Janja Žmavc
Dr. Janja Žmavc is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Primorska, Koper, and a Senior Research Associate at the Educational Research Institute in Ljubljana (ERI). She is the head of the Centre for Discourse Studies in Education and oversees the Educational Research program at ERI.
She collaborates with Slovenian universities, teaching rhetoric and pedagogical communication. She is a member of the Scientific Council for Interdisciplinary Studies and chairs the Expert Group for Science Promotion at the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency. She is also involved in various national expert advisory groups. Internationally, she is engaged in both research and teaching at various institutions, including universities in Zagreb (Croatia), Oxford, Durham (United Kingdom), Oslo (Norway), Sofia (Bulgaria), Belgrade (Serbia), and Warsaw (Poland).
Her research focuses on language in education, encompassing classics, rhetoric, argumentation, linguistic pragmatic analysis, and pedagogy. In recent years, her research has been expanded with multilingualism and policy discourse on EdTech. She actively disseminates her findings to educational practice, cooperating with policymakers and educators and providing lectures and workshops in rhetoric and argumentation for teachers at the primary and secondary levels. With over twenty years of teaching experience and extensive research, she gathered an interdisciplinary team of Slovenian researchers from education, theatre studies, philosophy, and linguistics. Together, they are developing an interdisciplinary model for the process oriented teaching of rhetoric in primary and secondary schools.
She has authored and co-authored three scientific monographs and about forty papers and articles in various national and international journals, books, and proceedings. Her recent publications include some noteworthy titles such as “A Vertical Framework for Teaching Oral Performance in Primary School” (Žmavc & Cestnik forth.), “The EU Policy Discourse on EdTech and Constructing the Image of an Excellent Teacher” (Žmavc & Bezlaj forth.), “Systematic teaching of oral performance in Slovene lessons as a starting point for cross- curricular integration and developing plurilingualism” (Žmavc 2024), “Rhetoric, oracy and citizenship: curricular innovations from Scotland, Slovenia and Norway” (Holmes- Henderson, Žmavc, & Kaldahl 2022), “The rhetorical perspective of communicative competence and its current research and teaching” (Žmavc 2022), “The rhetoric of the teacher’s authority” (Žmavc 2021), and “Rhetorical Ethos: an attempt at linguistic pragmatic perspective on classical rhetoric” (Žmavc 2018).
In 2012, she received the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency Award for Special Achievements in the Humanities.
Viktorija Car
Viktorija Car (PhD in Media and Communication) is a Full Professor at the University of Split at the Communication and Media studies. Previously she worked for 22 years at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Political Science, Media and Communication Department. She is a Research Fellow of the Social Science Research Center at Mississippi State University, USA. In the focus of her scientific research are visual culture and visual media, media narratives, digital activism, media and diversity, and public service media. She was project leader of the Digital Data and Security project (University of Zagreb, 2018-2022). She was a MC member of the COST Action IS0906: Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies: “New challenges and methodological innovations in European media audience research“ (2010-2014). She was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Media Studies journal (www.mediastudies.fpzg.hr) 2010-2017. She was member of the HRT Program Council (Croatian public service radio-television) 2011-2012. She worked as a journalist and a screenwriter for the Croatian Public Service Television Hrvatska televizija (HTV) 1998-2002, at the Education Program. She was general manager of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU) 2003-2004.
She edited or is a co-editor of 6 books, Requirements for Modern Journalism Education – The Perspective of Students in South East Europe (2016), Mediji, novinarstvo i ljudska prava [Media, journalism and human rights] (2017), Mediji i javni interes [Media and public interest] (2016), Medijska pismenost – preduvjet za odgovorne medije [Media Literacy – Prerequisite for Accountable Media] (2015), Mi i oni kroz medijske naočale: medijski diskursi u Bosni i Hercegovini, Hrvatskoj i Srbiji [We and They through Media Lenses: Media Discourses in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia] (2015) and Putokazi prema slobodnim i odgovornim medijima [Guideposts to Free and Accountable Media] (2012). She is author or co-author of about 30 articles and book chapters. Her bibliography is available on https://unizg.academia.edu/ViktorijaCar and on https://www.croris.hr/crosbi/searchByContext/2/7089
Dima Mohammed
Dima Mohammed is Principal researcher of Philosophy and professor of communication at the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL). Dima’s main academic expertise is in argumentation theory, at the intersection of philosophy and communication. Her research examines the complexities of public political arguments and the challenges they pose, with a focus on the workings of argumentation in challenging conditions, such as situations characterised by populism, hate speech, polarisation and deep disagreements. Over the years, Dima has studied argumentative practices in a diversity of contexts: formal institutional ones, such as US presidential speeches and Parliaments of the UK, the EU and Portugal, as well as less formal ones, such as (social) media discussions in the context of the Arab Spring, about terrorism, the #Me-Too movement and the 2022 Ukraine war. Beyond research, she has also taught argumentation, rhetoric and persuasion, communication and media as well as critical thinking in universities in Portugal, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada and in Palestine.
Dima is coordinator of the Argumentation, Cognition and Language Lab (ArgLab) at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy, member of the Institute’s scientific council and executive committee as well as of the Faculty Council of the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities. She is also active member of several editorial boards (e.g. Journal of Argumentation in Context, Argumentation and Advocacy), academic associations and initiatives (e.g. the Board of Directors of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking, the Steering Committee of the European Conference on Argumentation) and regularly serves in international juries and commissions of trust (e.g. the Blair Prize Committee, OSSA 10 & OSSA 13).
Before joining the UNL, Dima was lecturer at the Department of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric at the University of Amsterdam, NL, and researcher and programme manager at the Institute of Communication and Health at the University of Lugano, CH. Dima hold a BA in English Linguistics and Literature from the University of Birzeit, Palestine, and an MA in Logic, Language and Argumentation and a PhD in Humanities, both from the University of Amsterdam, NL.