PhD Researchers

Recent political trends and events, such as the Brexit, the triumph of Donald Trump in the US presidency election as well as the rise of populist parties and politicians in European countries, have brought the concept of “populism” to the center of global discussion.

Qian Huang | Erasmus University Rotterdam
Digital vigilantism is a process where citizens who are facilitated by digital media and technology are collectively offended by other citizens’ activities and use visibility as a weapon to conduct mediated policing and control. In China, DV is featured by the so-called ‘human flesh search engine’ and other forms of citizen-led vigilante activities.

Rashid Gabdulhakov | Erasmus University Rotterdam
As part of an international project, this research examines digital vigilance in the context of the Russian Federation with the aim of a nuanced representation of the phenomenon, including emergence and decay of cases, motives behind participation and its impact on targets, as well as the role of the state agents in mediated citizen-led justice.

Amanda Brouwers | University of Groningen
The overall aim of the larger project, initiated by Tamara Witschge, is to theorise emerging shared understandings, everyday work activities, and material contexts of entrepreneurial journalism, in a time when established legacy media face significant challenges and new forms of journalism are emerging. The aim of the sub-project is to provide detailed observations of everyday activities in entrepreneurial journalism.

Frank Weij | Erasmus University Rotterdam
Geopolitics of artivism explores the complex relationship between arts and politics in an increasingly globalized world. In Western democracies artists enjoy a relatively high degree of artistic freedom, meaning that artists are able to incorporate explicit political advocacy in their artworks. However, since most art fields are relatively autonomous from other societal fields, impact of politically engaged art often remains limited.

Andrea Wagemans | University of Groningen
Through a detailed study of innovation processes, this research proposal aims to gain insight into how networked ways of working within new journalism initiatives function in day-to-day practice. Based on the idea that innovation thrives in a context where a diversity of actors collaborate (see o.a. Blomqvist and Levy, 2006; Nieto and Santamaria, 2007; Ketchen e.a., 2007), this proposal researches how collaborations and negotiations between partners take place and what they result in.

Arnoud Arps | University of Amsterdam
This PhD-project investigates how cultural memories of the violence during the Indonesian War of Independence are produced, constructed and consumed through contemporary Indonesian popular culture. For the past few years, Indonesian popular culture has been structurally and continuously referring to the Indonesian War of Independence, including its atrocities. This project takes Indonesian war-themed popular culture as its object of study

Jiyu Zhang | Leiden University
No later than the turn of the century, the notion of Chineseness has entered into a crisis. Many theorists and scholars, including Rey Chow, Ien Ang, and Shu-mei Shih, to just name a few, have called into question the seemingly impeccable notion of Chineseness. For them, “Chineseness” reads like a monolithic, compulsory, and dominant presence that almost immediately suggests suppression and elimination.

Shuangli Guo | Utrecht University
My research is about Chinese early film history from 1896 to 1929. Before the 1980s, early films were seen as inferior, primitive because they did not follow the realist model of classical Hollywood film. In 1986, the famous American film historian Tom Gunning published his profound paper, “The cinema of Attraction(s): Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde”, which had a great impact on film theory and history. In this article, Tom Gunning emphasized pre-narrative film and experimental film.

Esther Hammelburg | University of Amsterdam
This research project addresses the question how liveness is constructed within the mediatised experience of cultural events/festivals. Since Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz have firmly installed the category of media events into media theory these events have been closely connected to the notion of liveness, as they describe, the experience of being there, joining in the event as it takes place (Dayan & Katz, 1992). Many studies on a variety of event types have shown that although immediacy is one of the key aspects of liveness, the concept should not be regarded as the equivalent of live; it is not simply the simultaneity of event, transmission, and viewing (cf. Feuer, 1983; White, 2004; Kumar, 2012; Lunt, 2004; Couldry, 2002).

Inge Kalle-den Oudsten | University of Amsterdam
My research looks at the relationship between Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s concept of the ‘post museum’ and digital technologies. The post museum may be conceptualised as the museum of the future: an open, democratic space, no longer centred on ‘objective’ knowledge and curator-led concerns, but much more about visitors and their meanings. Often, digital technologies are heralded as open and democratic, which begs the question – might they be an answer – could they project the traditional museum forwards towards the post museum?

Li-An Ko | Utrecht University
The development of cinema in Taiwan was heavily influenced by political powers (the colonial government of Japan and then the Chinese Koumintang), which controlled and restrained language, themes and historical representations on the screen. After the end of the Martial Law period in 1987, a number of films, in addition to the most famous one, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989), engaged in the complicated historical issues of Taiwan, trying to represent Taiwanese history with viewpoints that had been suppressed by those in power. Thus, these historical films became part of the movement of reflecting on the identity of Taiwanese.

Nicky van Es | Erasmus University Rotterdam Faculty & Department: Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC); Arts & Culture Department | Supervisor: dr. Stijn Reijnders | 01 February 2013 – 1 February 17 | vanes[at]eshcc[dot]eur[dot]nl