Research school for Media Studies (RMeS)

25 & 26 June 2026 | Radboud University Nijmegen This year, the RMeS Summer School will be hosted and organised by the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Radboud University, Research group Media, Popular Culture and Social Change. This year’s theme for the summer school is Disconnection: Media, Politics and Affect. During the Summer School, there will be 3 public keynotes. Are you int…

Friday 19 June 2026 | 14:00-15:30 | Aula - Oude Lutherse Kerk What does it mean to be a person who is constantly translated into data? In a world shaped by the platform ecosystems of Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, everyday life unfolds through infrastructures that do more than monitor behavior: they steer how reality is perceived, how choices take shape, and how people come to know…

Monday, 22 June 2026 | University of Amsterdam Databases were a hot topic in about 1971. Nowadays they sit in the background as the backbone of AI and internet platforms. Databases are often seen, and used, as mechanisms of order and rationalisation, epitomising the splitting of formalism and feeling or intensive and extensive. Can their ordered and ordering qualities, and their foundational role…

5 - 11 july 2026 | De Cinema, Antwerp, Belgium One full week of screenings, Q&A’s and in depth lectures on two themes, one in film history and one in film criticism, organized by Cinea and De Cinema with support from the Royal Belgian Film Archive. A convivial event with a dedicated group of film-loving participants (including students, filmmakers, etc.).

Symposium, 20 May 2026 | 13.00 - 17.00 YouTube has long established itself within the current online ecosystem as one of the biggest platforms through which people consume and produce news, culture and entertainment. But it didn’t spawn in a vacuum, surfing a larger wave of platformization but also tapping into older alternative media ecologies, including conspiratorial and extremist ones. This s…

This project aims to re-centre the voices, experiences and practices of (queer) children and teenagers in relation to the media that represents them. Through a qualitative, multi-sited ethnographic study, this project examines how children and teens consume, interpret and creatively engage with mediated representations of queerness and queer childhoods in their everyday lives.

Scholarship on international broadcasting centres European institutional perspectives, Cold War propaganda, and English-language archives. This research intervenes by examining the Indonesian programme of Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep (1945–1965), foregrounding Indonesian broadcasters as agents rather than invisible figures.

This research argues that stigmatizing stereotypes about intellectual disability that were utilized in late 19th – early 20th century eugenics propaganda still recur in hegemonic (e.g. Hollywood) representations. These stereotypes often assume a poor quality of life and end in literal or social death. If not death, they end in an assimilation into normative expectations through ‘inspiring’ tales …

This project investigates cross-cultural differences in multimodal narratives in online comics, with a particular focus on webcomics as a rapidly growing yet still underexplored form of digital storytelling. While comics have attracted increasing attention in multimodal studies, digital humanities, and cognitive psychology, webcomics remain relatively understudied despite their global popularity …

Send your proposal before May 11, 2026. Are you passionate about sharing original research with new generations of students and scholars you admire? Have you been sitting on an idea for organizing a workshop in your area of expertise, but you don’t have the funds to do so? RMeS has got your back!

In this episode, Dr Barbara Titus (UvA) joins our PhD council member Merit Zimmermann (EUR) to discuss her research on maskanda music in South Africa, with a focus on reflexivity, positionality, and colonial legacies in academic knowledge production.

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The Russian-Ukrainian war is a digitally networked war on an unprecedented scale. Every day, people are constantly cross-checking official news against social media and frontline updates right on their phones. This leaves them with the exhausting daily challenge of filtering through propaganda and chaos just to make sense of the war and its repercussions.  This PhD project will examine how Ukrai…

10 April 2026 | Trippenhuis Amsterdam Join us for this three-hour workshop for researchers and heritage professionals who work with audiovisual (AV) materials. Participants will be introduced to AVAnnotate (https://av-annotate.org/), an open-source application and a workflow for building digital exhibits and editions with annotated AV. Designed by Dr. Tanya Clement, Brumfield Labs, and Performant…

26-27 August 2026 | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam This two-day international symposium brings together some of the most prominent voices in the global debate on media’s entanglements with the living world. Speakers from three continents will present research on topics ranging from the colonial materiality of film and operative images of extraction to film archives in a warming world, media’s role …

The overarching project Nieuws dat ertoe doet aims to develop news literacy programs that align with the news use and everyday lives of vocational education students. This project includes an interview study on the news use of these students in the city of Groningen and the rural town of Stadskanaal. This part of the project examines how this group encounters, interprets, and evaluates news and…