PhD Projects
COMPARING CLIMATE CHANNGE PERCEPTIONS AND EXPLORING COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES: CHINA VS EU
In the face of global climate change challenges, China and the EU stand at the forefront of climate action, underscoring the importance of comprehending public perceptions within these regions. While previous research on public perceptions of climate change primarily focuses on the US, the few comparative studies between China and the US lack comprehensive analysis of underlying factors. Notably, there's a lack of comparative research on climate change perceptions between China and Europe.
This study is trying to address three key questions: 1) What are the significant differences in public perceptions of climate change between China and Europe? 2) What factors shape these perceptions? 3) What communication strategies are most effective in China and Europe based on the different perceptions and shaping factors?
To achieve the above objectives, this research seeks to employ resonance analysis—a methodology comprising elicitation test, semantic coding, and Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). As a data analysis technique, MCA allows to graphically present categorical information of multiple variables and visualize the distances (relations) between these variables in the form of a multidimensional map. The potential findings may hold significance in providing a nuanced understanding of climate change perceptions in China and the EU, along with the underlying factors, thereby informing policymakers and climate communicators, which can promote international cooperation and public engagement in the fight against climate change.
Project Details
Started: October 2023
Researcher: Kunpeng Ma
Academic promotor(s): Pascal Verhoest
Co-supervisor: Joke Bauwens; Yazan Badran
Populist radical right environmentalism.
Analyzing the role of ideology, socio-political context, and media and audience uptake in the construction of environmental discourse by populist radical right parties in Belgium and the Netherlands
Although the upsurge of populist radical right (PRR) parties and the ecological crisis are two defining issues of 21st-century politics, there is a significant gap in the academic literature concerning the nexus between both. This gap is all the more surprising as environmental issues play an increasingly important role in the discourse of PRR parties, becoming, for example, visible in these parties’ attempts to capitalize on recent farmer protests against EU policy. This proposed research contributes to filling this gap by studying the complexity and diversity of PRR discourse on the environment. Using Vlaams Belang (VB) in Belgium and Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) in the Netherlands as cases, the research looks at how these parties construct PRR environmental discourse through the interplay between PRR ideology, socio-political context, and media and audience uptake. To so do, it looks at three interrelated levels of analysis: the construction of PRR environmental discourse by parties, the uptake of PRR environmental discourse by media, and the uptake of PRR environmental discourse by audiences. Three critical themes in environmental politics structure the analysis at every level: the farmer protests (2019-today), climate protests (2019-today), and energy crisis (2021-today). The study applies an innovative and challenging methodological approach based on cross-fertilization between discourse studies, political studies, and communication studies.
Project Details
Started: September 2023
Researcher: Gijs Lambrechts
Academic Promotor: Benjamin De Cleen
Emotions, subjectivity, and objectivity in metajournalistic discourses
This research analyzes the presence and role of emotions in discourses about journalistic subjectivity and objectivity. Within these metajournalistic discourses, the analysis aims to understand (1) the form and style with which journalists use to express their emotions, (2) how journalists identify tensions and position themselves in their work through emotionality, and (3) what these emotions reveal about journalistic boundary work in a digital era defined by pressure and precarity. To accomplish this, it will apply discourse analysis of articles and relevant media in combination with in-depth interviews. The research aims to contribute to the growing field of literature within the “emotional turn” in journalism studies, and to research on emotions in (meta)journalistic texts and production in particular.
Project Details
Started: October 2022
Researcher: Anna Luo
Academic promotors: Benjamin De Cleen; Yazan Badran
Fandom Across Generations: Analyzing Belgian Fan Clubs of Hollywood Franchises
This PhD project analyses Belgian fan clubs of long-running Hollywood franchises, considering three broad pillars: 1) the organisation of the clubs, 2) the creation of fan content or paratexts and 3) the perceptions of the members towards the studios. With the advent of the Internet, fans have become more ubiquitous than ever. They actively share a wealth of information and fan content online. However, it’s essential to recognize that organized clubs for both well-known and lesser-known franchises continue to emerge today. These clubs provide fans with the opportunity to move beyond the virtual world and connect physically. Today's nostalgia-driven Hollywood blockbusters have ensured that our cinemas are flooded with sequels to old IPs. These also give new generations the opportunity to embrace the characters of these franchises, develop their identities around them and join existing fan clubs. This research focuses on the phenomenon of old and new fans coming together in these physical spaces. (How) do younger fans find their way into these clubs? How do these groups navigate cross-generational membership? How do older and younger fans interact with each other and respond to production decisions within the franchises? To address these inquiries, we conduct an analysis of fan clubs in Belgium, a country with a strong tradition of participation in community life. Within this study, explanatory concepts such as fan apprenticeship, fan cultures, totemic nostalgia and paratext are covered.
Project Details
Started: October 2022
Researcher: Florian Stegen
Academic Promotor: Kevin Smets
Scenic Symbolics: Understanding screen tourism and imagined space in small nations (Flanders, Ireland)
This research aims to broaden the understanding of how media-generated meaning and tourism affect places and communities. Despite ample previous work on media and tourism, research has yet to address this dynamic in combining symbolic (How are places imagined and given various meanings through text?) and material dimensions (What is the impact on the ground in places witnessing screen tourism?). New knowledge with regards to small nations exposed to screen tourism is especially urgent, as this context will contribute to more complex power imbalances. Sensitive societal tensions connected with community dependencies, belonging, and national identity are more pervasive but understudied in small nationhood. For this, the study looks at Flanders and Ireland. The theoretical focus lies on the intersection of communication studies, social sciences, and critical heritage studies. The research is guided by concepts such as imaginaries, place, and nationalism. Methods are grounded in qualitative strategies, namely semi-structured interviews, observation, and content analysis.
Project Details
Started: October 2022
Researcher: Sofie Vermoesen
Academic promotor: Kevin Smets
Co-supervisor: Lennart Soberon
Pseudo-journalistic political communication: When politicians act like journalists
This PhD project analyzes the use of journalistic genres in political communication, focusing on the Belgian Vlaams Belang (VB) and the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as populist radical right (PRR) parties that are key players in the contemporary hybridization of political communication. Bridging journalism studies, political communication and genre as well as discourse studies, the study proposes the term pseudo-journalistic political communication to capture hybrid genres that emerge through the integration of journalistic genre resources into political communication. Taking into account complex interactions between content, production and reception in the negotiation of genres, it examines three interrelated levels. On a content level, it constructs a typology of uses of journalistic genres in PRR political communication, and then performs an in-depth multimodal genre analysis on a subset of content that makes substantive and structural use of journalistic genres. On a production level, a social network analysis supplemented with semi-structured qualitative interviews constructs a detailed map of the production context of such pseudo-journalistic political communication. On a reception level, the study performs a digital ethnography of how audiences engage with pseudo-journalistic political communication. Through its focus on pseudo-journalistic political communication the research fills a significant gap in the literature on political communication, on PRR parties, as well as on the contemporary politics-journalism nexus more broadly.
Project Details
Started: November 2022
Researcher: Maximilian Grönegräs
Academic Promotors: Benjamin De Cleen; Yazan Badran
From Sacred to Subaltern: the politics of postcolonial language appropriation and abrogation in social media texts by Pakistani transgender activists
Marginalized communities in postcolonial societies, in particular transgender people, face unique challenges when consciously displaying their gender and/or sexual identity. Drawing upon the postcolonial concepts of language appropriation and abrogation – typically only limited to the literary tradition – this project seeks to understand how colonial language and aesthetics are articulated in media by diverse transgender activists in the Pakistani context. I do this through the case study of the indigenous khwajasira community – an overarching term for transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people, often known as the “third gender” or as gender category X in legal communication, and more popularly as hijra in the South Asian region. Intersecting postcolonial studies, gender communication, and digital cultures, this project analyzes the tension between linguistic appropriation and abrogation (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1989, 2002) combined with multimodal critical discourse analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; Machin & Mayr 2012), intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Fairclough, 2003). Considering the intricacies of varied discursive repertoires, we delineate three categories of activists at the language level, including English-centric activists, bilingual or multilingual activists and Urdu-centric activists. For each linguistic orientation, we consider four transgender activists to capture a range of perspectives, discourses, and linguistic expressions within the khwajasira community through social media texts produced on Twitter (now X), Instagram, and YouTube. We meticulously scrutinize around 100-200 social media posts for each activist, considering their posting frequency, engagement metrics, and visibility on Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter (now X). Through a close reading of online cultural artefacts and texts from these activists, we analyze language as a fraught and contested site through which the postcolonial condition is negotiated for those on the margins. Centering on appropriation and abrogation, we evaluate innovative linguistic and textual strategies such as untranslated words, codeswitching, codemixing, metonymic gap, interlanguage, and neologism. Our exploration of social media texts and the discourses surrounding them reveal nuanced insights into the ways in which marginalized communities use language to resist, decolonize, and dismantle dominant power relations. More importantly, this research bridges a significant gap in the literature on postcolonialism, more importantly on the application of the postcolonial literary toolkit in a non-literary and mediatized context. . Beyond this, the research project decenters and overcomes Anglo-Eurocentric perspectives in the LGBTQIA+ scholarly tradition in the context of negotiating transgender identities in postcolonial milieus and shaping our understanding of queer discursive practices emerging in South Asia.
Project Details
Started: October 2020
Researcher: Fatima Zahid Ali
Academic Promotor: Kevin Smets; Benjamin De Cleen.
Understanding the notions of public and private in the Chinese context: the case of the Chinese social media regulation
The notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ have been core concepts in Western thought since classical antiquity. The question whether the public-private dichotomy is suitable for understanding a non-western context is rarely asked in academic research. Western political discourse and media regularly apply Western concepts and values to non-Western contexts, for instance in relation to the Chinese notions of ‘private’ vs ‘public’. This research aims at providing an alternative perspective on the public/private debate. Furthermore, it investigates how these notions differ in the Chinese and Western contexts, and how they materialize in the Chinese social media regulation.
Project Details
Started on 14/09/16
Researcher: Jinxixi Lyu;
Funding: China scholarship council (CSC).
Academic Promotor: Katia Segers; Co-supervisors: Pascal Verhoest; Joke Bauwens.
Challenging border epistemologies from below: Participatory filmmaking at the dividing lines of Ireland, Morocco-Spain and Syria-Turkey
Participatory filmmaking (PF), or participatory video (PV), has been used since the 1960s to collect, generate and disseminate knowledge by engaging people in making films according to their sense of what is important. In the context of border and migration research, it can be an effective tool for creating safe spaces to create vernacular narratives about borders and share them with a wider audience. Moreover, when used in projects set in borderlands, PF can bring first-hand knowledge and awareness of how people living in borderlands carry the border within themselves. The seminal literature on PF, mostly labelled as a-critical, has been centred in analysing crucial components that this methodology should fulfil as a critical media pedagogy and literacy, such as awareness, participation, cooperation, and agency. However, specific ethical and methodological challenges arise within the practice of PF, especially when implementing it in borderlands where cultural, gender, class, and race inequalities are exposed. In order to address these challenges, it is essential to depart from intersectional viewpoints, ensure safety and reciprocity, and use a critical feminist decolonial approach to scrutinize some of the biases that can undermine a PF project. The present thesis intends to address this gap in the current literature by examining the advantages and pitfalls of using this methodology in border and migration research. Specifically, the goal is to co-create, co-analyse, and share through PF first-hand experiences of people who live in three borderlands (Ireland, Morocco/Spain, and Syria/Turkey) to challenge current border and migration epistemologies from below. The thesis outlines three primary research questions:
- To what extent can PF be conceptualised as a potential methodology in border and migration studies by attending the theory-practice interface in the light of everyday dynamics of bordering?
- What are the ethical and methodological challenges of conducting PF research at the borders of Ireland, Morocco/Spain, and Syria/Turkey?
- How can PF contribute to bringing epistemic justice and challenging existing epistemologies on borders and migration from a grassroots perspective?
The scientific and social relevance of this study lies in the following:
1) The need to create a conceptual framework of PF for migration and border studies that goes beyond the dominant nation-state logic and the Eurocentric perspective within the disciplines. Such theoretical framework should also examine the technological and representational canons of filmmaking considering the technical, economic, and socio-cultural factors involved.
2) The innovative implementation of PF in three different border areas can contribute to its development as a methodology that aims to critically address the potential of participatory creative methods in migration and border research on a large scale. This can be achieved by involving a large sample of participants, from cross-border citizens to undocumented migrants, at all stages.
3) A critical perspective that incorporates decolonial feminist visions at the intersection of migration, border, and film studies can effectively challenge current migration and border epistemologies. By doing so, we can use film as a tool of knowledge to promote epistemic justice and alternative border and migration narratives based on processes of becoming and belonging. The dissertation is part of the European Research Council Starting Grant #948278 REEL BORDERS. More info: https://reelborders.eu/
Project Details
Started on 01/03/21
Researcher: Irene Gutiérrez
Academic Promotor: Kevin Smets.
Gay-targeted advertising in Flanders: Flemish LGBTQ+ people’s reception of gay-themed advertising
The sociopolitical climate on LGBTQ+ people has evolved significantly in parts of the US and Europe during the last decades, and also marketing industries have stepped in, acknowledging the opportunities of this ‘dream market’ consumer segment. This resulted in a growing interest in the gay consumer market followed by the emergence of gay-targeted advertising. However, little is known about the implications thereof on LGBTQ+ people’s perception of how they are visually represented in, for example, gay-themed advertising. Hence, this study sets forth to provide further insights into the extant scientific knowledge on this matter and to contribute to the understanding of the interchange of sexuality, gender, generational membership, and ethnicity with regard to the gay-themed advertising. It does so by focusing on LGBTQ+ people in Flanders, which at the same time broadens the focus on the US, a context where most related studies have been conducted so far.
Project Details
Started on 01/10/17
Researcher: Rein Demunter;
Academic Promotor: Kevin Smets; Joke Bauwens.
China as an 'Imagined Other 'in Europe
This project aims to investigate if stereotypical perceptions towards China/ Chinese people exist among Europeans. The main objectives are exploring the cognitive process of stereotypes and the links between stereotypes and media framing, plus a variety of social factors. The "cognitive resonance approach" is employed as the methodology. In short, it combines elicitation tests, semantic coding with cluster analysis to uncover and categorize the cognitive schemes that explain the perceptions of different population groups. Additionally, an analysis of media usage, intergroup contact, racial attitudes, social-distance scale and cosmopolitism are used to investigate the extent to which shared perceptions relate to common values and sentiments towards China and Chinese people. Furthermore, the way in which these factors interact with each other will be explored in a social and cultural context through a statistical modelling.
Project Details
Funding: China scholarship council ( CSC)
Researcher: Yuejue Zhang
Academic Promotor: Pascal Verhoest
New dynamics of Turkish and Kurdish chain migration to London and Brussels: a visual sociological study
This project aims to explore the experiences of recent migrants from Turkey to London and Brussels through the concept of urban citizenship. It intends to discover complexities and nuances of newcomers’ relations with established diaspora and host communities within the urban spaces of these cities. As these places, both diverse global cities, form the immediate spaces in which migrants articulate and construct their being, visual research methods, in particular filming, will shed light on these matters. Moreover, it aims to explore how audio-visual research methods can help us to understand contrasting experiences of the city and mobility.
Project Details
Started on 01/09/19
Funding: EUTOPIA – Co-tutelle PhD programme between University of Warwick and VUB
Researcher: Yasemin Karsli
Academic Promotor: Kevin Smets, Hannah Jones
Of Populists and Euro Bubbles: How Europe’s far-right political movements are covered by the Brussels Press Corps
This project aims to explore how far right-wing political parties and movements in Europe are covered by the Brussels Press Corps. This research becomes particularly important as the concept of a European identity and transnational trends in politics grows and shapes a European public sphere amidst the backdrop of Brussels' growing political and legislative power on the continent. Meanwhile, as the influence of the EU institutions strengthens and encroaches on national jurisdictions, far-right movements have emerged across Europe and come to shape the national debate surrounding EU membership and power centralization in Brussels. Given the professional duty of the Brussels Press Corps to report on the growing political importance and power held in Brussels amidst the growing popularity of far-right movements across Europe, the central question this project examines is how the Brussels Press Corps cover far-right governments and movements in the EU.
Project Details
Started on 01/09/20
Researcher: Kait Bolongaro
Academic Promotor: Benjamin De Cleen
Conceptualizing Hybrid-Fiction
Migration is amongst the most emotive themes in today's societies. It has become the hub of people's worries and fears, and mass media have often echoed such feelings. New ways of reporting this compelling subject can tell a different story, drawing attention to the political, economic, and social magnitude of migration while, simultaneously, reaffirming the humanity of migrants. Media and migration research has, up to now, exclusively considered cinema, documentary, traditional news, and data-visualization as separate genres. Consequently, powerful and original productions on migration have gone unnoticed due to their intrinsic nature of hybrid objects.
Project Details
Started on 1/11/20
Researcher: Giacomo Toffano
Academic Promotor: Kevin Smets
Completed PhD Projects
Cultural identity performance on social media: the case of Bolivian university students
The aim of this research is to demonstrate how cultural identities of Bolivian young adults (18-25 years old) are being performed and constructed on social network sites. To do so, the research will be based on a qualitative approach that makes use of focus groups, in-depth interviews, and digital ethnography. It fills a gap as one of the few studies on cultural identities and social media in the Latin American context.
Project Details
Started on 15/04/2021
Researcher: Paola Condemayta Soto
Academic Promotors: Joke Bauwens; co-supervisor: Kevin Smets.
A multilevel and mixed methods investigation into the role of media capture in media systems in transitional democracies: the case of Iraqi Kurdistan
When authoritarian regimes are overthrown, it is commonly expected that the emerging political systems will adopt many aspects of Western-based models of democratic government, including models of parliamentary democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech. According to existing studies, however, the practical realities of these ‘transitional democracies’ often defy this expectation. The aim of this research proposal is to investigate how the concept of media capture allows us to understand media systems in transitional democracies by analysing the different mechanisms with which powerful social actors attempt to control media in the case of Iraqi Kurdistan. To this end, it puts forward a highly innovative mixed methods design, in which a quantitative content analysis is used for the level of financing, document analysis and interviews with state officials and politicians for the level of regulatory control, and interviews with journalists and editors in chief for the level of journalistic culture. In this way, this proposal not only puts forward a multi-methodological approach that combines the paradigm of political economy with rigorous social-scientific research. It also makes this study comprehensive and able to triangulate its results across these different levels, thereby offering a multidimensional picture of how these mechanisms add to our understanding of (the level of media capture in) media systems in transitional democracies.
Project Details
Started on 1/10/2016
Ended on 1/10/2023
Researcher: Jiyan Faris
Academic Promotors: Pieter Maeseele, Kevin Smets.
Media discourses about populism: protecting what kind of democracy?
Over the course of these last few years, ‘populism’ seemed to be everywhere. Not only populist actors appeared everywhere, but the term ‘populism’ became omnipresent in media coverage. When journalists increasingly use ‘populism’, this is however not a mere consequence of the rise of populist politics, and the coverage of such politics as ‘populist’ has an impact on the prevalence and success of populist politics. Journalists often seem to use populism in relation to democracy, and more specifically to criticize certain kinds of politics. This PhD research looked at how Belgian journalists, academics and politicians use ‘populism’ to discursively construct the boundaries of democracy.
Project Details
Started on 1/10/2017,
Ended on 1/10/2023
Researcher: Jana Goyvaerts
Academic Promotor: Benjamin De Cleen
Making sense of Transdisciplinary Learning Research Communities for vulnerable contexts in Bolivia
The aim of this research is to understand how the different actors of an inter-university program for social development -between Belgium and Bolivia- tell, discuss, build, and experience the sensemaking of “Transdisciplinary Learning Communities”. “TLC” (for short) is the methodological approach of this program. The research is based on a critical sensemaking perspective, where power relations, tensions, and struggles play an important role. This research analyzes the discourses, narratives, and interactions of the actors involved (micro level) and the link between these communicational practices with the academic institutional context (meso level), and the chosen vulnerable contexts in Bolivia (macro level). Against this backdrop, the research intends to develop a “critical sensemaking model” which can be applied in other social and communication studies.
Project Details
Started on 01/10/18
Ended on 11/01/2023
Researcher: Guadalupe Peres Cajas;
Academic Promotor: Joke Bauwens; Marc Craps; Gerrit Loots.
The Evolution Of THE TERMS REFERRING TO PEOPLE ON THE MOVE
Words defining people in migration (e.g. refugee, migrant, immigrant, asylum-seeker, illegal, displaced person) are not fixed in time. Indeed, their meaning and reference evolve according to events and social representations, contributing to constructing both the public issue and the image of the social actors involved. The aim of this research is to understand, through a lexical discourse analysis, the evolution of the meanings of the terms mentioned above and the way they are used in Belgian national media in French and Dutch. The analysis will focus on newspapers and television news from March 2015 to July 2017.
Project Details
Funding: FRESH (FNRS)
Ended on 23/03/2023
Researcher: Valériane Mistiaen
Co-tutelle ULB/VUB, with promotors: Laura Calabrese (ULB) and Benjamin De Cleen (VUB).
New Communication Spaces in the Arab World
The study aims to investigate the new communication spaces opening up in the Arab World, by looking at emerging media organisations as a specific category of media producers in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. The study aims at examining the phenomenon of emerging media organisations beyond the dichotomy of mass and alternative media. Moreover, it intends to outline the structural conditions (state relations and regulation, ownership structures and financing models) that condition the operations of emerging media organisations in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. It also aims to analyse the processes of resistance, negotiation and mediation that take place at the level of the organisation and the journalistic values it produces. The study adopts a mixed-method approach that allows for a more in-depth understanding of the target organisations. It includes extensive research stays at the different countries (Turkey, in the case of Syrian media) with several weeks of participant observations at each organisation.
Project Details
Started on 01/11/18
Ended on 31/12/21
Researcher: Yazan Badran
Academic Promotor: Kevin Smets