What constitutes a good life in a deeply mediatized society, and when do media support (or undermine) people’s sense of belonging, agency, and political voice? These are the questions Emilija Gagrčin explores in her research. She examines how people experience, interpret, and collectively shape their relationship to society in the context of multiple crises, and what role media play in this process. At the heart of her work is the question of the social, normative, and infrastructural conditions under which political imagination and participation emerge.
Before joining the University of Bremen, Emilija Gagrčin was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bergen, where her RESDEM project investigated how polarization shapes democratic participation, using local conflicts around wind energy expansion in Baden-Württemberg as a case study. Previously, she conducted research at the University of Mannheim and completed her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society.
She sees the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) as a particularly good fit for her research: "In German communication studies, which tend to be more quantitatively oriented, ZeMKI is a special place. It shows how qualitative and mixed-methods approaches can drive theoretical work forward, and do so within large research consortia and with international visibility." One such consortium is the DFG- and FWF-funded research group "Communicative AI" (ComAI), coordinated at ZeMKI. In Bremen, Gagrčin will take over the Qualitative Methods module and leads the newly established GLaMS Lab (Good Life & Media Society) at ZeMKI.
In 2025, she received the Early Career Researcher Award in the Social Sciences and Humanities from the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters (DKNVS). She also serves as chair of the Young Scholars Network of the European Communication Research and Education Association (YECREA), where she works to strengthen support for early-career researchers.
