Dr. Alina Dolea is Associate Professor in Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy and Head of School of Law and Society at Bournemouth University, UK. Alina's expertise covers public diplomacy and diaspora diplomacy, nation branding, migration, and media studies. Her research explores the role of emotions and non-state actors in public diplomacy, sometimes reinforcing, other times contesting and disrupting state strategic communication and soft power. She focuses particularly on Romanian diaspora and diaspora diplomacy, examining how diasporas’ transnational existence not only fosters cultural and political influence across borders, but also reshapes and disrupts diplomatic engagement and state narratives. Alina developed a conceptual and analytical framework for the study of Diaspora diplomacy, emotions, and disruption (CPD Perspectives on Public Diplomacy, Figuroa Press, 2024), a discursive approach for the study of public diplomacy (e.g. Nations and Nationalism, International Communication Gazette, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy), as well as the monograph Twenty Years of (Re)branding Post-Communist Romania. Actors, discourses, perspectives - 1990–2010 (Institutul European, 2015). Alina has been 2022-2024 Research Fellow of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, Fulbright Senior Scholar 2015-2016 at Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California (US) and SCIEX Visiting Scholar 2015 at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland).