Johana Kotišová

Dr. Johana Kotišová is a Senior FWO Postdoctoral Researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Department of Communication Sciences. 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 current 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.