“Big Ideas – Challenging Public Relations Research and Practice”
1 keynote, 60 papers and 4 panels were presented at this year’s conference of the European Public Relations Education and Research Association (EUPRERA) at Aarhus BBS, Aarhus University, Denmark.
The idea of the congress theme “Big Ideas – Challenging Public Relations Research and Practice” was to bring Public Relations researchers out of their comfort zone by producing new ideas and discussing more theory-building, more cross-disciplinarity, more innovation in practice.
„Why ‚good communication‘ is making everything worse. Towards a paradox view on public relations” was the provocative title of a talk that Peter Winkler, Senior Researcher at the Department of Communication, presented together with Professor Kerstin Thummes from the University of Münster. They introduced a model on how to substantially engage with inevitable contradictions that arise from growing demands of corporate transparency, dialogue, and responsibility.
Uta Rußmann, Senior Researcher at the Department of Communication, together with Anne B. Lane, Queensland University of Technology, presented a cross-continent study conducted in Australia and Austria asking public relations practitioners how mandatory dialogue is used in practice. In their study “Dialogue between Theory and Practice – Challenges for Future Research Agendas” the discrepancies between the normative understanding of dialogue and its use in public relations practice in Australia and Austria were discussed. In a second presentation on “Perceptions on Instagram: How Stakeholders perceive postings on top candidate’ Instagram accounts”, Uta Rußmann presented an experiment and discussed the challenges for organizations when using Instagram.