PhD-candidate - Present Heroes: Sporting role models and mediated meaning making amongst urban...

The Erasmus Research Centre for Media, Communication and Culture (ERMeCC) and the Mulier Institute are looking for a PhD-candidate in a research project on Diversity in Sport within the NWA-ORC funded project Re/Presenting Europe: Popular Representations of Diversity and Belonging. This project is a collaboration amongst several universities and societal and grassroots organizations in the Netherlands and Curaçao. The full project consists of work packages that will address dominant and more countercultural spaces of ethnic/racial representation and belonging, in different (institutional) practices like education, healing, sport, popular culture, and urban arts. The goal of the project is a more inclusive understanding of the Netherlands and Europe.

The PhD project forms the contemporary component of a work package on diversity in sport with the title Arenas of Belonging: Sport Heroes as Models of Aspiration, Inspiration, and Participation. It focuses on the way in which (dominant) popular representations of sport heroes function as mechanisms of belonging and exclusion for ethnic/racially diverse youth in the Netherlands. We want to analyze how representations of sport heroes are at work amongst youth in contemporary communities. How do sports heroes impact young people’s personal and collective ethnic/racial and (trans)national identity, sense of belonging, and their future aspirations? Community-based participatory research will be applied, together with quantitative methods, to deliver an in-depth understanding of contemporary adolescents’ heroes and their personal and intersocial meanings in terms of identification, representations (including mediated stereotypes), and feelings of belonging. The PhD will work closely together with a postdoc and with a PhD-candidate from the second part of the work package titledPast Heroes: Historical analysis of representations of black athletes and constructions of ‘Dutchness’ and belonging, 1950s-present.

The PhD-candidate will collaborate closely with the work package team and the researchers of other work packages in the project that focus on popular music, urban arts and education. You will also have the opportunity to work with societal and scientific partners in the Netherlands and Curaçao.