PhD Researchers

How to sustain a political movement when it is not allowed? How to survive in abeyance? Hong Kong’s 2019-20 Anti-Extradition Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement, a full-scale democratic struggle against Chinese rule, was forced into abeyance under the National Security Law imposed in June 2020. Followed by hard-handed suppression, activist networks were forced to shift to other arenas less susceptible to the regime’s control: consumer marketplace, fan culture, and diasporic communities. These informal networks remain active in constructing political discourse and staging micro-resistance, which remaps the boundaries of politics and solidarity outside traditional institutions, protests, and civil society.

In my project, I am analysing the fact-checking accounts on TikTok in order to understand the specifics of multimodal argumentation on the social media platform and the argumentative strategies used by the fact-checkers. Even though TikTok is one of the most downloaded applications in the world, there have been little efforts to fight mis- and disinformation, which are omnipresent in the platform.

The growing role of digital technology in society has changed the notions of citizenship and inclusion. Governments worldwide are becoming increasingly digital and shift the responsibility to handle e-governance technologies towards citizens. Digital divide scholars express concern about these developments, as it becomes increasingly difficult for a significant part of society to participate. This is the case, even in societies that are digitally advanced. The Netherlands is an example of such a place where 97% of citizens have domestic internet access but where four out of 17 million citizens lack the basic digital literacy to participate in the digital society.

Black Star analyzes the “idea of blackness” in the world and how there are two separate paths “Black Cinema” can take: “that which ‘awakens’ the spectator by taking him along the path of progress, and that which ‘lulls him to sleep’ by making him sluggish and escape from reality by merely entertaining him.”[1] The dissertation posits that “Cinema”, which it designates as a “Colonizing Cinema”, has demanded, “Black Cinema” to perform with a minstrel mask and explicit blackface that grants a partial humanization of the “idea of blackness” in “Cinema.” This allows “Colonizing Cinema” to take possession of “Black Cinema” to make it palatable, which further concretizes its place as the “other” within “Cinema.”

Today’s digitised media context is undergoing an oral/aural renaissance, where voice technology increasingly permeates much of contemporary life. In particular, tech companies and states are massively investing in voice biometrics, making such technology a multi-billion global industry and a new centre of digital innovation.

This project aims to explore how people’s social engagement with news on social media may influence social trust in the context of public crises in China. Social media has changed main features of news consumption and the way in which people engage with news. Previous audiences are enabled to produce, share and discuss news on social media. News engagement on social media even becomes a popular way for people to interact with each other and maintain social relationships. Social trust, defined as people’s trust in other citizens, is considered to be an essential aspect of social capital. Previous studies have addressed the impacts of social media use and online social interactions on social trust, though the results remain controversial due to different circumstances.

Community news media in Canada is in a state of crisis. Since 2008, more than 300 local news outlets in 214 Canadian communities have closed. Other local media outlets are merging with geographic neighbours, reducing staff, and reducing or eliminating print publications. The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have further contributed to this decline.

This PhD-research entails a qualitative audience study into the experience of watching slow cinema. This is ‘a type of cinema characterized by minimalism, austerity, and extended duration; downplaying drama, event, and action in favor of mood; and endowing the activity of viewing with a meditative or contemplative quality’ (Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies).

Disinformation has always existed and even though there are prevention methods, with yet more to be developed, we currently cannot assume it will disappear anytime soon. What we can do however, is to create and understand the conditions for resilience, both on a societal and individual level. The focus in this work will lie on the latter, with the guiding question: Who are vulnerable to disinformation and how can we protect (these) individuals from the potentially harmful effects of disinformation?

Cristel Kolopaking is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in the RE-FRAME project, based on a collaboration between Utrecht University, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Make Media Great Again. RE-FRAME addresses the merging of journalistic sourcing practices by investigating the reuse of audiovisual data with Artificial Intelligence (AI) through an affordance analysis of the technical components, combined with an ethnographic production and action-based research with journalists.

Digital activism has been gaining increased attention in recent years: the media coverage of #MeToo stories from all around the world, the political debates on racial discrimination and police brutality in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the growing number of anti-vaccine groups on social media during the Covid-19 pandemic – all illustrate the rise of this phenomenon and its inclusion in the broader public discourse.

Chinese society is moving towards a significantly aging society with the number of older persons aged 60 years or over. Meanwhile, Elderly migration and mobility continue to be a fundamental part of the human experience. The nexus of aging, migration, and new media constitute a rather neglected area in studies on digital diasporas.

China now constitutes the second-largest film market in the world. One significant change accompanying this unprecedented expansion has been the Chinese government’s active encouragement of film exports as part of its drive to augment soft power. This is closely allied to China’s most important foreign policy, known as Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which aims to intensify China’s influence in Eurasia.

The project analyses the ecology and development of mobile apps for language development in typical and atypical children from the perspective of software designers and developers. Software ethnography, quantitative analysis and modelling, and interviews with software developers will be integrated to identify how notions and theories of language acquisition and development in early childhood are translated into mobile applications for the market.