The Media, Communication and Sport Section (MCS) will be holding online elections for one co-chair and one vice-chair positions, for the term 2024 - 2028.
The elections will be held online from 23 April to 14 May using the SurveyMonkey platform. Individual members and representatives of institutional members in good standing, who are also registered as members of the Media, Communication and Sport Section will be eligible to stand for a position and to vote. Voters will receive a voting link on 23 April.
To verify if you are a member of the MCS Section, log in to your IAMCR account and select “My Sections and Working Groups” from the menu.
See the candidates and read their statements below.
Read about the Media, Communication and Sport Section
More information and timeline at https://iamcr.org/s-wg/elections2024
Candidates
For Co-chair:
For Vice chair:
Statements
Peter English (University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia)
I am a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. My research focuses on sports journalism and sports media, with an emphasis on journalists, content, and social media. I was awarded my PhD in Journalism from the University of the Sunshine Coast in 2014, when I started there as a full-time lecturer.
Since then, I have completed a single-authored book, Australian Sports Journalism: Power, Control and Threats (Routledge) and published more than 35 journal articles and five book chapters in international and domestic publications. My work has appeared in a range of high-impact international journals, including New Media & Society, Digital Journalism, Journalism, Communication & Sport, and Sport & Society. My sports-related scholarship has also included chapters in the Routledge Handbook of Sports Journalism, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, and Investigative Journalism in Changing Times. I am currently co-writing chapters in Routledge handbooks on sports media in South Asia, and diversity in Australian sports media.
I am also a collaborator in both the International Sports Press Survey and the Worlds of Journalism Study. Other academic research has been published on media representations of North Korea’s participation in the 2018 Winter Olympics, and the 2018 Invictus Games.
A current research focus is the Brisbane 2032 Olympics and Paralympics. This includes examining media representations of sporting issues, understanding sentiment, and investigating legacy. The Sunshine Coast will be one of the areas hosting the Games, highlighting the importance of these topics to my home region, and I am on committees helping to advise on the mega-event.
I am highly involved in scholarly associations, including being a vice-president since 2019 of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia, the key scholarly association in the field in the country. In 2022, I was appointed as co-editor of Australian Journalism Review, the primary outlet for research about journalism in Australia.
As a practitioner, I have worked as a sports journalist for more than two decades, writing across domestic and international media. Recent coverage includes articles about cycling and cricket, as well as reporting on the media’s role at the Tokyo 2021 Olympics. At the University of the Sunshine Coast, I work with the High Performance Student-Athlete Program as an adviser, media trainer and researcher.
My relationship with IAMCR goes back to Madrid 2019, when I attended the conference as an early-career researcher. I also presented at Lyon 2023, where I was approached about the possibility of joining the IAMCR Media, Communication & Sport Section management team.
I nominate as a Co-Chair for the term 2024-28 to help build the section, in collaboration with the incumbent Co-Chair, Xavier Ramon, and other members of the management team. My goals involve aiming to increase diversity and international visibility of contributions, including from researchers in the Global South. I also intend to help mentor researchers, particularly by supporting younger scholars looking to develop their research trajectories through international collaborations.
Dr Peter English, School of Business and Creative Industries, University of the Sunshine Coast
penglish@usc.edu.au
Veronika Macková (Charles University, Czech Republic)
Veronika Macková is an academic researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague. Previously, she held a position as a journalist at Czech Television, which is why she mainly teaches practical journalism-oriented courses. Her areas of research interest include sports journalism and artificial intelligence journalism. In her academic publications, she focuses mainly on Para sports and athletes with a disability. She also belongs to the research team of two international projects as well as several projects supported by the Technical Agency of the Czech Republic. Veronika Macková was also part of the COVID-19 Infodemia project, which won three awards. The project became the absolute winner of the tenth annual award of the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic. COVID-19 Infodemia also won the Miloslav Petrusek Prize for presentation 2021 (the project team donated the financial reward associated with it to the endowment fund of the UK for the support of academic researchers from Ukraine) and won the prize in the category Effective planning, research and evaluation of communication in the international competition of media analysts AMEC Awards.
I have a personal connection with IAMCR conferences because the 2015 conference in Montreal, Canada was the first conference of my academic career. I consider these conferences – and the sessions held by the Media, Communication, and Sport Section (MCS) – to be of high quality and beneficial to the development of the field. Since then, I have attended five IAMCR conferences. At the last one, I was offered to consider running for the position of Vice Chair for the term 2024 - 2028. I would like to hold this position because I know that the current management is guiding this section very effectively and has done a lot of good work, so I would like to continue with Xavier Ramon and other members of the management team in contributing to the section's success. I wish for our sport section to continue growing, with new members bringing in great ideas for research in the field of media and sport.
Dr Veronika Macková, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic)
veronika.mackova@fsv.cuni.cz