After completing a Bachelor Degree in Political Sciences at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa, Italy) and a Research Master in Sociology at Sciences Po Paris, Emma Bonutti D’Agostini started a PhD in Sociology under the supervision of Sylvain Parasie (médialab) and Etienne Ollion (CREST, IPParis). 

In her dissertation, she aims to study and measure to what extent and how the news media in France and Italy may have contributed to the dissemination of radical right discourse, ideology, and political agendas over the past three decades, and to assess the connections between the unfolding of these processes and the electoral-political trajectories of radical right parties in both countries. Her research combines computational NLP methods with qualitative methodologies, such as interviews and qualitative content analysis.

Previously, her long-standing interest in sociology of journalism and communication has brought her to study the domestication of social media as a tool for political reporting in the Italian journalistic sphere, the tensions that Italian journalists face when dealing with right-wing populist politicians and their propagandistic strategies, as well as the evolution of agenda setting dynamics between the political and media sphere during the Covid pandemic in Italy.