PhD Position on Playing Politics - Platforms: Ambiguity and Escalation

This PhD position is part of an interdisciplinary project on play and politics, which is conducted by a team of closely collaborating scholars: Prof. dr. Sybille Lammes; Prof. dr. Frans-Willem Korsten, Dr. Frank Chouraqui, Dr. Alex Gekker, Dr. Bram Ieven, and Dr. Sara Polak.

We are looking for an excellent, highly motivated, creative and collaborative PhD candidate to join our project Playing Politics: Media Platforms, Making Worlds. Our project analyses how playful affordances of current media platforms have substantially altered the way in which political actors (politicians, citizens and other stakeholders) respond to, promulgate, and frame political issues. Our hypothesis is that ludic or game-like forms of political mediation or ‘casual politicking’ use such platforms to whimsically and capriciously create worlds, which has made political force fields less predictable. Such ludic or game-like forms manifest themselves as gender-trolling, the use of humorous contradictions, or post-truth discourses, and meme-sharing. This change in how politics is done calls for a reconsideration of how politics works. By analysing ludo-political practices on media platforms, examining the ontological relation between play, contemporary politics and world-making, and theoretically examining media affordances in relation to play and politics, we build an innovative approach for understanding this shift. The project will set a new benchmark for understanding contemporary mediatised politics. It does so by building a comparative conceptual and methodological framework informed by media studies, play studies and philosophy. From this interdisciplinary outset it will develop a much-needed vocabulary to analyse and critically engage with the workings of politics in contemporary post-digital culture.

You will engage with the work of play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith (2001), who argued that it is difficult to understand and define play as it is in essence ambiguous. Through this perspective you will examine social media platforms where political messages shift rapidly in tone and style. The question is: How are playful ambiguities used politically on media platforms and does this require a reconsideration of the seven ambiguities as theorised by Sutton-Smith? To interrogate this you will focus on moments when playful ambiguities become untenable and processes of escalation kick in, by focusing on three cases — trolling, warring, and shaming — from three different media platforms. You will analyse what happens at such occasions when ambiguity is destabilised and playful tactics ‘spill over’ into more risky endeavours. The project traces how these crisis points are reached and concentrates on the potentials of escalation that play and politics share.

Your project will be part of the first subproject ‘Media Platforms, Play, Politics’ that besides of your research part consists of

Key responsibilities

• Completion of a PhD thesis within four years (1,0 fte);
• Participation in meetings of the project research group(s) and events co-organised by the research group;
• Participation in initiatives involving stakeholders outside academia;
• Co-writing articles and longreads;
• Co-creating podcasts and other dissemination materials;
• Presentations of intermediate research results at workshops and conferences;
• Participation in the training programme of the local Leiden Graduate School, the LUCAS and a National Research School (NICA, Media Studies, or OSL);
• Participation in staff meeting of the LUCAS Modern and Contemporary cluster and the intellectual life of the LUCAS (PhD) community;
• Some teaching in the second and third years of the appointment, subject to progress and demand.