3-6 July 2018 | Utrecht University
During this summer school, we aim to critically investigate the digital means by which imagined communities shape themselves and are shaped by (commercial) platforms, institutions and governments through processes of datafication. We are interested both in research on suitable methodologies and in case studies on datafied communities, institutions, and systems.
25 June 2018
The media discourse of competitive sports contributes some of the most consistent and powerful world-building dynamics to the constantly changing cross-media landscape. The serialized and repetitive organization of its competitions guarantees an endless stream of interrelated events, and the evaluation of performances provokes ongoing investigations and contested narratives about heroes and villains.
25 April 2018
Digital detox holidays, phone stacking dinners, virtual suicide, a year without Internet.
In a culture obsessed with social networking, participation and connectivity, to disconnect has come to mean going off-line: to reclaim presence in the physical world; to revitalize face to face communication; to salvage the actual over the virtual; to (temporarily) obliterate one’s online identity. To disconnect signals a desire to re-connect: with one’s off-line identity, with friends, with the spiritual values of life, with one’s natural environment, with the world at large. Disconnectivity thus bespeaks connectivity, and vice versa.
On Monday April 9, 2018 at 16:15, Tom Slootweg will defend his doctoral thesis Resistance, Disruption and Belonging. The thesis returns to the period before the explosive rise of YouTube. The slow introduction of video as a consumer media technology, from the mid-1960s onwards, set in motion a long phase during which expectations were rife with video’s potential for everyday users in terms of participation and media democratisation.
29 March 2018 | University of Groningen
This one-day symposium revolves around the question how the politics of memory are today increasingly interwoven with the politics of social media platforms. Social media such as YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia are not only platforms for content sharing and consumption, social networking, and knowledge production.
Image: Sylvia van Schie, illustrator
On Thursday 29 March 2018, Rik Smit will defend his PhD Thesis Platforms of Memory: Social Media and Digital Memory Work.
On Thursday 18 January 2018 at 16:00h, Tim van der Heijden will defend his PhD dissertation Hybrid Histories: Technologies of Memory and the Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies, 1895–2005. This research project analyses how throughout the twentieth century various generations have recorded their family memories on film, video and digital media.
Call for Papers: The NECS 2018 Conference | Media Tactics and Engagement
27-29 June 2018
The changing media landscape requires continuous (re)invention of the ways in which photography, film, television, digital media, and the arts are produced, distributed, accessed, and consumed. Back in the past like today, the question of media tactics and engagement is crucial once more. Today the question seems even more urgent, since large corporations provide platforms and services that foster the desired behaviour of the average media viewer/user/consumer and produ(c/s)er; nevertheless, in previous decades, ways of planning long-term strategies, tactical reactions to unforeseen circumstances and engagement have determined media practices and discourses. The NECS 2018 conference will explore the various – both intended and/or subversive − ways in which media are currently developed, deployed and distorted.
The PhD Council needs you!
Due to a number of graduations, the RMeS PhD Council is looking for new members. The Council meets twice a year and organizes one network event each year. The Council represents the PhD community in the RMeS Advisory Board and gets to evaluate and discuss the direction of the Research School for Media Studies.
18 January 2018, 14–16h | University of Amsterdam
No one seems surprised anymore that culture is more and more organized as a competition; there are awards for books, rankings for universities, likes or shares for photos, and casting shows for talents from singing to baking. But how did this become the default approach to culture?
February-March 2018 – Utrecht University
Each spring, the Research School for Media Studies offers a Trending Topics course where faculty members from eight participating universities (UvA, UU, VU, EUR, UL, UM, RUG, RUN) 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.
23 & 24 January 2018
This Winter School will feature different types of sessions: 1) parallel sessions for presenting your work to peers 2) lectures by RMeS staff members and 3) a workshop on Academic Career outside Academia.
Seminars: November 8, 2017. January 31, February 28, May 9, 2018 | Workshop: two-day “pressure cooker” workshop: February 27-28
Urban processes have been impacted by frictions all throughout history. The remarkable pace and dynamics of the current phase of global urbanization in the age of mediatization, datafication, and pervasive connectivity suggest a new age where insular, political boundaries have come to shift radically. Perhaps to a larger extent than before, people are identifying as global citizens. However, as a result of this spatial accumulation social, political and cultural frictions within our cities manifest themselves on a wide scale.
Date: 11 October, 10-13hrs. (includes lunch) Venue: University of Amsterdam, Roeterseiland, REC C10.20 Open to: PhD Candidates and RMA students who are a member of a Dutch Graduate Research School (onderzoekschool). Credits: 1EC Coordination: Marijn Sax, M.Sax@uva.nl Registration: Max number of participants: 5 Space is limited and registration is required. Register with RMeS by 1 […]
29 September 2017
This masterclass with renowned scholar and interaction designer Janet Murray will explore how interactive narratives can help to create engaging experiences, and support critical and problem-solving capacities.
April-May 2018 – Erasmus University Rotterdam
The course is organised around four dimensions – platforms, politics, performances and people. Platforms are the new contexts for digital cultures. They are deeply corporatized, walled gardens that often allow a small circle of researchers to access their vast data.
20, 21 & 22 June 2018 – Radboud University Nijmegen
How do we identify the fake from the real? What strategies enable us to reveal and yet protect our subjects who seek anonymity online? Can researchers be activists and their research serve as instruments for social change? How do we ensure fair representation through big data analytics? These are some of the questions that need addressing as we seek to study digital cultures. This course identifies key research issues and novel methodological solutions in the study of contemporary digital cultures. In particular, we investigate challenges faced in the arena of data authenticity, representation and communication to lay and other publics.
February 2018
Together with literary theorist Timothy Morton, renown composer/performer Jennifer Walshe is working on a large-scale performance entitled Time: the Opera which will premiere in 2019. In this seminar, we will work closely together with both Walshe and Morton, exploring the key themes that matter to this project as they coincide with the urgencies of contemporary cultural theory (media studies, performance studies, sonic studies).
Block 4 (23 April 2018 – 29 June 2018) – Utrecht University
In this course, we will focus on movement and gesture as aspects of how we are corporeally literate that have for a long time been neglected in accounts of embodied meaning making but are currently gaining more prominence as the result of technological developments (movement becoming more and more part of what can be detected and shared by media as well as of ways of using media and interacting with them) and also the emergence of embodied, embedded and enactive understandings of perception and cognition. During the meetings we will discuss a panorama of historical and contemporary approaches to movement and gesture in relation to questions of (among others) affect, emotion, experience, spatiality, and memory. Students are invited to explore the potential of these readings for the analysis of encounters with objects, events and situations of different kinds.
Block 3 (05 February 2018 – 06 April 2018) – Utrecht University
This course actively teams up with ongoing research of MCW’s research groep [urban interfaces]. [urban interfaces] investigates urban transformations and the role of mobile and locational art, media and performance in urban contexts.
RMeS Summer School 2018: New Materialism
/in RMeS News /by Chantal20, 21 & 22 June 2018 – Radboud University Nijmegen
How do we identify the fake from the real? What strategies enable us to reveal and yet protect our subjects who seek anonymity online? Can researchers be activists and their research serve as instruments for social change? How do we ensure fair representation through big data analytics? These are some of the questions that need addressing as we seek to study digital cultures. This course identifies key research issues and novel methodological solutions in the study of contemporary digital cultures. In particular, we investigate challenges faced in the arena of data authenticity, representation and communication to lay and other publics.