Johana Kotišová

Johana Kotišová was a Senior FWO Postdoctoral Researcher at ECHO. She studied journalism and social anthropology and has a joint PhD in sociology. Johana’s research interests include crisis and conflict reporting, journalists’ safety, emotional labor, and mental well-being. Her project, funded by Research Foundation – Flanders, focuses on journalists who had to leave their homes in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine. Her previous research, conducted within her Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at the University of Amsterdam, dealt with risks among local and foreign media professionals covering the Russo-Ukrainian War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is the author of Crisis Reporters, Emotions, and Technology: An Ethnography (Palgrave Macmillan), a monograph on European crisis reporters’ emotions, professional ideology, and cynicism; her work has also been published in journals such as Journalism, Digital Journalism, International Journal of Press/Politics, Journalism Studies, and European Journal of Communication. Johana strives to produce research that is relevant and useful to journalists and helps make conflict-reporting ecosystems more ethical. Besides her academic work, she occasionally writes journalistic pieces.

In 2025 she has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for her project Emotions and bodies in fact-based media production: Integrating affective and embodied knowledge into journalism and documentary filmmaking (AFfact), which she executes at the University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture).