Judith Jansma | From Submission to Soumission: Populist Perspectives on Culture

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Judith Jansma | University of Groningen
In today’s political discourse the idea of a culturally-grounded national identity has made a strong come-back. One can think of Theresa May’s (in)famous  statement that “citizens of the world are actually citizens of nowhere”, or Dutch Christian-democratic party CDA insisting on the integration of the national hymn in the primary school curriculum. Yet this adherence to national identity as a way to deal with complex societal challenges (globalization, multiculturalism) is performed to a much greater extent by populist parties associated with the far right. Their understanding of citizenship being based on the notion of “ethnos” rather than “demos” – leading to a strong “us vs. them” narrative – it should not come as a surprise that culture is an important tool to unite “us” and to exclude “them”.

Jiang Ye | Cross-Cultural Writing: Chinese Fan Fiction on the English World

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Jiang Ye | Cross-Cultural Writing: Chinese Fan Fiction on the English World | School of Asian Studies, The Leiden University Institute for Area Studies | Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Maghiel van Crevel | 01-10-2019 to 30-09-2023

My topic focus on Chinese fan fiction written by Chinese young female based on English source texts. It asks how this collective writing behaviour that crosses cultural borders in an unique way can realise Chinese young female’s subjectivities. In four case studies, I will focus on four different identifications in which the said subjectivities emerge through the authors’ agency. I will both close-read the texts and invoke the bigger picture of overarching tropes and media.

Andries Hiskes | Disability and its Affective Affordances: Deformity, Decay, Disruption, Distortion

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Andries Hiskes | Leiden University
Bodies considered disabled or defomed may elicit strong affective or emotional reactions. They can shock us, evoke disgust or sympathy, or we might wonder at them for example. Through the lens of four key concepts (Deformity, Decay, Disruption, Distortion), this project examines contemporary literature and art in which such affective reactions to these “deviant” bodies are depicted.

Rose Smith | Hegemonic European Communist memory narratives in Central European Museums

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Rose Smith | University of Groningen
This dissertation aims to critically scrutinize how transnational knowledge bases create a hegemonic European Communist memory narrative in museums. It fills a conceptual and empirical gap in the field of memory studies. First, the concept of mnemonic hegemony, though has been used by various scholars in memory studies, has not yet been properly developed; thus, it opens up an analytic optic that specifically focuses on mnemonic power struggles for obtaining a special advantage or authority. Second, while there is a substantial amount of research on the European memory of Communism, the transnational network organizations of European memory, as well as the museums of Communism, there is no research that specifically deals with how museum members of the Platform for European Conscience narrate Communist past.

Francisca Silva Layera | News frames and effects on the affective assessment of immigrants: An analysis of Chilean digital media

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Francisca Silva Layera | News frames and effects on the affective assessment of immigrants: An analysis of Chilean digital media | University of Groningen, Faculty of Arts, Graduate School for the Humanities (GSH) | Prof. Dr. Pablo Valdivia, Dr. Florian Lippert, Dr. Hugh McDonnell, Dr. Marc Esteve Del Valle, Dr. Konstantin Mierau & Dr. Jeanette […]

Rosmery-Ann Boegeholz | The ‘Mirror Syndrome’: young female university students’ reactions to beauty influencers’ activity on Instagram

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Rosmery-Ann Boegeholz | University of Groningen
This project aims to diagnose how influencers’ actions through Instagram contribute to the appearance of different psychiatric conditions on young female users of the social network. In other words, it seeks to explore, describe, explain, and analyse how the impact that beauty influencer generates when advertising cosmetic products on Instagram in young female users’ daily life and if the systematic use of images by young female university students on Instagram may trigger the appearance of different mental disorders.

Danelle Du Plessis | Narratives of Crisis and the Cultural Practices of Coping with Them: Engendering Mediated Time During the Coronavirus Pandemic

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Danelle Du Plessis | Narratives of Crisis and the Cultural Practices of Coping with Them: Engendering Mediated Time During the Coronavirus Pandemic | University of Groningen, Faculty of Arts, Graduate School for the Humanities (GSH) | Prof. Dr. Pablo Valdivia Martín & Dr. Ksenia Robbe

The purpose of this project is to explore gendered responses to the Coronavirus pandemic as a process of cultural organization to understand its implications for gender (in)equality. It proposes the development of the concept of ‘time use’ as a measurement of gender (in)equality to be used as a systematic temporal analytical tool during times of crisis. Within this context, it seeks to interrogate the role of the media in the construction of cultural representations of gendered time use in the home under lockdown and how the resultant cultural discourses can contribute to either the legitimization or attenuation of gender inequalities.