Team
Project Leader: Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi
Sandra Ponzanesi is Chair and Professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies, at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, NL. She has published in the field of media, postcolonial studies, digital migration and cinema with a particular focus on Postcolonial Europe from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective.
She has led the ERC project ‘Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and Belonging’ CONNECTINGEUROPE and the PIN project “Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics” funded by NWO (Dutch Research Council) in collaboration with many European partners. She is coordinator of the Special Interest Group ‘Games and VR for Inclusion’ for the Focus Area Game Research. She is also co-coordinator of the IOS Platform Gender, Diversity and Global Justice and board member of the UU Focus area Migration and Societal Change and involved in the UU Centre for Environmental Humanities. She is the founding director of the PCI (Postcolonial Studies Initiative)
Supervisor & advisor: Dr. Wouter Oomen
Wouter Oomen is a lecturer in media studies at Utrecht University, where he recently defended his PhD dissertation. His research is focused on humanitarian communication and on the platforms that enable and constrain the circulation of humanitarian imagery and discourse. Wouter Oomen is co-director of the Expertise Centre Humanitarian Communication, a non-profit organization committed to better communication on international development. He has taught in a broad range of courses in media studies and social sciences, at the University of Amsterdam, University of Groningen, Utrecht University and the London School of Economics.
PhD candidate: Laurence Herfs (she/her)
Laurence Herfs is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She conducts research into the representation of refugees, migrants and the suffering Other within immersive and VR media technologies. For this project, she draws on media theory in conjunction with discourse analysis, cultural analysis and postcolonial studies, in order to offer a comprehensive qualitative analysis of VR productions produced in the past decade with the focus on how VR collapses the division between spectator and distant sufferer. She examines the implications of this from a critical media perspective as well as postcolonial and intersectional perspective. The research is supervised by Prof. dr. Sandra Ponzanesi and dr. Wouter Oomen.
Laurence’s academic background is in game studies, cultural analysis and visual media studies. She previously taught in the minor game studies at Leiden University, where she specialised in Japanese video game productions. Laurence also holds a BFA from The Royal Academy of Arts in Fine Arts.
PhD Candidate: Lisa Burghardt (she/her)
Lisa Burghardt is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Within the project, she conducts research on how to understand the experience of audiences being immersed in VR installations around topics of migration. She researches the affective and emotional responses these humanitarian VR experiences create amongst audiences, how this impacts their engagements with the topic and their moral responses to the VR experience. Through these insights she hopes to better understand the potentials and pitfalls of VR and how it might allow to bridge between distant others. Further, she aims to draw broader conclusions regarding the relation between technological mediations and emotions. The research is supervised by Prof. dr. Sandra Ponzanesi and dr. Wouter Oomen.
Lisa has a background within Techno-Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies and Philosophy of Technology. She also holds a BA in International Communication and Media.