Jeroen Boom | Cinematic Cartographies of Urban Peripheries in Contemporary Europe | Radboud University Nijmegen, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures | Supervisors: Prof. dr Anneke Smelik & dr László Munteán | 01 September 2019 – 31 August 2023 | j.boom[at]let.ru.nl

European cities have been privileged sites for thematizations of modernity, progress, and national identity. What happens at the margins of these cities tends to acquire less attention. This research aims to map the production of urban peripheries in contemporary cinema from a trans-European perspective in order to understand the political, aesthetic and affective dimensions of marginality across and amidst local expressions of urban deprivation. Europe’s urban outskirts have long been seen as either a violent spectacle or a placeless wasteland in the shadows of the city-center. This project aims to de-essentialize this dominant narrative and dismantle its aura of universalism. Although diverse in their industrial context, the filmmakers under examination (e.g. Céline Sciamma, Matteo Garrone, and Ruben Östland) are interconnected through the Deleuze-Guattarian concept of ‘minor cinema,’ characterized by its struggle to define itself against the hegemonic and exclusive discourse that occludes it. This research will explore how these minor filmmakers attach divergent feelings and meanings to Europe’s urban peripheries, tracing the different strategies and tactics that are employed in imagining these marginal spaces.

Anna Marieke Weerdmeester | Personalised Information Gatekeepers: Social Media Platforms’ Responsibilities to Protect European Citizens’ Right to Receive Information | Overarching project: Governing Digital Societies | Utrecht University – Department of Media and Culture Studies | Supervisors: Professor José van Dijck & Professor Janneke Gerards | 1 May 2019 – 1 May 2022 |  a.m.weerdmeester[at]uu.nl

This projects investigates the responsibilities of social media platforms, as gatekeepers of information, to protect European citizens’ right to receive information.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, have become increasingly important actors in the facilitation of information on the Internet. As such, they are increasingly being identified as gatekeepers of information (e.g. Helberger, Kleinen-von Königslöw & van der Noll, 2015; Laidlaw, 2015). However, while social media are increasingly classified as gatekeepers, a comprehensive understanding of social media platforms’ role as gatekeepers lacks in the literature. Therefore, their responsibilities as gatekeepers of information have thus far remained unclear.

This is problematic, for social media gatekeeping can threaten citizens’ right to receive information in several ways. Social media platforms’ algorithmic personalisation of content, specifically, could threaten information diversity and manipulate free access to information, thereby influencing individual forum internum and collective democratic deliberation.

Therefore, through an interdisciplinary study building on human rights law, media theory and philosophy, this project investigates the following question: What responsibilities do social media platforms, as gatekeepers of information, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have to protect European citizens’ right to receive information, specifically from manipulation through personalised information filtering?

The project investigates both descriptive and normative questions and makes use of legal analysis based on primary documents and jurisprudence, interviews with stakeholders (such as interest groups and policy-makers) and literature review based on secondary sources.