Mélodine Sommier is currently working as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She received her Ph.D. in 2016 for work on representations of secularism as part of the French national imaginary in newspaper texts.
Mélodine’s research interests cover a variety of themes related to intercultural communication, media representations, race and racism, migration, sustainability, and education. Within the field of intercultural communication, her work concentrates on the use of culture as a discursive and an interactional resource. She mostly relies on critical and discursive approaches to examine the construction of cultural realities and outcomes regarding the (re)production of difference. Her research project on ‘racial landscapes’ (2022-2027) focuses on the way race and racism materialize in everyday urban spaces across Europe in ways that contribute to (re)produce and contest existing discourses and processes of racialization.
Mélodine is co-founder of the Intercultural Communication & Diversity division at the Netherlands-Flanders Communication Association (NeFCA) which she co-chaired between 2018-2022. She is the chair of the Intercultural and International Communication division at the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) and a board member of the Society for the Study of Ethnic Relations and International Migration (ETMU).
Selected publications:
Sommier, M., Roiha, A., & Lahti, M. (Eds.) (2023). Interculturality in higher education: Putting critical approaches into practice. London: Routledge.
Sommier, M. (2022). Race et espace: La ville comme lieu d’étude des représentations raciales [Race and space: Exploring racial representations in the city]. Itinéraires: Littérature, Textes, Cultures, 2021(3).
Sommier, M., Wang, Y., & Vasques, A. (2022). Transformative, interdisciplinary and intercultural learning for developing HEI students’ sustainability-oriented competences: A case study. Environment, Development and Sustainability.
Sommier, M., Lahti, M., & Roiha, A. (Eds.) (2021). From ‘intercultural-washing’ to meaningful intercultural education: Revisiting higher education practice. (Special issue). Journal of Praxis in Higher Education, 3(2).
Galy-Badenas, F., & Sommier, M. (2021). “A baby bump for women’s rights”: Analysing local and international media coverage of Jacinda Ardern’s pregnancy. Feminist Media Studies.
Sommier, M. (2020). “How ELSE are you supposed to dress up like a Black Guy??”: Negotiating accusations of Blackface in online newspaper comments. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43(16), 57–75.
Work for CID:
Mélodine Sommier is the co-author of KC107: Interculturality and of a Guest Post on Implementing Critical Approaches to Interculturality in Higher Education., and the translator of KC107: Interculturality into French.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 