Global boss, local workers? How context influences food delivery riders’ relation to platforms (GLOBLOW)

By Davide Beraldo (Faculty of Humanities) and Letizia Chiappini (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences). This project explores dynamics within platform capitalism from the workers’ perspective, investigating a number of dimensions associated with workers’ relation towards the platform in a global comparative fashion. It focuses on the food delivery sector, investigating workers’ relation towards the…

Gaming the Global City: Imagining and Experiencing Digital Urban Worlds

By Carolyn Birdsall (Faculty of Humanities), Wouter van Gent (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences), Thijs Jeursen (Law, Economics and Governance, Utrecht University). Digital gaming has become an increasingly important everyday pastime and a leading global cultural industry, with revenues for games now far surpassing that of films. Both the production and consumption of games…

Political Microtargeting on Social Media in Diverse Democracies

By Ursula Daxecker (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences), Stefania Milan (Faculty of Humanities). Digital platforms and mobile apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook have become important political tools in elections in India and other emerging democracies in the Global South but have potentially worrisome consequences. In diverse societies, religious, ethnic, and political cleavages are…

Digital Platforms and the Digitisation of Expression and Surveillance

By Ronan Fahy (Faculty of Law),  Judith Möller (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences), Rocco Bellanova (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences). In Europe today, digital platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, provide essential means for millions of people to express themselves, engage in public debate, and organise politically. However, governments can leverage the…

Cultural Diversity in the Age of Global Digital Media: the Case of Netflix in the Netherlands

By Daphne Idiz (Faculty of Humanities), Kristina Irion (Faculty of Law), Rens Vliegenthart (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences), Joris Ebbers (University of Amsterdam Economics and Business). Today’s global digital environment challenges how media content is created, produced, distributed, and consumed, playing an increasingly important role in the construction of cultural identities. In light of…

Global digital art: Perspectives on categories, place, and economic value in the crypto art market

By Monika Kackovic (University of Amsterdam Economics and Business), Giovanni Colavizza (Faculty of Humanities), Andrea Leiter (Faculty of Law). We focus on the intersection between categories and place, and investigate the impact on economic value. Using categorization as our theoretical lens, we study the extent to which the meaning of categories in one market context…

From Performativity to Behavioral Data: The Algorithmic Configurations of Sexuality on Social Media in China

By Shuaishuai Wang (Faculty of Humanities), Rachel Spronk (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences). This project explores how gendered content and sexual classifications on social media come to be algorithmically aggregated and processed to regulate sexual identifications of users. Gender has been theorized as a repetitive and ritual performativity, which is discursively enabled, hence regulated…

P(R)OTESTAS The politics and aesthetics of digital authoritarianism and protest in the Global South

By Julienne Weegels (Faculty of Humanities), Yatun Sastramidjaja (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences), Luisa F. González Valencia (Faculty of Humanities). In this cross-regional research project, we critically examine the tension between digital democratization and securitization in the Global South, focusing on recent cases in Latin America (Nicaragua, Colombia) and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Thailand). Addressing…