Welcome to the Department of Communication (IfK) at the University of Münster.

Prof. Dr. Thorsten Quandt, together with international partners, has received a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation for the project “Manipulation of the Past.”
How do far-right actors use historical narratives to reach young people and shift democratic discourse? This question is the focus of the new research project “Manipulation of the Past: Far-Right Ideologies and the Weaponization of History” (MAP), which is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation with approximately 1.3 million euros as part of the program “Transformational Knowledge on Democracies in Transition.”

How is a good news story actually created? What makes for a successful magazine layout? And how does it feel to stand in front of a green screen or in a recording studio? Twenty-two students from the Gymnasium an der Schweizer Allee in Dortmund explored these questions during a visit to the IfK.

The article “Epistemic authority in the digital public sphere. An integrative conceptual framework and research agenda” has been awarded the ASCoR Denis McQuail Award 2026. The article was published in 2025 in the journal Communication Theory.

Applications are now open for the second intake of the English-taught Master’s programme in Knowledge and Communication at the Department of Communication. Launched in the winter semester of 2025/26, the programme is aimed at students who wish to explore how knowledge is generated and communicated, and its impact in an interconnected world. The programme currently has students from four different countries.

IfK researchers Felix Reer, Saïd Unger, and Thorsten Quandt were honored with a “Top Poster Award” at this year’s annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) in Cape Town. The award recognized their paper “Mapping the Field of Social Scientific Game Studies: A Computational Approach”, which was presented at the ICA’s 76th Annual Conference.