Year 2

• booklet Screen Cultures in Transition 

The advanced trajectory of Screen Cultures in Transition is meant for students who want to develop a firm grounding in traditions of film and TV studies while also gaining experience in mobilizing this expertise for the contemporary screen environment as it is characterized by dynamic interrelations between old and new media forms. More specifically, students following this advanced trajectory are interested in understanding how more established concepts such as the apparatus, shot analysis, flow, liveness, and genre function along-side new concepts in relation to more current developments in digital TV, interactive film, and virtual reality.

• booklet Participatory Cultures 

The trajectory Participatory Cultures is meant for students with a broad interest in the role media and performance play in shaping civic and social engagement within the context of our participatory culture and society. Students are interested in subjects like media and ecology, performance and gender, participatory practices and artistic activism. This trajectory is particularly recommended to students who prefer to study several objects – theatre, installation art, film and television and digital media – instead of only one of these and who are interested in the intricate relation between media, performance and societal issues and transformations. Moreover, this trajectory caters to students who want to be challenged in employing creative research methods. Besides more traditional formats such as writing academic papers, students also create video essays, memes, fan fiction and urban interventions and organize public events. Additionally, students will meet professionals from the field of media and performance.

• booklet Critical Data Studies

This advanced trajectory is meant for students interested in raising critical questions about how datafication shapes and interacts with society and culture. Inspired by the field of Critical Data Studies, the aim of this advanced trajectory is to train students to analyze the assemblages that produce, circulate and utilize data in diverse ways.
Digitalization and datafication now take place at the core of our culture and social organization. In the current environment ‘big’ data are surrounded by misleading claims of objectivity and accuracy. Yet the translation of the social and cultural world into data involves abstraction and reduction into computational symbols. These data are then processed for diverse objectives by computational tools that have their own built-in biases and assumptions. This raises questions about how data are constructed, represented and operationalized. As humanities scholars we understand knowledge to be partial and situated and engage in cultural criticism. Together with our understanding of processes of mediation, media scholars are well positioned to explore the limitations, biases, ethics and materliaties of data analysis and its role in reproducing social hierarchies and injustices. It enables us to make important contributions to debates about data and datafication.