People of FSS: Meet Štěpán Žádník

Štěpán is an expert on the use of media technologies and especially on access to them. He focuses on the inequalities in terms of access to media and how people can cope with situations where they do not have the knowledge or skills to use media and media content in the way they need to. He is working on his dissertation topic with help from an Internal Grant Agency grant (Benefiting from convergent culture: development of survey measurement), which he was one of the few applicants to receive. Štěpán is not a newcomer in his field of interest, he was involved, among other things, in a GACR research project (The Practice and Moral Politics of Copying and Downloading in the Czech Republic: Audiences, Authors, Producers, and Distributors).

He also passes on his knowledge and experience, whether through teaching qualitative methodology of media audiences research, statistical analysis, and new media studies, or by supervising and reviewing theses. Štěpán is both loved and "beloved" by his students, as he is a cheery entertainer, with humor blacker than Vantablack and a fashion icon (at least based on the feedback from course evaluations), but he is also seen as a tenacious but constructive critic. Underneath his somewhat tough exterior, however, there are the inner qualities that come from being a precise, competent, sensitive, and helpful person who can motivate students and those around them to put their best foot forward. Štěpán is, however, a man of many faces and excels in gardening (he willingly waters his colleagues' flowers), fire safety (he checks whether someone is surreptitiously smoking in the toilets), consumer law (he frequently and successfully makes complaints about products and services of all kinds), sports (he is a die-hard fan of AC Sparta Praha, hated by all reasonable people, and an enthusiastic supporter of the To Work on Bike challenge), tea-tasting (he is a green tea drinker, loathes coffee), and last but not least, he pays attention to water quality control (he is a proponent of a well-founded theory about the relatively higher quality of water in women's toilets due to more intensive usage if compared to the quality of water in men's toilets). He is also no stranger to the field of catering (he excels especially in commissioning other people to find the most delicious cakes near FSS). So if you need advice on the use of media (including its practical uses), Stepan is the man for the job (but you might need to provide him with some sweets or another kind of treat 😊)!