Roberta Bracciale

Roberta Bracciale, PhD in Communication Studies (University of Rome "Sapienza"), is Full Professor of Media Sociology at the Department of Political Sciences, University of Pisa (Italy).

She is the director of MediaLaB | Big Data in Social and Political Research Lab|, a laboratory focused on analysing big data in social and political research.

Her research interests focus on the interconnections between digital media, everyday life, and the public sphere. Her areas of expertise are: (i) the relationship between social and digital inequalities, with an in-depth analysis of the outcomes of the processes of inclusion vs. exclusion; (ii) the transformations of participatory practices following the platformisation of society, with a specific focus on the mechanisms of grassroots production and of memeification of the public sphere seen as connective aggregators of individual instances; (iii) the redefinition of the communication strategies of social actors achieved through the introduction of emotional elements, and the adoption of populism as a communication style, to increase the involvement and attract the attention of their audiences exploiting the algorithmic logics of the platforms; (iv) the application of computational methods to the domain of social sciences.

In addition to her research activities, she is the Co-Chief Information Officer of Pisa University. She is also the co-chief editor of the scientific journal “The Lab's Quarterly”. She is a member of the doctoral board of the national program in "Artificial Intelligence" and also of the "Political Sciences" at Pisa University program. Furthermore, she is a member of the Board of Directors of the Italian Association of Political Communication, a research associate at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics at the Italian National Research Council (IIT-CNR) of Pisa, and a research associate at the “DeVisu” laboratory of the Polytechnique Hauts de France.

She is also a founding partner and member of the Board of Directors of the Spin-off company of Pisa University “VoisLab” (Evaluation of outcomes and social impact).

At the University of Pisa, she teaches Sociology of New Media in several master’s degree programmes (Business Communication and Human Resource Management, Digital Humanities, Sociology) and Sociology of Communication in the bachelor’s degree programme in Political Science.  She also teaches Communication Theories in the master’s degree programme in Naval Sciences at the Italian Naval Academy of Livorno.

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