Nico Carpentier is Associate Professor at the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB - Free University of Brussels) and Lecturer at Charles University in Prague. He is also an executive board member of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and he was vice-president of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) from 2008 to 2012. His theoretical focus is on discourse theory, his research interests are situated in the relationship between media, journalism, politics and culture, especially towards social domains as war & conflict, ideology, participation and democracy. This has been translated into the following five topical areas: 1/Media, participation and democracy; 2/Media, death and war; 3/Journalism and identity; 4/Audience and reception; 5/Discourse theory.