Clara Schultz is a research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow Institute (HBI) since July 2026. She works in the Media Research Methods Lab as part of the collaborative project “Systematic Observation of New Auditive Risks” (SONAR), which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR). Her research focuses in particular on the role of (social) media in the context of societal phenomena such as populism, polarization, and the spread of disinformation.
From 2022 to 2025, she worked as a research assistant at the HBI on the project “POLTRACK – Political Polarization and Individualized Online Information Environments”. As part of this project, she also wrote her master’s thesis on the affective polarization of attitudes toward the climate movements Fridays for Future and Letzte Generation through the reception of online news. In addition, she worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Communication Studies at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena under Prof. Dr. Edda Humprecht, supporting research projects in the field of digitalization and the public sphere.
Clara Schultz studied sociology and political science as an undergraduate at Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel. She then completed a master’s degree in Political Communication at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena.
