Research News

Hellenic American College is happy to announce that our MetaCities proposal (HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-ACCESS-04 Call for Excellence Hubs) has been approved for funding from the European Commission! Our proposal scored 14/15 and qualified from amongst 102 proposals! The project starts in January 2023 and HAEC will have the pleasure to host its kick-off meeting.

The MetaCities consortium is made up of 21 partners from Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Denmark, who will establish an Excellence Hub for Future Cities and Regions in Southeast Europe (SEE).  The Hub will offer a common platform for collaboration, cross-fertilization, and best practices sharing across borders, sectors and disciplines on knowledge production, circulation and use.

The thematic focus of the Hub is future, metaverse cities and involves ambitious R&I agendas and the uptake of advanced digital technologies.  The project will define Digital Twins (DT) of future cities/regions that will provide accurate and reliable reference representation seamlessly unifying the physical, digital and human worlds and enabling stakeholders to assess the effects of any changes before investments and implementations actually occur.

Didoe Prevedourou, Director of Innovation in ICT, has been appointed Managing Director of π-NET Emerging Networks & Applications, a recently established Competence Center with 22 partners-shareholders representing businesses, research organizations, and public and private higher and lifelong education institutions, among which Hellenic American College.  The creation of π-NET as a Competence Center has been approved by the General Secretariat for Research and Innovation of Greece, which is also funding 60% of the first 18 months of π-NET’s operations. Hellenic American College will collaborate with π-ΝΕΤ in funded R & I projects, up-skilling and reskilling training programs, and the provision of business consulting and entrepreneurship support services through the College’s B-Cube initiative.

Hellenic American University/Hellenic American College is pleased to announce that, thanks to the efforts of the four participating twinning institutions, the HOLOTWIN project has been officially approved for funding by Bulgaria’s Ministry of Science and Education. HOLOTWIN is a University twinning action for enhancing capacity and research excellence in holographic telepresence systems as a catalyst of digitalization. The twinning will activate a process of knowledge transfer towards the Technical University of Sofia (Bulgaria), which leverages the academic and research excellence at Aarhus University (Denmark), University of Surrey (UK) and Hellenic American University/Hellenic American College (Greece) in this area of research. The plan of activities includes staff exchanges, brainstorming meetings, research and entrepreneurship workshops, the start of new EU- and nationally funded joint research projects for doctoral students, cross-functional mentoring, training and summer schools.

The kick-off meeting of the HOLOTWIN project has been scheduled for the first week of December 2020. Due to the COVID-19 situation it will be a fully on-line event.

Those interested in getting more information about the project may contact Ms. Didoe Prevedourou, dprevedourou [at] hauniv.edu.

Associate Professor and Associate Provost Dr. Themis Kaniklidou and Alexandra Papamanoli (MAT ‘21) and have had their paper “COVID-19 representations in political statements: A corpus-driven analysis” accepted for publication in the edited volume: Pandemic and Crisis Discourse. Communicating COVID-19. The book, published by Bloomsbury Publishing, is the first to focus on the global crisis communication that has been generated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This work provides a qualitative corpus-driven analysis of statements made by political actors and policy makers on COVID-19 and investigates how these contribute to framing the pandemic as a public problem. Political statements have been selected as they operate as windows of interpretation for COVID-19. The analysis draws on Gusfield’s theory (1981) on the construction of public problems with insights from literature on the social construction of diseases (Powers & Xiao, 2008). It particularly draws on three key elements: i) problem ownership i.e. who claims a say in defining a problem, ii) causality or which theory of causes behind a problem is publicly espoused and iii) accountability i.e. who is praised or blamed for solving or not the problem (Gusfield, 1981, p. 6). Data for this paper includes 54 statements culled from 77 articles from the World Section of the NY Times’ online edition during the second week of March i.e. 16.3.2020 - 22.3.2020. Preliminary findings establish links between democracy, human rights, government transparency and how COVID-19 is represented. In this context, we also offer an analysis of the public narratives concerning the multiple actors handling the incidence of the virus. Overall, this paper argues that political discourse plays a key role in the construction of COVID-19 framing it as a public problem.

Dr. Alexander Nikolaou, adjunct faculty member at Hellenic American University, participated in the 24th International Symposium of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, which was organized by Aristotle University of Thessaloniki on October 2-4, 2020. He co-presented with former HAU faculty member Dr. Jennifer Sclafani, their work on “Indexicality and the interactional construction of identity in the narratives of 'return' migration”.

Their study investigates narrative accounts of “return” migration as told by second-generation bi-ethnic Greeks (Greek Americans in their majority) who migrated to Athens as adults. Based on a corpus of 12 ethnographic interviews about the linguistic and cultural experience of their ‘returns’, they focus on participants’ recounting of their relocation to their parents’ homeland as an experience of cultural assimilation and conflict, authenticity and hybridity. Narrative discourse has proven to be a fruitful locus for this area of inquiry because it allows speakers to construct and negotiate alignments and disalignments between Self and Other by adopting interactional positions in discourse. In line with current work on discourse and identity, the authors view identity as the product of discursive performance through a variety of linguistic devices.