Introduction

With the start of the 2020s we became used to speaking about our life in terms of a temporal duality that has marked the history of humanity in this decade. We refer to what happened ‘before the pandemic’ versus what occurred ‘after the lockdowns’. The gestation of this book began before the pandemic, when in 2019 the organiser team of Universidad de Navarra, together with the Board of Directors of the European Public Relations Education and Research Association (EUPRERA), agreed on the theme of EUPRERA's 22nd International Annual Congress, which was supposed to take place in 2020. Ironically, one pandemic and two years later, when the EUPRERA community could finally – and timidly – relaunch onsite activities in the fall of 2021, still with a significant number of delegates banned from travelling, the theme was more meaningful and relevant than ever: (Re)discovering the human element in public relations and communication management in unpredictable times.