Renate Schroeder
Director of the European Federation of Journalists

Renate Schroeder is the Director of the European Federation of Journalists, In 1993 she started working for the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and since 2003 she works for the EFJ. Advocacy at EU and Council of Europe level; presentation of EFJ at international meetings and fact-finding media freedom missions; project work, communication and assistance in several EFJ expert groups including on freelances, broadcasting media literacy and digital journalism, are part of her work-load in the small dynamic Brussels office.

Renate Schroeder studied International Relations and Political Science at Boston University (Bachelor’s Degree in 1988) and in Berlin at the Free University (Masters in 1992). Major themes during her Masters program were nationalism, integration and refugee policy.

Renate worked among other at the United Nations, New York, the research institute FAST in Berlin and the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation in Brussels before she joined the IFJ/EFJ team. She is of German nationality and speaks English, French, Italian, German and Spanish (passive).

 Holger Briel

Professor of International Business Communication at Monarch University, Switzerland, and Graduate Programme Director in the School of Film and TV Arts at Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University

Holger Briel is Professor of International Business Communication at Monarch University, Switzerland, and Graduate Programme Director in the School of Film and TV Arts at Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University. He has taught and conducted research at many universities in the UK, the USA, Germany, Austria, Greece, Cyprus, The Philippines, South Africa and China and has written books and articles on Digital Media, Cultural Changes in the Digital World, Media Theory and Intercultural Communication. His latest book, VisionBytes, re-evaluates vision in the digital era and will be published in 2020. In his academic work, he is particularly interested in the relationship between words and images and how this relationship has changed over the centuries. Today it seems we have entered the age of the image - what does that mean for media studies, for journalists and for consumers? How do we, more and more as prosumers, engage with media and reflect upon ourselves? What does this changing media environment entail for media specialists and those caught in the interface between the written and spoken word and its visual representations? What does this mean for the veracity and prosody of both?

Apart from teaching in academe, has also engaged in field work for digital ethnography and oral history in countries such as Cyprus, Borneo, Russia and China, recording and analysing how indigenous people live in a deeply mediated world and how their expressions of their lives have changed because of that.