About the conference

Through the eyes of Tomáš Trampota, the director of the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism (faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague):

This conference, under the auspices of the Central and East European Network of the European Communication Research and Education Association is part of an ongoing series of such conferences, jointly organized with our Polish and Slovak colleagues, which have in the past been held in the cities of Wroclaw, Brno, Telč and Bratislava.

The plan to hold this year's international conference in Prague actually took shape last may when I was having a walk around the city center of Krakow with Epp Lauk, Aukse Balcytiene and Boguslawa Dobek-Ostrowska - members of the management committee of the CEE network. It was all decided somewhere between the main square of the city (Rynek Glowny) and the shop selling traditional Polish krówki on Grodzka Street.

It has now been more than 20 years since the streets of Prague's city center were filled with the abandoned cars of east German citizens fleeing to West Germany through the Prague embassy. And, it has now been more than 20 years the Berlin Wall crumbled and with it the Iron Curtain that had "descended across the Continent", as Churchill famously stated. However, even after two decades of freedom and apparent openness, Central and Eastern Europe still seems to be holding on to remnants of that legacy of cultural separation from the West also in the area of the communication, media and journalism research.

(...)

Although we are geographically close to one another, and even though we may be working on similar research topics, addressing similar issues related to the fields of communication, media and journalism, we are all too often not aware of what our colleagues are working on.

To bring our researchers closer together, to give them a chance to get to know one another and better learn about current research projects was one of the reasons why the Central and Eastern Network of the European Communication Research and Education Association was created with the support of Nico Carpentier. That is why we are meeting today in Prague.

(From the foreword of Tomáš Trampota in the brochure of the CEECOM Prague 2012)