Claudia Padovani

Claudia is researcher and senior lecturer in Political Science and International Relations at the Department of Politics, Law and International Studies (SPGI) of the University of Padova, Italy.

At the University of Padova, she teaches courses in International Communication, Politics of the Global Societies and Sustainable Development, Intercultural Dialogue and territoriality (within an Erasmus Mundus Master). She is reference person for a number of Erasmus exchange flows with European institutions, is delegated by the SPGI to support the internationalization of its research and training activities and has organized, over the years, several international high level scientific events, mostly focused on the nexus between global transformations and communication, media and mediations, governance and networks.

Her main areas of interest concern the transformation of political processes in the global context and their connection to the evolution of communication dynamics and technologies. These include global governance, multi-stakeholderism, network approaches to the study of global politics; global communication policy and Internet Governance: issues, actors, networks; trans-national social mobilizations around media reform, media democratization and communication rights; global civil society as a global actor, the transformative role of norms and power in world politics, trans-national advocacy networks. Most recently her areas of investigation have moved towards a better understanding of the connections and disconnection between communication and women and gender-related issues with a focus on related governing arrangements and social practices, both at the European level and transnationally.

She has been for eight years member of the International Council of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) where she currently chairs (since 2008) the Working Group on Global Media Policy and is a member of the Task Force on Communication Policy. She has been appointed to the Council of the ORBICOM network of UNESCO Chairs in Communication (awaiting to be nominated chair of a UNESCO Chair in Global communications and governance. She has been co-coordinator of the Communication and Democracy Section of the ECREA, European Communication Research and Education Association and is member of the EuroMedia Research Group. Finally, Claudia sits in the Steering Committee of the Italian Political Science Society (SISP), where she is also the focal point for the International section of the Standing group in Political Communication.

She has published extensively on topics related to her research interests, with interventions in international journals and contributions to international collections, with a special focus on Global Media Policy.  She also sits in editorial boards of international journals (Continuum. Journal of Media and Cultural Studies; Anuario ININCO: investigaciones de la comunicación;  Partecipazione e Conflitto) and book series (the forthcoming IAMCR series published by Palgrave McMillan).

Furthermore, she collaborates with non-academic, not-for-profit national and international institutions operating in media and communication-related areas such as the Communication Rights in the Information Society international Campaign (CRIS, 2001-2006) and the international monitoring project Who Makes the News (www.whomakesthenews.org).

Claudia is single mum of a challenging and inspiring 12 years old young women; she likes traveling and intercultural encounters; she loves music and figurative art and cultivates a passion for dances and dancing.

Ongoing international research activities

From 2007 to date, Claudia has been promoter and active member of the Mapping Global Media Policy project, an independent project initiated by the Global Media Policy Working Group of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), hosted and supported by an academic consortium led by Media@McGill, a research and public outreach hub based at McGill University (Canada), and including University of Padova (Italy) and the Center for Media and Communication Studies (CMCS) at Central European University (Hungary). She contributed to designing the framework and structure of a digital platform for the project, accessible at: www.globalmediapolicy.net.

She is currently engaged in structuring a thematic island in the Mapping Platform titled ‘Gender-oriented Communication Governance’ (http://www.globalmediapolicy.net/island/1117); in this context, a European section of the database is being developed while opportunities for collaboration are being discussed with the International Federation of Journalists, the World Association for Christian Communication and GMMP, the UNESCO.

Since July 2012, Claudia is also engaged in a European project, titled Study on Area J of the Beijing Platform for Action: Women and the Media in European Union (EIGE/2012/OPER/07), in response to a call for tender funded by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). Claudia is senior researcher in a consortium led by the University of Liverpool (Karen Ross) and including the University of Segreb (Hungary) and the Osservatorio di Pavia (Italy). The aim of the project is to investigate the role and status of women in decision-making positions in European media industries (27 countries + Croatia) and to produce a set of indicators to be presented by the forthcoming Irish presidency to the European Council in 2013 for adoption by Member States.

Over the period 2011-2013 another project is been conducted, titled Networks and Power in Gender-oriented Communication Governance. Funded by the University of Padova and conducted in cooperation with Elena Pavan (University of Trento) the project aims at empirically analyzing the area of trans-national communication governance that focuses on the nexus between women, media and communication (GoC_Gov). The final aim is to provide an articulated overview of GoC_Gov as it evolved over the past decades, while contributing to shed new light on the conduct and mechanisms of international politics, looking at how normative frameworks evolve in the supra-national context, through the intervention of a plurality of interacting actors. Moreover, the project aims at producing relevant knowledge to support activities carried on by researchers, activists, media professionals and policy makers and strengthen stakeholders’ capacity to act with a particular focus on relevant upcoming events such as the Beijing+20 and WSIS+10 United Nations conferences on Women and the Information and Knowledge Societies.