canada. His research interests are in philosophy of communication and media theory, focusing specifically on the ethical aspects of the limits of communication, media as means of witnessing and memory, and pathologies of communication and their construction. He is theauthor of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication and coeditor of two books, Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (with P. Frosh) and Ethics of Media (with N. Couldry and M. Madianou). He is co-editor of the Philosophy/Communication book series for Duquesne University Press. In 2011 he was a Visiting Scholar at theAnnenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and in the following year the recipient of the James A. Jaksa Scholar in Residence award from the National Communication Ethics Conference. Between 2011-2015 he served as vice-chairand chair of the Philosophy, Theory and Critique Division of the International Communication Association.
Professor Anna Reading
Professor of Culture and Creative Industries, Kings College, London, UK. Anna Reading is a playwright, author and academic, leading research in the field of social and cultural memory studies. In her latest book, “Gender and Memory in the Globital Age” (Palgrave 2016) her research develops the new epistemology of memory in an unevenly globalized digitized environment that she terms the globital age. She develops dynamic methods of digital trajectories to understand the immersive and connective ecologies of gendered social memory. She is the author and editor of five other books and many articles on media, gender and cultural memory, including "Polish women, solidarity and feminism" (1992, MacMillan), "The social inheritance of the Holocaust: gender, culture and memory" (2002, Palgrave) "Save as...digital memories" edited with J. Garde-Hansen and A. Hoskins (2009, Palgrave) and Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles: Powerful Times edited with Tamar Katriel. She is involved in a number of funded international projects including Data Centres: Territory, Community and Labour with colleagues Prof Brett Nielson, Prof Ned Rossiter and Dr Tanya Notley at Western Sydney University; a pan European network entitled Digital Memories of the Shoah led by Prof. Yra Van Dijk and Dr. David Duindan at Leiden University and seed funded project on Migration and Belonging as part of her international role as an Alliance PLuS Fellow working with colleagues in Australia and the US. Anna Reading is currently on the Expert Committee for the Development of Creative Industries in Russia and the New East for the Calvert 22 Foundation. She acts as a consultant to museums on the Holocaust especially on questions of gender and memory, and digital memory. Her new research, which includes writing her eighth play, concerns what she has coined as ‘Future Memory’: the role of creativity and the imaginary in memories of anticipated totalitarian future pasts.
Professor Tony Walter
Honorary Professor of Death Studies, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath, UK, and past Director of CDAS. After a PhD in Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, Tony worked for 20 years as a freeelance writer, before returning to academia with posts at the University of Reading (1994-2007) and Bath (2006 onwards). His main research interest since 1990 has been the sociology of death, dying, bereavement, funerals, pilgrimage, and afterlife beliefs, including most recently: the internet and social networks at the end of life, the role of angels in contemporary mourning, and why different modern countries manage death differently. His publications include 12 single authored books, 1 edited and 3 co-edited books, and numerous articles and book chapters. His most cited article from the past decade is 'Does the Internet Change How we Die and Mourn?' Omega 64(4), 2012. His books include 'Pilgrimage in Popular Culture' (with Ian Reader, Macmillan 1993), 'The Revival of Death' (Routledge 2014), 'The Mourning for Diana' (Berg 1999), 'Social Death' (with Jana Králová, Routledge 2016), and 'What Death Means Now: thinking critically about dying and grieving' (Policy Press 2017). He also works with the churches and Civil Ceremonies Ltd, training funeral celebrants.
Special Scientific Advisor
Charles M. Ess
Charles Ess (PhD, Pennsylvania State University, USA) is Professor in Media Studies, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. He has received awards for teaching and scholarship. His research and publications emphasize cross-cultural and ethical perspectives in Internet Studies, and Information and Computing Ethics. Recent books include Digital Media Ethics (Polity Press, 2nd edition in 2013), and (with Mia Consalvo), The Handbook of Internet Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Recent book chapters include: What’s “culture” got to do with it? A (personal) review of CATaC (Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication), 1998-2014. In Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories (Gerard Goggin, Mark McLelland, eds.), 34-48; and (forthcoming), God Out of the Machine?: The Politics and Economics of Technological Development, in A. Beavers (ed.), Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Philosophy (MIHP) 10. Macmillan. Recent journal special issues include “Communication and Technology,” a special double issue of The Annals of the International Communication Association: Volume 1, Issues 3, 4 (September, December 2017) 2017).
Ess serves as an ethics advisor for a number of research projects, such as: Responsible Ethical Learning with Robotics – REELER (H2020). Ess has held guest professorships in Norway, Germany, Denmark, and France, and is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Drury University (Springfield, Missouri, USA). Ess is a founding member of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP); he has served as Vice-President and then President of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), and as President (2012-2016) of the International Society for Ethics in Information Technology (INSEIT).
