Dr Josephine B. Schmitt is scientific coordinator at CAIS. In this role, she is responsible for the work of the CAIS Research Incubator, among other things. There, she is involved in researching and developing innovative concepts for interdisciplinary collaboration in digitisation research and identifying relevant research topics, among other things.
She continues to research the content, dissemination and impact of hate speech, extremist propaganda and (political) information and education offerings on the internet. In addition, she develops didactic concepts for the prevention of radicalisation/promotion of media literacy on behalf of the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) and the Ministry of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia, among others, and gives workshops and lectures on various topics of civic education and media literacy.
She was the Equal Opportunities Officer at CAIS from January 2020 to January 2025.
Curriculum vitae
- From September 2018 to August 2019, she worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Communication Studies and Media Research at LMU Munich.
- Before that, she worked for two years (March 2016 – June 2018) in the interdisciplinary EU project “CONTRA – Countering Propaganda through Narration towards anti-radical awareness”.
- From 2012 to 2016, she worked as a research assistant at the Chair of Media Psychology, first at the University of Hamburg , then at the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart. In 2015, she wrote her doctoral thesis on the political information behaviour of young people on the internet.
- In summer 2013, she interrupted her work at the University of Hohenheim and was a Visiting Scholar at the School of Communication at Ohio State University, Columbus (Ohio).
- Josephine B. Schmitt studied Psychology and Modern German Literature (Diplom) at the University of Hamburg from 2007 to 2012, while working as a student assistant at SPIEGEL TV Infotainment and DER SPIEGEL.
- From 2017 to 2021, she was the spokesperson for young researchers in the Media Psychology section of the German Psychological Society. Since 2019, she has also been a member of the network “Bewegtbildung – Netzwerk für politische Bildung und Webvideo”.
