Profile

My name is Florencia García-Rapp. I am a Spanish Ministry of Science fellow (Juan de la Cierva Incorporación) with the research group in “Applied Social Sciences” at University of Valladolid (Department of Sociology and Social Work). My research is funded by a European Union grant (NextGenerationEU).

Previously, I worked at the University of Sheffield as Lecturer in Media Audiences and Users and as research associate within the research group “Media, Policy, and Culture” from the University of Antwerp (Department of Communication, Faculty of Social Sciences).

I was awarded a Ph.D. in Communication (compilation of publications, summa cum laude) by Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, after finishing the program in June 2017. I was recipient of the university’s outstanding Ph.D. prize awarded in recognition of the quality and impact of doctoral research contributions. I also hold a Masters Degree in Media Culture from Paderborn University in Germany and a Degree (Licenciatura) in Audiovisual Communication from my homeland, Argentina.

I left Argentina 15 years ago to pursue my research interests at the intersections of digital and popular cultures with audiences and fandom research. I work within the fields of media studies, media sociology, and anthropology. I question prescriptive modes of argumentation that quickly classify people, cultures, and objects of fandom as normative/resistant/legitimate/trivial. Rather, I approach audiences (users, fans, citizens) from interpretive epistemologies, acknowledging subjectivities within global media landscapes. As there is no paradigm-free way of seeing, I seek to bring forward research that tolerates ambivalence, contradictions, and embraces the complexity of social worlds and human interaction.

My work has been published by Celebrity Studies, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Television and New Media, First Monday, Journal of Media Practice, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, and International Journal of Web-Based Communities. I also contributed a chapter to Routledge’s edited collection Mediated Intimacies (ECREA Book Series). New articles on parenthood, humor and Peruvian TikTok, have been recently published by Visual Communication Quarterly and First Monday.  

I am a member of the editorial board of the journal Celebrity Studies (Taylor and Francis). I have also been a monograph proposal reviewer for Palgrave Macmillan for their “Journalism, Media, and Communication” list (UK), and their “Anthropology and Sociology” list (US). I was member of the external evaluation committee of the MSCA-COFUND Ph.D. Program in Anthropology and Communication (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, a Marie S. Curie fellowship, funded by the EU).

Exciting news! Since March 2024, I’m part of an Horizon Europe project in a team of researchers from 9 countries. CIDAPE (2024-2027). “Climate, Inequality, and Democratic Action: The Force of Political Emotions”. Together with my colleague Fabienne Lind from Uni Wien, I am Co-PI of WP3, where we will examine social media emotions and discourses related to climate change in Spanish, German, and English. I am responsible for the ethnographic part and she would provide the quantitative, statistical approach. 

 

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This website is hosted through a Spanish Ministry of Science grant (Juan de la Cierva Incorporación JDC2020-042743I) and thanks to the support of the European Union (NextGenerationEU).