PhD Alumni

16 April 2025 | Radboud University Nijmegen
The dissertation maps how representatives of Silicon Valley propagate this myth and how it affects their position in public debates. I approach platform companies (Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) and prominent tech figures (e.g. Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Elon Musk) as cultural producers and political actors. To understand how these actors engage in practic­es of mythmaking, I use methods of discursive and historical analysis to examine the narra­tives, green rhetoric, visual identity and underlying ideology of tech-on-climate discourse.

Time: 27 November 2024, 10:30-12:00 Location: Rotterdam University, Campus Woudestijn, Education Center, Senate Hall Livestreaming practices are increasingly influencing Chinese people’s everyday lives in social, cultural, and economic terms. The showroom livestreaming, known as xiuchang zhibo, features various content entertainment from singing and dancing to mundane everyday life activities such as chatting and eating. Whereas e-commerce livestreaming […]

12 November 2019 | VU University
On the face of it, both journalism and Journalism Studies have witnessed a shift toward the users of news. However, while news users have taken center stage in discussions about journalism, they are still more often spoken about rather than spoken with.

On 27 September Stephanie de Smale defended her PhD thesis Ludic Memory Networks: Following Translations and Circulations of War Memory in Digital Popular Culture in the University Hall.

On July 12, 2018 at 11:00,Yu Sun will defend her doctoral thesis, Engaging in politics: everyday political talk in online China.

Arjen Nauta | University of Amsterdam
My research seeks to address the surge of reality television in China in the 21st century within strategies of governance. First, I analyze the political economy in which television makers operate. Then, based on one year of ethnographic research at HSTV in Changsha, I show how political and economic factors influence the daily labor of production.

Stefan Baack | University of Groningen
My dissertation examines how the growing reliance on data and the steady quantification of social life affects democratic publics. It studies the practices and social imaginaries of two actors who facilitate the use quantitative techniques in key areas of public space: data activists and data journalists. As data activists, I describe activists in the open data and civic tech movements who develop projects that aim to make engagement with authorities easier for citizens, e.g. parliamentary monitoring websites that make parliamentary speeches more accessible.

Stephanie de Smale | Utrecht University
How is wartime suffering is imagined and remembered in translocal digital culture communities? The empirical research conducted offers an in-depth case study analysis of everyday practices of remembrance within digital culture, read in relation to peacebuilding and postwar reconstruction in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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.

14 maart 2017
Redacties talkshows vermijden risico’s. Format tv-show bepalend voor keuze politieke gasten

Niet de presentator, niet de opvattingen van de redactie maar het ‘format’ bepaalt volkomen welke politici worden uitgenodigd in de zes belangrijkste Nederlandse talkshows. Zij worden, naar gelang de aard van het programma, geselecteerd op politieke relevantie en ‘talkability’. Redacties zijn daarbij huiverig om te experimenteren met onbekende hoofdgasten. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van Birte Schohaus, die op 14 maart promoveert aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Ze weerlegt in het onderzoek ook de kritiek dat talkshows de ‘gewone man’ te weinig aan het woord zouden laten.