_{Stemming from four different UvA faculties, the nine 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 awarded scholars to establish collaboration between UvA scholars at different Faculties and address urgent and relevant problems on Global Digital Cultures.}

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

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.

Gaming the Global City: Imagining and Experiencing Digital Urban Worlds 

Carolyn Birdsall (Faculty of Humanities), Wouter van Gent (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences), Thijs Jeursen (Law, Economics and Governance, Utrecht University)

This research develops an interdisciplinary methodological approach and innovative conceptual apparatus to “playing the city”, to understand how globally-produced and globally-consumed digital urban worlds shape social communities and cultural practices.

Political Microtargeting on Social Media in Diverse Democracies

Ursula Daxecker (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences), Stefania Milan (Faculty of Humanities)

This project asks how political microtargeting and misinformation, in particular hostile messages involving ethnic or religious cleavages, affect people’s beliefs and democratic attitudes in India.

Digital Platforms and the Digitisation of Expression and Surveillance

Ronan Fahy (Faculty of Law),  Judith Möller (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences), Rocco Bellanova (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences)

This project examines the troubling wave of regulation sweeping across Europe targeting public expression on online platforms, the role of platforms in the facilitation of government surveillance, and how platform practices shape information dissemination.

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

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) 

This project uses a case study of Netflix in the Netherlands to generate an empirically based understanding of the promotion of European cultural diversity in VOD.

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

Monika Kackovic (University of Amsterdam Economics and Business), Giovanni Colavizza (Faculty of Humanities), Andrea Leiter (Faculty of Law)

Using categorization as a theoretical lens, the project studies the extent to which the meaning of categories in one market context may evolve or change when there is a transition to digital place-bound features in another market that uses the same categories.

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

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. 

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

Julienne Weegels (Faculty of Humanities), Yatun Sastramidjaja (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences), Luisa F. González Valencia (Faculty of Humanities)

This cross-regional research project, critically examines the tension between digital democratization and securitization in the Global South, focusing on recent cases in Latin America (Nicaragua, Columbia) and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Thailand).