PhD Researcher on social media narratives

The Brussels School of Governance, Department Instituut voor Europese Studies, is looking for a PhD-student with a doctoral grant. 

More concretely your work package, for the preparation of a doctorate, contains: 

As a PHD student you will develop a research proposal on the empirical analysis of narratives and narrative dynamics on social media. Importantly, the envisaged research project should be situated at the intersections of CD2I’s research lines on information distrust and disorder and on innovations in digital research. 

Under the impetus of online disinformation and conspiracy theories, the study of narratives in participatory web environments has developed into an active area of research. On the one hand, the field is marked by approaches that rely on network and transmission models of communication to explain how narratives circulate and propagate online. On the other, critical approaches aim to interpret narratives in relation to wider cultural and political contexts and trends as political expressions, as creative responses, or folk narratives.  

The objective of the envisaged doctoral research project is to bridge gaps between these two paradigms, and to study how narratives, as symbolic forms of expression, take shape in relation to cultural and political contexts, as well as in relation to the social and technical affordances of social media. We are particularly interested in approaches that seek to uncover how social media form idiosyncratic narratives, for instance through recontextualizations of prior knowledge, through distributed forms of storytelling, or by facilitating dynamics of convergence among previously distinct narratives. 

CD2I supports empirical research that connects quantitative methods from data science with interpretative practices from the humanities. The doctoral research project will thus combine theoretical approaches from narratology or related disciplines with methods grounded in natural language processing, web scraping, (social) network analysis, and data visualisation. It is expected that the project will thus make a methodological contribution to the study of narratives on online media.  

The project is carried out within the Centre for Digitalisation, Democracy and Innovation (CD2I) of the Brussels School of Governance (BSoG). 

For this function, our Brussels Humanities, Sciences & Engineering Campus (Elsene) will serve as your home base.