PhD students of the Department of Social Policy and Social Security Studies

Filiz Kalmuk
The Japan-EU Free Trade Agreement (JEFTA for short), the unknown foreign deployments of the German Armed Forces or the "Europe 2020" strategy for combating poverty - hardly anyone is likely to have learned very much about these issues in the media in recent years. And this despite the fact that they have a high relevance, or in other words a high news value for society. This phenomenon, which has been little researched to date, is also known in communication science as agenda cutting. But why is it that so much important news is deliberately or involuntarily neglected while other, less relevant news is dealt with in a continuous loop? In her dissertation project, PhD student Filiz Kalmuk pursues this question. Using a mixed-method approach, she will investigate the different mechanisms and reasons for agenda cutting with the aim of finding out what influences there are at the micro, meso and macro levels in the dethematization of events and news. The influence of public relations and the tools it uses for agenda cutting will also be investigated.
Betreuung: Prof. Dr. Hektor Haarkötter

Sandra Wrzeziono
In recent years, the collective participation of citizens has increasingly found its way into the German health care system in order to orient health policy decisions more strongly towards the needs of patients. Because of the challenges in the implementation and establishment of collective participation possibilities as well as the ongoing discussion about the democratic deficit in the German health care system, PhD student Sandra Wrzeziono examines in her research project the understanding of democracy of the involved actors by means of qualitative interviews. The project aims to shed more light on the implications for the future design of institutionalized citizen participation.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Remi Maier-Rigaud