Stef Pukallus

Dr Stef Pukallus is Senior Lecturer in Public Communication and Civil Development at the University of Sheffield (UK) and Founding Chair of the Hub for the Study of Hybrid Communication in Peacebuilding (HCPB). Stef’s overall research interest is the role that public communication (broadly conceived) plays in the building, maintaining, strengthening as well as diminishment and destruction of civil societies across the globe. She is particularly interested in communication’s transformative capacity and has applied this interest to conflict communication (hate speech, dehumanisation, polarisation) as well as to peace communication (post-civil war, European integration). She has developed her own model of communicative peacebuilding, an intrinsic element of which is discursive civility. Stef has acted in an advisory expert capacity to both the European Commission and the United Nations. She published 'Communication in Peacebuilding. Civil wars, civility and safe spaces' in 2022 with Palgrave and her new book 'Contestation in Civil Society: Noise, Listening and Civil Action' is out 2025 with Routledge.