Nele Heise is an independent media researcher and consultant for digital media and communication; from 2014 until end of 2018 she was an associate member of the Hans Bredow Institute.
After completing her master's degree in communication at the University of Erfurt, Nele Heise worked at the HBI from October 2011 to June 2014 as a junior researcher in the DFG project “Die (Wieder-)Entdeckung des Publikums” [The (Re-)Discovery of the Audience]. During this time she helped to develop the BredowCast, was spokesperson for the doctoral students at the Graduate School Media and Communication, the interdisciplinary doctoral programme of the Research Center for Media and Communication (RCMC) in Hamburg. She represented the institute at numerous (international) conferences, in the media and non-academic contexts such as re:publica.
Nele Heise then worked as a research assistant at the Department of Media Pedagogy and Aesthetic Education (2015) and the Chair for Journalism and Communication Studies (2016-2017), and as guest lecturer at the University of Hamburg. Since 2014, she has been working as a freelance consultant, e.g. for institutions in the field of science/education, NGOs and public service media organizations. She is also involved in research ethics discourses, e.g. as a member of the AoIR Ethics 3.0 Committee, and is the current Young Scholars' Representative of the ECREA Radio Research Section.
Her research interests are media participation, social media use, ethics and norms in digital media environments, science communication, media change, digital inequality and diversity, as well as the societal implications of digitalization. Her current research examines the production and use of digital audio media, with a focus on podcasting in the D/A/CH region.
Her most important publications include articles in Journalism Studies and Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, the chapter "Algorithms" (Handbuch Medien- und Informationsethik, 2016, J. B. Metzler) and the volume "Praxis Grounded Theory" (2017, Springer VS) co-edited with C. Pentzold and A. Bischof.
