Research school for Media Studies (RMeS)

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…

While Taigi music is extensively studied through historical and political narratives, less attention is paid to musicians’ creative agency, the interplay between music and Taigi as a tonal language, and the impact of digital and AI tools on authorship and authenticity. Historically a battleground for identity, Taigi music raises vital questions about the present: Does it still sing “Taiwanese-nes…

1-13 June 2026 | Hosted by Utrecht University and RADIUS Centre for Contemporary Art and Ecology This first intensive global classroom, hosted by Utrecht University and RADIUS Centre for Contemporary Art and Ecology, invites students to think and feel with the earth at a time of deep ecological, social, and political uncertainty. Drawing on environmental humanities, philosophy, literature and the…

The study addresses a significant gap in media studies: while the socio-environmental impacts of tourism are well-documented, there is a lack of scholarly work analyzing how digital platforms mediate these developments from a communication perspective. Central to this inquiry is the Main Research Question: How do indigenous actors and the government in Labuan Bajo digitally narrate climate change…

This PhD proposes reclaiming craft as a legitimate system of knowledge to decolonise dominant, Western notions of creativity, particularly as these are being reshaped in the age of Artificial Intelligence. Situated in the Indian context, it argues that craft embodies collective, culturally embedded, and context-specific forms of creativity that are marginalised by institutional, economic, and tec…

Thursday 26 February 2026 &#124; Utrecht University Science Park Workshops are increasingly employed for participatory engagement. But what does it mean to approach workshop as a method and intervention? This workshop is an opportunity to discuss as well as engage with practices researchers have refined over time to design and facilitate workshops and prompt meaningful interaction.