Project description
Emotions as embodied knowledge in fact-based media production
Media production has focused on objectivity, but emotions are crucial for content and audience engagement. Despite their importance, the emotional impact on media professionals remains unexplored, hindering efforts to address mental well-being and audience disconnection. The ERC-funded AFfacts project aims to integrate emotions as embodied knowledge into fact-based media through empirical, theoretical, and practical methods. It will conduct ethnographic research with media professionals in journalism and documentary filmmaking across six Central and Eastern European countries. The project will explore the role of emotions in these media forms, develop a framework for affective epistemology, and organise nature retreats to assess how ecotherapy can enhance emotional literacy and mental well-being in media work.
Objective
Fact-based media production such as journalism and documentary filmmaking depend on truthfulness, reliability, and accuracy. Traditionally, their epistemologies set objectivity, rationality, and mind against subjectivity, emotionality, and bodily experience. Recently, media studies have seen an emotional turn: a rapid increase in scholarly attention to the role of emotions, affect, and bodily sensations in media production, content, and consumption. Yet, the epistemic value of emotions and bodies – how they limit and enable what media professionals know – is yet to be seriously considered. Furthermore, the rational/emotional dichotomy mindset has contributed to a professional culture that suppresses feelings, leaving media industries unable to adequately respond to emotion-related challenges of media labour, such as media professionals’ mental well-being or the disconnect between media and their audiences. This project’s vision is to empirically (O1), theoretically (O2), and practically (O3) integrate emotions as embodied knowledge in fact-based media epistemologies. Based on ethnographic research among media professionals working in three production “nodes” – journalism and documentary filmmaking about politics, conflicts, and culture, located in six Central-Eastern European countries – the project first seeks to understand the epistemic value of emotions and bodily experiences in journalism and documentary filmmaking. Second, the project aims to comprehensively theorize the epistemic value of emotions and bodies in fact-based media production by developing and elaborating the concepts of affective epistemology and the epistemic affordances of emotions. Third, the project experiments with a series of nature retreats for media professionals, to test whether and how ecotherapy can enhance journalists’ and documentary filmmakers’ emotional literacy and mental well-being and help practically integrate emotions and bodily experiences into fact-based media production.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities philosophy, ethics and religion philosophy epistemology
- social sciences media and communications journalism
- humanities arts modern and contemporary art cinematography
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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1012WX Amsterdam
Netherlands
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