The Netherlands Research school for Media Studies (RMeS) is a national network of academic experts in media research. It is organized to advance knowledge on media and to educate young scholars, both PhD candidates and promising RMa students, in classical and cutting edge theories and methodologies in media studies, and to offer them an opportunity to start building a network.
23 October 2025 | Utrecht
RMeS will organise the first Netherlands Media Studies Conference. This one-day event will take place in Utrecht on Thursday 23 October 2025. It provides a space for media studies scholars and students to discuss their work and make connections with peers.
19 September 2025 | Utrecht University|
This kick-off event invites RMa students and PhD candidates to reflect on what it means to navigate a research career today. Together, we’ll ask how the environments we work in influence our thinking, how we can resist or reshape institutional expectations, and how the (soft) skills of research, such as collaboration, communication, improvisation, and reflexivity, are not only central to surviving in academia but transferable to other domains.
October 2025 – April 2026 | University of Amsterdam
The seminar focuses on the tension between thinking and feeling as a crucial resource for understanding the mediation of politics and culture. This tension has often been lost in the “turn to affect”. The seminar reorients the politics of feeling by setting it into relation with thought, concepts and reasoning. Rather than finesse varied forms of “affect theory”, the seminar constructs a mise-en-scène within which thinking and feeling, reasoning and sensing, are explicitly staged as fractious interlocutors.
November – December 2025 | Utrecht University
This autumn, the Research School for Media Studies offers a Platformisation course where faculty members from three participating universities (UvA, UU, RUG) present the latest research in their fields of interest through a series of lectures and workshops. The course invites RMA students to participate in an international, cutting edge research environment, while earning credits towards their degree. It presents a unique opportunity to get to know other students and leading academics from all over The Netherlands, in an open setting of engaging and ambitious exchange that would prove particularly fruitful for students who are aspiring to pursue a future career in academic research or teaching. All ten universities accept the credits earned in this module.
12 November 2025 | University of Groningen
Contrary to common perception, the web is far from permanent. Websites are constantly updated, restructured, or taken offline, making the web a far less stable source than print, digitised archives, or audiovisual collections. This ephemeral nature poses a challenge for researchers relying on web sources. Still, it also underscores the growing significance of web archives as a resource for contemporary historical and media research. Web archives provide access to past versions of websites, allowing scholars to explore online cultures, political discourse, and media practices that would otherwise be lost.
How are media keeping us busy these days?
In this podcast series the RMeS PhD council interviews media doctors that either work in or outside academia.
The RMeS PhD council welcomes RMa students, PhD students and post docs in media studies to join the RMeS Grad Students Discord server!
RMeS educational programme for 2025-2026
/in RMeS News /by ChantalPlease note that the RMeS office is closed from July 18 – September 2, 2025
We are currently finalizing our educational programme for 2025-2026. Full programme will be available by the end of September.