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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.