Kevin Smets Editor & Author

Kevin Smets is Associate Professor in Media and Culture at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), where he co-directs the research group ECHO: Media, Culture & Politics. He has previously published Film: Een geschiedenis (2022) and co-edited the SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration (2020). Lennart Soberon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Reel Borders project at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and artistic coordinator of KASKcinema (Ghent). His film Dragon’s Teeth (2024) won the Best Short Documentary Award at Galway Film Fleadh. He is the co-founder of cinephile platform Kinoautomat. Irene Gutiérrez-Torres is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M). Her artistic and academic work critically engages with migration and border dynamics through participatory filmmaking. Silvia Almenara-Niebla is a Ramón y Cajal senior research fellow at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) and an affiliated researcher at ECHO: Media, Culture & Politics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). She has published in various international journals and received research awards on these topics.