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The great Romanian election TikTok replay
The great Romanian election TikTok replay
Presented during the 2025 Digital Methods Initiative Winter School, this project aimed to explore how TikTok was used during and after the 2024 Romanian presidential elections. The project explored two approaches for critically replaying Romanian election videos: making video composites based on viral candidate soundtracks, and making post-election hashtag soundscapes. Beyond evaluating informational content, group replay formats can also highlight the everyday situations, aesthetics and affective dimensions of election TikTok videos – from sexualised lip-syncing to rousing AI anthems, sponsored micro-influencer testimonials to post-communist nationalist nostalgia.
The project team included Dr. Liliana Bounegru and Dr. Jonathan Gray (King's College London & The Public Data Lab), Dr. Elena Negrea-Busuioc (SNSPA) and Dr. Eduard Gross (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu).
A detailed project description can be found here.
Mapping Uncharted Waters: The Presence and Influence of Post-Truth Spaces in European Mainstream media
Mapping Uncharted Waters: The Presence and Influence of Post-Truth Spaces in European Mainstream media
Presented during the 2024 Digital Methods Initiative Summer School, this project sought to locate post-truth spaces in Facebook networks in the Czech, Polish, Romanian and Slovak languages, found through keyword queries concerning the Russia-Ukraine war, July, 2023-July, 2024. These countries were selected given their targeting by Russia’s influence as well as the work conducted there by fact-checkers and journalists seeking to expose them. In fact, this project aimed to contribute to methodologies that surface leads for fact checkers. It also aimed to measure the impact of post-truth spaces through an influence metric that gauges the extent of their interpenetration with more mainstream and central media spaces (where the constitution of the mainstream is also of interest).
The project team included Sofia Bonfanti, Liliana Bounegru, Fabio Daniele, Michaela Dubóczi, Kamila Koronska, Elena Negrea-Busuioc, Richard Rogers, Giulia Tucci and Ahmad Zareie.
The project description can be found here.
Communicating Science to Young Generations: Metaphors Our Children Learn by (ComMetSci)
Communicating Science to Young Generations: Metaphors Our Children Learn by (ComMetSci)
ComMetSci is an interdisciplinary research project that uses cognitive linguistic, textbook analysis and communication approaches to examine the role that metaphor play in scientific education. Metaphors are efficient and attractive ways to explain abstract ideas in familiar terms, and they provide the basis for understanding core concepts from physics (e.g. light in terms of 'waves'), chemistry (e.g. links between molecules as chemical 'bonding') and biology (e.g. synaptic receptor as 'key-lock mechanism'). This project seeks to explore how science metaphors and analogies are understood and misunderstood by young learners and the implications that (mis-) understanding complex scientific ideas might have for students' preparedness to make sense of the world we live in and, ultimately, for their future engagement with, and interest in science.
A short presentation of the project can be found here.
Related publications
Negrea-Busuioc, E., Simion, D.-L., & Udrea, G. (2025). The heart is a pump, a dollhouse, a car or a ship: How students use conventional and spontaneously generated creative metaphors to understand biology concepts. Science & Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-025-00691-8
Negrea-Busuioc, E. (2023). ‘Vaccine as a cheat sheet’: a metaphor gone awry on Facebook. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1198172. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1198172
Negrea-Busuioc, E., Ștefăniță, O., & Guiu, G. (2022). Science meets metaphor: Teaching and communicating about abstract concepts in Romanian science textbooks. Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations, vol. 24, no. 1 (55), 47-60. https://doi.org/10.21018/rjcpr.2022.1.339
More information about the project here.
A short presentation of the project is available below.
COMMETSCI presentation.pptx
Fostering a Healthy Society through Science and Communication: An Innovative and Integrative Platform for Scientific and Media Education in Schools (Știință și comunicare pentru o societate sănătoasă: Platformă inovativă și integrativă de educație științifică și educație media în școli și licee)
The project “Fostering a Healthy Society through Science and Communication: An Innovative and Integrative Platform for Scientific and Media Education in Schools” aims to enhance media education by familiarizing students and teachers in Romanian schools with science communication and science journalism, thereby contributing to the development of a healthy society. It seeks to stimulate students’ interest in STEM fields and research through an innovative, integrated approach that addresses the current gaps in media and scientific literacy in Romania. The project combines scientific education, science communication, and media and digital literacy activities to transform how science and research are perceived and understood by both students and educators.
Led by the Institute of Sociology of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, the project consortium includes SNSPA, represented by Dr. Elena Negrea-Busuioc.
The project proposal was submitted to the 2024 "Știința în școli" (SS-SC) competition, funded by UEFISCDI (Romanian Research Funding Council), with results expected in May 2025.
@DMC Hub 2025
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