Prof. Joonas Rokka (Emlyon Business School)

Joonas Rokka is director of PhD Program and professor at emlyon business school. His areas of expertise and teaching focus on branding, consumer experience, lifestyle, digital media, and creative visual research methods. His research has been published in leading journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, Organization Science, Organization, Annals of Tourism Research, Marketing Theory, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Marketing Management, European Journal of Marketing, and Consumption Markets and Culture. He is currently Associate Editor for Consumption Markets & Culture and Journal of Customer Behaviour and Board member at the Consumer Culture Theory Consortium.

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Prof. Giorgia Aiello (University of Milano)

Giorgia Aiello is full professor of Sociology of culture and communication at the University of Milano. She is a media and communication scholar who researches the problems and potentials of visual communication in the construction and promotion of social and cultural identities. She is broadly interested in how aesthetics shape and are shaped by economic and political agendas, and my work aims to uncover how identities are formed, how both difference and diversity are negotiated, and how inequalities are maintained or overcome through visual images, the urban built environment, and multimodal design. She has written about branding, cities, photography, data visualization and both social media and news media imagery, on institutions like the European Union and Magnum Photos, and on corporations such as Starbucks and Getty Images. She has published three books, received research grants from the European Union and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and her work has been translated into Italian and French. Her ongoing research projects focus on the relationship between visual communication and digital culture, the role of both generic and generative images in contemporary media and communication, the visual-material gentrification of cities, and the relationship between digital aesthetics and urban space. She specializes in a critical and empirical framework rooted in social semiotics, cultural sociology and cultural studies, and in her individual and collaborative work she has used a combination of both textual and digital methods with ethnography, phenomenology, political economy, production and audience research, and archival research.

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Dr. Gabriele Colombo (Politecnico di Milano)

Gabriele Colombo is a researcher in the field of Communication Design, with a focus on information visualization and visual methods for digital research. He holds a PhD in Design from Politecnico di Milano (2018). In 2022, he was a Research Associate at the Department of Digital Humanities, Kingʼs College London, in the context of the European-funded project SUPERB, exploring how humanities-based digital methods can be used to understand forest issues and to explore engagement around reforestation. From 2019 to 2022, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the European research project INCOMMON, hosted by IUAV, University of Venice. He is affiliated with DensityDesign, a research lab at the Design Department of Politecnico di Milano, and an affiliated researcher of the Visual Methodologies Collective at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. At Politecnico di Milano, he teaches Digital Methods and Communication Design in the Communication Design Master Degree. His research and teaching activities focus on the design of novel strategies for the communication, exploration, analysis and valorization of collections of images and videos.