Makassar, 13 April 2025 — The Digital Media & Society Research Group (DiMS-RG) at the Department of Communication Science, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (FISIP), Universitas Hasanuddin (UNHAS), held its inaugural international research meeting via Zoom on Monday, 13 April 2025, with Prof. Dr. Marcel Machill, Professor of Journalism and International Media Systems at Universität Leipzig, Germany. The meeting ran from 16:00 to 17:00 WITA and brought together ten participants, marking the formal opening of a new chapter in UNHAS’s international academic partnership.
The session was led by Dr. Alem Febri Sonni, S.Sos., M.Si., Head of DiMS-RG, and was attended by core members of the research group, including Vinanda Cinta Cendekia, Nosakros Arya, Ainun Jariah Yusuf, Dien Zulfikri Hidayat, Aslam Azis, and Muliadi Mau, among others.
The meeting did not begin from a standing start. Prof. Machill had previously visited the Department of Communication Science at UNHAS as part of a FIBAA international accreditation process — a visit that left a lasting impression on the department’s faculty and, by Dr. Sonni’s own account, was one of the catalysts behind the establishment of DiMS-RG itself. That prior connection provided a warm and collegial foundation for the formal collaboration now being pursued.
During the session, Dr. Sonni presented DiMS-RG’s six core research themes, AI and Journalism Technology; Social Media and Disinformation; Platform and Algorithmic Studies; Digital Culture and Media; Media Literacy and Public Engagement; and Digital Communication Strategies, before walking through three active research projects. The most advanced is a quantitative study on political news avoidance among Indonesian youth (n=387, PLS-SEM), currently being prepared for submission to Digital Journalism, a Scopus Q1 journal. Two further projects at the proposal stage address hate speech and digital nationalism using computational content analysis with IndoBERT, and indigenous cultural representation in digital platforms in the Wallacea Region of Indonesia.
The discussion then turned to the shape of the partnership itself. DiMS-RG proposed four forms of collaboration: joint publications in Scopus-indexed journals under a “one data source, multiple theoretical voices” model; collaborative grant applications to both Indonesian national funding schemes and international bodies such as DAAD and the Asia-Europe Foundation; expert review and graduate co-supervision; and academic exchange through guest lectures and joint webinars connecting both institutions.
The meeting concluded with a clear set of agreed next steps: formalising Prof. Machill’s listing as International Research Partner on the DiMS-RG website; identifying the political news avoidance manuscript as the first joint publication target; mapping eligible grant opportunities; and scheduling a follow-up meeting to align on a shared research agenda and publication timeline for 2026.
The successful conclusion of this meeting is a meaningful milestone for DiMS-RG. As a newly established research group based in Eastern Indonesia, the group’s ability to open and sustain a substantive dialogue with a senior European scholar reflects the ambition and direction that has defined DiMS-RG since its founding. The collaboration with Universität Leipzig is expected to strengthen the group’s international visibility, publication output, and competitiveness in major research grant cycles in the years ahead.
