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Media and the Environment: Alumna Elisabetta Petrucci

Born and raised in Rome, Elisabetta Petrucci graduated from JCU in May 2019. She has a B.A. in Communications with a minor in Entrepreneurship. Elisabetta is currently pursuing her Master’s in Cultural Encounters and Communication at Roskilde University in Denmark.

It’s good! After graduation, I knew that I wanted to continue to graduate school because I want to stay in academia, but I wanted to live in Rome and travel for a bit first. I took a year off in 2020 to do this, but then the pandemic hit so I ended up using that time to explore different options for graduate school.

You’re doing a Master’s in Cultural Encounters and Communication at Roskilde University, in Denmark. How and why did you choose this program?

I focused on popular music studies at JCU and I am very interested in cultural studies. Roskilde University has a great interdisciplinary program that blends cultural encounters and communication and I’m really liking it. There are a lot of communication programs out there that are about strategic communications or marketing and that wasn’t what I wanted, so this program is really great for me.

You also work as a research assistant on projects related to the ecological crisis and sustainability issues. Tell us more about this.

My master’s is research-based, so half of it consists of classes and the other half is research. We have to do a lot of in-depth projects, so I focused mine on the relationship between media and the environment. When I started looking at different work opportunities, I found this program at Copenhagen Business School. They were looking for a research assistant to do some studies on greenwashing in business. Within the program, I research case studies using specific keywords like greenwashing, decoupling, sustainability, and others like that, and then I am creating a database of articles so that professors can reference them.

How did your classes at JCU prepare you for graduate studies?

What I loved about JCU was that you could choose between theoretical classes and hands-on classes. I’ve always taken theory classes because that’s what I like and that’s what I think I’m good at. Learning how you can apply theories to different media texts was extremely useful for me because it’s similar to what I do in my research.

Which JCU classes and/or professors impacted you the most and why?

Definitely Professor Peter Sarram. I think I took all his classes except for maybe one. In my last semester, I even graduated with extra credits because he was starting this new class on music videos and I really wanted to take it. Professor Kwame Phillips’ classes were also great. He taught me how to connect the theory to the practice. And then I would have to say that right now Professor Antonio Lopez is probably the most influential. I didn’t take any of his classes while at JCU, but my current research field is the same as Professor Lopez’s and we’ve been working together. I’m also helping him with the research for his new book.

I’m almost done with my master’s thesis, then I would like to do a Ph.D. Here in Denmark, the applications open in February, so until then I will be working on some research projects with a couple of different professors. I’ll also work on writing some articles based on my thesis and try to get them published.

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