PhD Researchers

From virtual classrooms to remote examinations, AI tutors, and automated feedback systems, educational environments are increasingly saturated with digital technologies. These tools not only shape teaching and learning practices but are actively involved in the re-infrastructuring of education as a civic institution (Williamson, 2024).

Similar to other societal inequalities, digital inequality may drive wedges in the ways society coheres, through shaping the inclusion and opportunities experienced differently across groups. Therefore, this PhD project seeks to explore the complexities of “socio-digital inequalities”– referring to the interconnectedness between digital and broader societal inequalities – by bringing together academic and experiential knowledge on technologies and media, socio-digital inequality, intersectionality, and social (co-)inclusion (Helsper, 2022, p. 4).

Music festivals no longer start at the gate or end with the last act. Instead, they begin months before, unfold dynamically during, and linger long after as organizers and audiences leverage technologies to shape collective memories, experiences and anticipations (Hammelburg, 2020; Hill et al., 2022). Festivals are inherently spatialized, taking place in a designated space within which participants are separated from non-participating bodies for a set  period of time (Woodward & Swartjes, 2024).

This project aims to explore screen tourism, the phenomenon of people traveling to places associated with audiovisual production. Most of the current knowledge on screen tourism is built on research conducted on film and TV series and mainly on Western Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries, but little is known about the dynamics between reality TV and tourism outside of the western context. This project thus aims to contribute to this research gap by studying reality-TV-induced tourism in China, specifically focusing on Wuzhen, a historic Chinese watertown in Zhejiang province re-developed for modern tourism, as a case study. 

This research focuses on the specific interaction between toxic discourse and entertainment platforms in the context of masculinity content on social media. Notably, in the last years, there has been an increase of what has been called “manfluencers”, both as individuals (e.g. Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Myron Gaines – as well as women, like Hanna Pearl Davis ) and podcasts (Whatever podcast, Fres&Fit Miami, etc.).

Indonesia has had the highest level of generosity in the world in the last five years. This philanthropic culture is represented by viral content on YouTube and is welcomed by content creators, who increasingly produce content about donations to the poor. In this research, I call these “giving-to-others videos” to distinguish them from organized “donation” videos. Videos that depict poverty and heroes who help in surprising ways are popular among Indonesian viewers

My proposed research is an exploration into the idea of beauty in avant-garde cinema during the era of Eastern European history known as “the Stagnation” period, from 1964 to the end of the Soviet Union. The project aims to cover a film corpus ranging from Sergei Paradjanov’s first films up until Soviet Parallel Cinema in the late 80s. It will analyze the discourses on beauty which appear in late experimental cinema of the Eastern bloc, and its criticism from the 1960s throughout the Cold War.

Social media have increasingly become primary sources for news consumption, particularly among younger adults (18-35). At the same time, journalists try, often in vain, to attract people to their websites or apps for the full range of news coverage. Besides, news organizations have become gatekeepers of their websites, sometimes prioritizing social media logic over the traditional journalistic rationale. One can assume that news on social media at large might not be an accurate reflection of the scope and depth of general news reporting. This may be even more true for highly personalized social media feeds, in which news has become a by-product.

This research critically examines the historical shift in film cataloging infrastructures1 from analog to digital within film heritage institutions (FHIs). Despite often being viewed as “repetitive” and “tedious,” cataloging forms the foundation of archiving as it creates access points into the collections and enables physical and intellectual control over them. The fact that digital media are harder to retrieve without proper registration makes cataloging even more crucial today. Confronting the increasingly extensive and diverse cinematic materials and metadata, FHIs have long grappled with standardizing and adapting their cataloging systems amid evolving media culture. Meanwhile, the recent trend in decolonizing archives3 urges FHIs to enhance catalog inclusivity. To develop a critical reflection on these challenges and the role of cataloging infrastructures in shaping global film heritage, a review of the forgotten history of film cataloging is urgently needed.

How do the minority youth consume social media? What are the effects social media use on the social interactions of the minority youth in Indonesia? How do the minority youth in Indonesia express and negotiate their identities on social media? These are the research questions addressed in the project. Despite the fact that young people are among the most active users of online media, their experiences are often marginalized in academic discussions of the internet within the discipline of communication (Livingstone, 2003, cited in Redden and Way, 2016). This study seeks to address this gap by focusing on the experiences of minority youth in Indonesia, particularly those who are considered minorities based on their ethnicity, gender, and religion. Through the application of virtual ethnography, this research aims to enhance understanding of the convergence of social media and the physical world, with a particular focus on concepts drawn from media and cultural studies.

How do contemporary Afrikaans films, rooted in biographical and historic source material, interrogate apartheid ideology to deconstruct the cultural hegemony of traditional Afrikaner culture and its reproduction within contemporary Afrikaner culture? I do a film analysis of six recent Afrikaans films made in South Africa, namely Vir die Voëls (2016), Ellen: The Ellen Pakkies Story (2018), Kanarie (2018), Moffie (2019) Poppie Nongena (2019), and Toorbos (2021). The history of South African cinema is closely tied to the country’s socio-political past. South Africa was an apartheid state from 1948 till 1994, which meant that it had legalised racial segregation.

Artificial intelligence is considered a key technology today, although interpreted diversely and ambiguously. With the shift of AI products into everyday life, new fears of job loss and promises of easing work burdens are hatching, impacting large public investments into research and industry and are reflected in policy discourses and legislation. The imagination and future perception of what AI can and should become have led to different trajectories showcasing the importance of social and cultural discursive imagination in envisioning and determining trajectories of AI and its integration into society through such imaginaries.

Semmy Claassen | Utrecht University
As evidenced by the PISA 2022 Results, a third of Dutch 15-year-old students is at risk of leaving secondary school illiterate (OECD, 2023; Stichting Lezen, 2023). This points to the reading crisis among Dutch youth which manifests a decrease in reading (Waal, 2023). In the midst of this reading crisis, there is a fair share of adolescents who are (re)discovering and celebrating reading through TikTok’s literary subculture BookTok (Martens et al., 2022). I will further explore the mechanisms of digital literary platforms in Dutch-language contexts and their possible role in motivating reading among young people.

This interdisciplinary PhD project, combining media studies, literary studies, and educational sciences, consists of two main phases. The main research question is whether and if so, how, digital platforms and/or their subcultures with an emphasis on reading can enhance reading education in secondary schools to contribute towards combatting the reading crisis described above.

My practice-led research project focuses on curating and presenting silent films (i.e., films made during cinema’s first two decades) within contemporary archival and museological contexts. What does curating silent films today entail? What are the constitutive elements of this practice?