Of all the disciplines relating to communication studies (semiotics, linguistics, sociology, cognitive psychology, mass communication, symbolic anthropology etc.) the European/International Joint PhD Research Training and multi-year cycle on International Summer Schools focus primarily on social psychology, particularly in relation to social representations.
The European/International Joint PhD advanced research training thus involve key areas such as interaction, the media, the processes of social influence, the languages, emotions and new contexts of virtual and mediated interaction. Within this framework, the European/International Joint PhD training programme is based on the assumption that communication should be studied as a social process. Thus the theme of the media, for example, is discussed not just in terms of the development of sophisticated technology and the cognitive interaction between man and machine, but to the flexible forms of social interaction and the mediated, virtual contexts that they produce.
Within this perspective, although there is a vast amount of literature in the area of both communication studies and social representations, empirical studies from a multidisciplinary perspective are relatively rare. For this reason European/International Joint PhD training programme to work out the inter-relationships between representations, communication and the media, particularly in view of the fact that social representations are different from isolated cognition. The European/International Joint PhD International Summer Schools and the new series of the International LAB Meetings constitute a forum for this ongoing debate.