New management team at InCom-UAB
InCom-UAB begins a new stage with the renewal of its management, headed by Josep Àngel Guimerà and Enric Marin Otto, elected unanimously on February 20. The new team aims to strengthen the centre, expand its research base and promote strategic lines in a context of profound changes in the communicative ecosystem. With the aim of combining continuity and renewal, InCom-UAB is projected as a key space to rethink communication policies and digital culture, strengthening its collaborative vocation and its role in contemporary academic and social debates.
On February 20, the elections to renew the management of InCom-UAB took place. A single candidacy headed by Josep Àngel Guimerà and Enric Marin Otto was presented, which was ratified without any votes against, or any votes in blank. Josep Àngel Guimerà has already assumed the management functions of the Center, while Enric Marín has been appointed “Commissioner of strategic management”. One of the immediate objectives set by the new management is to strengthen the centre by allocating more researchers to promote the priority lines of research. Work is also being done to consolidate the new management team by incorporating at least one sub-directorate and an academic secretariat.
Under the impulse of Professor Miquel de Moragas, InCom-UAB was created on December 18, 1997. Since its foundation, it has been conceived as a study and research centre of an interdepartmental nature and with a vocation for interuniversity collaboration for the realization of research, specialized training, social dissemination of knowledge, the promotion of scientific debate and the provision of advanced communication services, with preferential attention for innovations and, in general, for the new challenges that communication represents.
The candidacy presented by professors Guimerà i Marín takes into account the trajectory of InCom-UAB, the current moment of paradigm changes in the global and local communicative ecosystem, the moment of the faculty and the University, as well as the need to update in Catalonia public policies in the field of digital culture and communication. In this sense, collecting the testimony of the previous management team led by Professor Amparo Huertas, in this new stage we want to guarantee, simultaneously, continuity and updating in a context that invites us to work for a new impulse of the Center. To achieve this double objective, InCom-UAB wants to deepen its vocation of open space and meeting of the whole Faculty of Communication Sciences. And from this transversality, stimulate interfacultative and interuniversity collaborations.
The work proposal presented by Guimerà and Marín revolves around research and utility transfer focused on the analysis and definition of public policies in the field of communication and culture. In this sense, priority areas are defined as those of communication policies in the post-broadcasting era; the evolution of the link between communication, information technologies and generative AI; the challenges of local communication in Catalonia; media literacy; or the thematic axis language, communication and digital culture. The proposal is also committed to the involvement of InCom-UAB in the strategic project of Catalonia Media City.
All this work plan is part of the conviction that Catalonia needs to reconnect with the debates and research that exists in Europe and the rest of the world. Debates that have allowed in the last 10 or 15 years in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific to abound theoretical, methodological and political contributions in the field of communication, digital culture and journalism that have not always had enough echo among us.