Funded Research Projects

Nordic observatory for digital media and information disorders (NORDIS), European Commission, European Media Observatory 1.9.2021-31.8.2023

Media platforms and social accountability: Dynamics, practices and discourses (MAPS), Academy of Finland 2020-2024

MAPS examines digital media platforms as crucial sites for accountability processes and debates across a range of global contexts. The primary question motivating the project is: How is accountability is produced, enacted and articulated in the digital media environment?

Reshaping Attention and Inclusion Strategies for Distinctively vulnerable people among the forcibly displaced (RAISD) EU Horizon 2020, 2019-2021

Forced displacement crises overcome societies and institutions all over the world. Pushed by the urgencies rather than events, solutions are frequently reactive, partial, and disregard some groups.  The project aims at identifying highly vulnerable groups among these forcibly displaced people, analysing their specific needs, and finding suitable practices to address them. The concept of ‘vulnerability context’ considers the interplay between the features of these persons and their hosting communities, their interactions and experiences, and how different solutions for attention and inclusion affect them. As a result of this work, a methodology to carry out these studies will be developed. Our research strategy will be based on methodological triangulation (i.e. the combined application of several methodologies). We will implement it through a specific participatory action research approach to fulfil the aim of undertaking advocacy-focused research, grounded in human rights and socio-ecological models.

Racisms and public communications in the hybrid media environment  (HYBRA) Academy of Finland, 2016-2019

Media, information management and emotional currents in the refugee crisis 2016-2018

The Crisis in Ukraine
The Helsingin Sanomat Foundation Project entitled “The Ukrainian Crisis in the Media. The Visual Framing and the Circulation of War Photography in a Changing Visual Economy” will run between 2014 and 2016, with Mervi Pantti as its principal investigator. This project examines the visual framing of the Ukranian crisis in mainstream European news outlets and various online networks. The study compares how major European news outlets, for example, Helsingin Sanomat, Dagens Nyheter, Süddeutsche Zeitung and The Guardian, visually frame the conflict. In addition, it explores how Finland’s geopolitical position has shaped the coverage of the crisis in Finland’s mainstream news media, Helsingin Sanomat, YLE, MTV3. The project also looks at how images of the crisis that originate from Russian and Ukrainian sources circulate in social media as well as how they are being re-packaged and interpreted within mainstream Western media. The project will be carried out in collaboration with the Research Centre COMET at the University of Tampere.

Amateur Images and Global News
The Helsingin Sanomat Foundation Project entitled “Amateur Images: A Comparative Study on How Audiences are Shaping Professional News” ran from 2011 to 2013. Mervi Pantti was the principal investigator in this international comparative research project, which examined how major news organizations and their audiences are responding to the growing availability of citizen and activist produced imagery in the context of crisis reporting. The project was a collaborative effort conducted with Professor Stuart Allan (Cardiff University) and Dr. Kari Andén-Papadopoulos (Stockholm University).

Mediated Emotions
A Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship was awarded for the research project “Mediation of Emotions: Sentimental Citizens, Communities of Feeling and the Emotional Public Sphere” conducted at the University of Amsterdam.