Research groups

Communication and Education Research Group

Director: Santiago Tejedor Calvo 

The Communication and Education Research Group is a consolidated research group aimed at promoting research at the intersection of two disciplines: communication and education. Since its creation, it has developed initiatives designed to integrate, with awareness and freedom, new communication technologies within the so-called global or knowledge society. The Gabinet has been recognised by the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants of the Government of Catalonia as a consolidated research group, in recognition of its path, projection, and development. Its main research areas are educational television, media education, the development and management of educational projects, educational multimedia products, and social media education.

Communication, Culture, and Cooperation Futures and Research Laboratory (LAPREC)

Codirectors: Teresa Velázquez and Ricardo Carniel

The Communication, Culture, and Cooperation Futures and Research Laboratory (LAPREC) is a research group specialising in communication policies and cultural industries by region, cultural studies, discourse and communication analysis, and international development cooperation and regional communication. LAPREC includes two observatories: the Mediterranean Observatory of Communication (OMEC) and the Ibero-American Observatory of Communication (OIC), and has four research programme leaders, twenty researchers, and three research fellows attached to its projects.

Observatory for Spanish Fiction and New Technologies (OFENT)

Director: Charo Lacalle

The Observatory for Spanish Fiction and New Technologies (OFENT) is dedicated to the analysis of the production, programming, and reception of fiction content and its extension to Web 2.0, as well as to the study of genres that lie at the boundaries between fiction and information. The Observatory serves as a platform for exploring new methodological approaches, integrated within a socio-semiotic analysis of the feedback between television fiction and the cultural context in which programs are produced and consumed.

The main objectives of OFENT are to explore the construction of social identities in new transmedia narratives (e.g., youth, gender, immigration), to foster the training of early-career researchers through various projects and doctoral theses developed from OFENT’s theoretical and methodological proposals, and to contribute to knowledge dissemination through the observation and analysis of media and cultural phenomena, examined in relation to the cultural contexts in which they are generated and with which they interact.