The PhD day will take place on September 22nd, exclusively reserved for the PhD students who have registered and paid (… Euros).

PhD Day will take the form of an afternoon workshop, during which PhD students will have the opportunity to present their research projects, including their research problems, designs, and methodologies. Experienced researchers will provide feedback on the presented dissertation projects, followed by discussions in small groups. This workshop will offer an excellent opportunity to meet fellow PhD students interested in educational resources from diverse international backgrounds and research fields.

Those presenting their projects will receive a certificate of achievement from IARTEM.

Contact and mandatory registration: iartem@uni.opole.pl

Location: University of Opole, Collegium Maius, Pl. Kopernika 11 

Monika Tosik (Kopytowska) (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1065-7044) is a linguist and communication scholar affiliated with the Department of Pragmatics at the University of Lodz, Poland, where she earned her PhD. Her research combines pragmatics, Critical Discourse Studies, journalism and media studies, intercultural communication and cognitive approaches to meaning-making, with a particular focus on the pragma-rhetorical construction of conflict, ethnicity, religion, and security in media and institutional discourse. She is the author of the Media Proximization Approach (MPA), which she has applied across media genres, thematic areas and sociocultural contexts, and has published widely in international journals and edited volumes.

She has been a visiting scholar at Lancaster University, the University of Nairobi, the University of Central Oklahoma and Ruhr-Universität Bochum, served as an external examiner at the University of Nairobi and Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, and is an alumna of the U.S. State Department’s highly competitive SUSI programme for journalists and media educators (Ohio University). She conducted workshops on media and conflict at the University of Zambia and the National University of Rwanda, and carried out fieldwork in media houses in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

Translating linguistic and intercultural research into socially responsive educational practice, she coordinated the Polish component of the C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project – Creating Online Network, Monitoring Team and Phone App to Counter Hate Crime Tactics – co-financed by the European Commission (2015-2017) and, more recently, the national project Otwarta Łódź [Open Lodz], aimed at supporting the integration of foreigners present on the Polish labour market and strengthening the language and intercultural competences of frontline public-service workers, including law-enforcement officers. Within the latter project, she was involved in the design and implementation of innovative educational materials and training programmes for police officers, city guards, officials and migrant communities. This work is continued in the Team-up project, which focuses on language and intercultural communication training for police officers.

She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Lodz Papers in Pragmatics (De Gruyter Brill). Her academic and socially engaged work has been recognised through awards including the Internationalization Teaching Star national award (“Perspektywy” Foundation), the European Language Label, Łódzkie Eureka and the distinction “for Merits to the City of Lodz”.