GDC Projects

The Global Digital Cultures RPA is pleased to announce the five new projects that have been granted research support funding following the 2021 call for applications! Stemming from five different UvA faculties, the new research initiatives critically explore how digitization is transforming cultural practices around the world. The projects’ interdisciplinarity, as well as their global and digital approaches, allow the awardees to establish collaboration between scholars and address urgent and relevant problems on Global Digital Cultures.

Encoding Identities: A Case Study of Commercial DNA Databases

This project investigates the legal aspects of digital identities operating on a global scale, and focuses on the use of commercial genealogical DNA databanks stemming from – predominantly US-based – private ...
On Display: Negotiating Local and Global Connections on Instagram

Over the past decade, Instagram has emerged as one of the world’s most important social media platforms. Especially young people use it as a vehicle to share defining moments. The app has become a focal point for ...
CARPA

CARPA (Crowdsourcing App for Responsible Production in Africa) aims at improving sustainable business in Africa through the development of a crowdsourcing app and website which enables local actors to report cases of ...
Global Cultural Interference: The Case of 5G Data Infrastructures

The overall objective of the proposed project is to explore how 5G networks are represented, imagined, and entangled with significant socio-economic and political implications. We propose to research cultural ...
From Climate Change to COVID-19: Communicating Complexity and Collective Affect through Digital Memes

How do memes simplify complex topics, making them politically legible and emotionally digestible to wide and diverse audiences on an increasingly global scale, using the techno-social affordances of social media ...

Global Boss, Local Workers?

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 ...
Gaming the Global City

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 have ...
Political Microtargeting on Social Media in Diverse Democracies

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 ...
Digital Platforms and the Digitisation of Expression and Surveillance

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 organize politically. However, governments ...
Cultural Diversity in the Age of Global Digital Media:

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 the rise ...
Global Digital Art

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 ...
From Performativity to Behavioral Data

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 ...
P(R)OTESTAS

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 ...
Social Media after the Arab Uprisings

A decade after the rise of what was controversially dubbed “Facebook revolutions” in the Arab world, a critical investigation of the roles that social media platforms play in the everyday life of the region is still ...

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