Irene Broer

Irene Broer was a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) in Research Program 3 “Knowledge for the Media Society” from 2018 to 2024. Her methodological focus is on ethnographic research as well as applied and co-creative designs. Her research interest is science communication, in particular the establishment of new actors, practices and orientations at the interfaces of science, media and politics. From March to September 2024, Irene will be investigating the role of artificial intelligence in and for science communication as a postdoc at the Institute of Communication Science at TU Braunschweig.

For her doctorate, Irene investigated new intermediaries between science and journalism, in particular through a newsroom ethnography at the Science Media Centre Germany (SMC) as part of the MeWiKo project (2018-2021). In her cumulative dissertation, she describes the working routines of SMC Germany, the crisis-related disruptions to these routines and the various broker roles that the organisation took on during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conceptually, she proposes to examine science communication as a communicative figuration and offers cultural anthropological perspectives on hybrid newsroom ethnography as a method.

In recent years, Irene’s research interests have expanded to include scientific policy advice. In 2021, COVID-19 was selected as a subject for research on communication in crises. Subsequently, she was involved as a scientific advisor for the BMBF in the development of the Crisis Science Hub (CSH) to optimise the exchange between science and politics. In a follow-up project, she contributed to the target group-orientated development of a repository for scientific advice documents (REPOD).

Since December 2021, she researched the integrative role and function of public service media at the Research Institute Social Cohesion and has organised Thinkshops with media users, creators and regulators.

In 2019-2020, Irene Broer was the Institute’s PhD spokesperson. In 2020-2021, she was elected spokesperson for Section B of the Leibniz PhD Network, representing all doctoral researchers at the Leibniz Institutes in the fields of economics, social sciences and spatial sciences.