Doc. Mgr. Pavel Zahrádka, PhD is a research associate at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies and Journalism at the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University Olomouc (Czechia). He leads research projects on cultural industries with a focus on the film and music sectors.

His academic training includes philosophy and aesthetics at Charles University in Prague and sociology at Palacký University in Olomouc. Zahrádka’s research focuses on cultural sociology, the ethics of new media, and media industry research.
He was a visiting professor at the University of Münster (2010–2011), a member of the research group “Ethics of Copying” at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research Bielefeld (2015–2016), a visiting scholar at American University in Washington (2021) and a visiting lecturer at SFU Vienna (2016–2025).

His recent publications include works on the ethical aspects of geographical restrictions on online content (“We are Sorry This Video Is Not Available in Your Country,” Journal of Media Ethics, 2021, with Reinold Schmücker), normativity of aesthetic judgements in film criticism (“Research on the Normativity of Aesthetic Judgments in Film Criticism”, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2020), multi-territorial licensing and digital export of Czech music (“Frontline Trenches or, rather, Open Borders? The Multi-territorial Licensing and Digital Export of Czech Music,” International Journal of Music Business Research, 2024, with Rostislav Sliwka, Michal Tomčík and Václav Hodonický), copyright issues in the context of remix culture (“Copyright and the Ethics of Sampling: The Lesson of the Czech Music Scene,” Popular Music and Society, 2025, with Ivan David, Rudolf Leška and Miroslav Krša) and the issue of the international circulation of cultural content from small markets (Digital Peripheries: The Online Circulation of Audiovisual Content from the Small Market Perspective, Springer, 2020, edited with Petr Szczepanik, Jakub Macek and Paul Stepan).