The research focuses on the contributions and further potential of community media in the Netherlands to support and facilitate debate, dialogue and societal participation at the local level.

Guiding questions:

·      How and through which activities can CM involve different age groups and

·      contribute to exchange and dialogue across generations?

·      How are CM dealing with different challenges in rural, peripheric and urban areas?

 

The research is based on a mapping of best practices in the Netherlands alongside empirical fieldwork with important actors in the field of community media.

Project under supervision of COMMIT

Project Leader

EU grant UU is subcontracting partner of COMMIT

• Elaine Nolten & Lola de Koning

Digital media use provides an understudied entry-point to understand the life worlds of
young migrants. Young asylum seekers and expatriates are connected migrants. They
both rely on digital media to keep in touch with loved ones and friends across borders.
However, their status and material circumstances radically differ. In Information and
Communication Technology for Development discourses, the Internet is celebrated to
empower asylum seekers. Ironically, digital data are also used to restrict the mobility of
‘irregular migrants’ as anti-immigration sentiments grow across Europe. In sharp
contrast, expatriate youth are elite nomads, for whom the borders of Fortress Europe
pose no obstacles.
This study considers how expat and refugee youth in the Netherlands digitally
encapsulate themselves in bubbles with co-ethnics and develop a cosmopolitan stance
towards others. The focus is on four interrelated processes: 1) identity, 2) learning, 3)
affectivity, and 4) communication rights.
Comparative fieldwork will be conducted among major migrant groups in the
Netherlands. To capture how power relations impact upon their lives, young Syrian and
Somali asylum seekers are compared with American and Indian expat youth (12-18
years).
Creative, participatory and digital techniques are combined during three phases of
data gathering: 1) In-depth interviews with 100 young people (25 Syrians, 25 Somalis,
25 Americans, 25 Indians) revolving around friendship network visualizations; 2) A
virtual ethnography with a selection of 40 interviewees; and 3) A photovoice activity
where 40 informants are invited to share and reflect on self-selected photographs from
their mobile phone archive.
This innovative study will have a three-fold impact. Academic debates in media,
gender and postcolonial studies about migration and ICTs will be diversified. Results
about learning and rights will be shared with relevant practitioners and policy-makers.
The photo exhibition will provide the general audience a more inclusive view of Dutch
society and everyday European multiculturalism.

Project Leader

NWO grant

The project ‘Critical media literacy through making media (MMM): A key to participation among migrant youth’, is funded by the Dutch National Research Agenda (2017-2019). The team consists of the coordinators Koen Leurs and Sanne Sprenger and junior researchers Ena Omerovic and Hemmo Bruinenberg. MMM collaborates with students and teachers to develop an educational program focused on visual media production using smartphones and aimed at raising critical consciousness and promoting civic engagement.

Project Leader

See the project blog at https://mmm.sites.uu.nl/over-mmm.

NWO grant Dutch National Research Agenda

• Sanne Sprenger MA

The main aim of the proposed study is to investigate the lived experience of cultural difference among young Londoners (between 12-18 years) of different cultural backgrounds. Internet applications such as the video sharing platform YouTube, the social-networking site Facebook and micro-blog Twitter are taken as entry points to study the juxtaposition of differences in urban, digital representations. I will theorize and produce new empirical knowledge about how digital practices become loci of intercultural encounters. Taking a comparative approach, I focus on the networked belonging of youths from lower-class (often more multicultural) and upper-class (often more homogeneous) London boroughs on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. As digital practices have become a significant part of their life, it is urgent to achieve greater insights in whether their use of Internet applications corroborates pan-European sentiments of failed multiculturalism and ethnic segregation or whether their experiences rather showcase conviviality, cross-cultural exchange and cultural hybridization. Thus far, the ways in which diverse ethnic/gender/religious identities digitally encounter, negotiate and appropriate one another across online/offline spaces have remained understudied. Innovatively bringing new media, gender and postcolonial studies into dialogue; the layered dynamics and user-generated cultural heterogeneity across Internet applications is scrutinized. The proposed study combines large-scale digital methods to study geographically tagged user-generated content, qualitative in-depth interviews with 90 youths and virtual ethnography with 30 young informants.

Project Leader

As of 1 September 2013, Dr Koen Leurs (Mediastudies) will work as a Marie Curie Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. With an Intra-European Fellowship for career development, he will conduct research for 24 months within the project ‘U.P.L.O.A.D – Urban Politics of London Youth Analyzed Digitally’ at the School of Media and Communications.

His project investigates the lived experience of cultural difference among young Londoners (between 12-18 years) of different cultural backgrounds. Taking a comparative approach, Leurs focuses on the networked belonging of youths from lower-class (often more multicultural) and upper-class (often more homogeneous) London boroughs on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

As digital practices have become a significant part of their life, it is urgent to achieve greater insights in whether their use of Internet applications corroborates pan-European sentiments of failed multiculturalism and ethnic segregation or whether their experiences rather showcase conviviality, cross-cultural exchange and cultural hybridisation. Thus far, the ways in which diverse ethnic/gender/religious identities digitally encounter, negotiate and appropriate one another across online/offline spaces have remained understudied.

Leurs innovatively brings new media, gender and postcolonial studies into dialogue. He combines large-scale digital methods to study geographically tagged user-generated content, qualitative in-depth interviews with 90 youths and virtual ethnography with 30 young informants.

EU grant Marie Curie IEF Intra-European Fellowship for career development

• Dr. Myria Georgiou

MIG@NET explores how migrant individuals and communities participate in the production and transformation of transnational digital networks and the effect of transnational digital networks on migrant mobility and integration. Transnational digital networks are studied as instances of socio-economic, gender, racial, and class hierarchies, where the participation of migrant communities entails the possibility of challenging these hierarchies. The participation of migrant communities - at times inclusive, joining in larger transnational digital projects, at times exclusive, creating separate and relatively closed transnational spaces - is investigated in detail through particular case studies in seven thematic areas: Border Crossings, Communication and Information Flows, Education and Knowledge, Religious Practices, Sexualities, Social Movements, Intercultural Conflict and Dialogue. The project addresses these issues through a tripartite conceptual and methodological approach: a) a critical approach to the separation between the digital and the real; b) a transnational approach to migration and c) an intersectional approach to gender.

 

Researcher

EU grant 7th European Framework Program

• dr. Eva Midden
• prof. dr. Sandra Ponzanesi

• Panteion University (Greece); Symfiliosi (Cyprus); Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (France); University of Hamburg (Germany); University of Bologna (Italy); The Peace Institute (Slovenia) and the University of Hull (UK).

In this project, carried out in collaboration with psychologist Mariëtte de Haan (Social Sciences, UU) and literary ethnographer Kevin Leander (Vanderbilt University, USA, Education and Human Development) we focus on how new digital media practices involving the Internet (e.g., information seeking, instant messaging, chat, web logs, the production and distribution of multi-media) impact on the lives, identities, learning and socialization of migrant youth. Migrancy, central to this program, embeds many of the local and global paradoxes that also pertain to digital media with their compression of space and time. However the link between the two fields is still under-theorised and is in need of more situated and comparative research. The project aims to monitor, evaluate and assess the socio-cultural specificities of the interaction between youth and digital media in a comparative perspective (migrants versus native Dutch, Moroccan migrants in the Netherlands versus Mexican migrants in the USA, female versus male). The comparative research focuses on a) identity construction and global representations, b) development of new learning strategies and socialization patterns, c) new forms of digital literacy and youth networks, and d) differences and similarities of these dynamics in a cross-national comparison. The project aims to locate the study of the effects of digital media in relation to socio-cultural configurations mediated by nationality, gender and ethnicity

Researcher

Utrecht University

• Prof. Mariette De Haan (UU
• SW); Dr. Kevin Leander. VanderBilt University
• USA; Dr. Fleur Prinsen (UU
• SW); Asli Unlosoy (UU
• SW)

In this project, we focus on how new digital media practices involving the internet impact on the lives, identities, learning and socialization of migrant youth. Migrancy, central to this program, embeds many of the local and global paradoxes that also pertain to digital media with their compression of space and time. However the link between the two fields is still under-theorised and is in need of more situated and comparative research. The project aims to monitor, evaluate and assess the socio-cultural specificities of the interaction between youth and digital media in a comparative perspective (migrants versus native Dutch, Moroccan migrants in the Netherlands versus Mexican migrants in the USA, female versus male). The comparative research focuses on a) identity construction and global representations, b) development of new learning strategies and socialization patterns, c) new forms of digital literacy and youth networks, and d) differences and similarities of these dynamics in a cross-national comparison. The project aims to locate the study of the effects of digital media in relation to socio-cultural configurations mediated by nationality, gender and ethnicity. See for more information: http://www.uu.nl/wiredup/

Researcher

With the goal to work on urgent contemporary issues, Wired Up offers me chances to grow as an engaged scholar. Originally, I was trained in media studies, and I also took courses in gender studies, cultural geography and philosophy. During my studies I have developed an interest in the critical study of internetworked culture. In my dissertation I advance this interest with a specific focus, my aim is to sketch and theorize processes of everyday Internetworked identification of Dutch-Moroccan youth. My aim is to uncover often unheard, but highly political stories of personal identification by tracing mediated crossings between youth cultures, cultures of origin and cultures of migration. Analytically, for me identity includes the performativity of various axis of differentiation such as gender, age, ethnicity, generation, religion and diaspora. Studying use of different applications, I hope to conceptualize how performativity is mutually shaped by their medium specific characteristics. I use survey data, interviews and online materials to highlight and juxtapose various aspects of these processes. I enjoy learning how to intervene in fields like gender and postcolonial studies and new media studies. Working together with people from various backgrounds, the project offers me the opportunity to learn how to bring quantitative and qualitative approaches into a creative and productive collision. Keywords: Dutch-Moroccan migrant youth, intersectional approach to identity, representation, postcolonial/gender studies, medium specificity

Utrecht University Utrecht Executive Board, High Potential Project

• prof. dr. Sandra Ponzanesi

• Prof. dr. Mariette de Haan (UU
• SW); dr. Kevin Leander
• VanderBilt University
• USA. Dr. Fleur Prinsen (UU
• GW); Asli Unlosoy (UU
• SW)