Science at FSV UK: Researcher Kateřina Turková on athletes on social media, disinformation regulation, and AI ethics

Sport plays a significant role in the life and research of Dr Kateřina Turková from the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism FSV UK. Even during her active sports career, however, she knew she did not want to remain only on the track. She was always drawn to a broader perspective—understanding how sport functions in the media, institutions, and society as a whole. This interest ultimately led her to pursue an academic career.

At present, she devotes most of her research time to projects funded either by national agencies or by the European Commission. One of these is a project supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic entitled Authorship Verifier. Within this project, she collaborates with colleagues from technical disciplines on the development of a web-based application that can be used, among other things, in disciplinary proceedings and for verifying the authorship of submitted documents.

What she enjoys most about academic work is the process itself: formulating research questions, searching for appropriate methods, and collaborative project work. She therefore likes to go beyond questionnaires and interviews. When examining media routines, for example, she and her colleagues from the ReMeD project employed ethnographic methods. “Ethnographic research is based on a combination of interviews and observation of people in their natural environment. Thanks to ethnography, one can understand much better how things work. It does not stop at what happens but also asks why,” she explains.

Read the full interview on our website about science at FSV UK. For example, the researcher mentions how Czech athletes communicate on social networks or what topic she dealt with as part of research sponsored by Oxford University.