Visiting Research Fellow

Dr. Natalia Berger is a Senior Researcher at Inholland University of Applied Sciences (Faculty of Business, Law and Creative Industries, the Netherlands). She holds a doctorate and a habilitation, both in Philology, and has authored more than 50 publications. Across her work in media, fashion, and journalism, she applies Critical Discursive Matrix Analysis (CDMA) — her own method, which combines critical discourse analysis in the tradition of Fairclough and Foucault with Juri Lotman’s semiosphere — to trace how meaning shifts as discourse moves from the core of a semiotic system to its periphery, where innovation occurs but rarely receives the language it needs.

In her current collaboration with the Media Innovation Studio, she examines the vocabulary Dutch newsrooms use to talk about artificial intelligence and how the authority to define “AI” shapes public trust in journalism. This work complements her research within an international EMMA-hub (European Media Management Association) team of five researchers, which draws on 62 expert interviews across Europe and the U.S. to examine the emotional undertow of datafication in newsrooms — how fear, ambivalence and professional identity shape the way media organisations adapt to technological change.

Her monograph Public Discourse and the Fashion Industry (Routledge, 2026), the result of thirteen years of research analysing 2,263 media texts across five cases, asks what happens to fashion once it leaves the fashion press — and shows that fashion’s own logic inverts in the general media: coverage produces aversion rather than desire, exclusion rather than inclusion. A third strand returns to the subject of her habilitation: her 2006 monograph on the theory and practice of Russian investigative journalism (St. Petersburg State University), written as the practice unfolded around her, is now being translated into English for Routledge.

Read together, the three strands share more than a method. Each asks who holds the authority to speak — fashion, spoken about by everyone except fashion; artificial intelligence, defined by newsrooms that did not build it; and an investigative tradition with no country left to publish in — and what becomes of a practice when it loses its language, or never finds one.

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