Project 2: Putting the Gay in Gaming: How Queer Youth Navigate Identity Development in Online Gaymer Communities

In developing an understanding of who they are, young people draw on cultural expectations and narratives for who they could (or should be) while engaging with others in their social environments. Increasingly, this process is taking place in online spaces – in which youth engage with (and create) digital content, interact, and play games. Especially for queer youth, whose gender and sexual identities often transgress the norms of their offline contexts, online gaming provides important safe spaces for finding an accepting community and exploring their identities; for example, by taking on different types of (gendered) characters and bodies. However, because gamer culture is itself often tied to heteronormative ideals of masculinity (i.e. the idea that games are ‘for’ straight men), queer players might experience friction and even harm, often leading to the formation of subcommunities of “gaymers,” (or LGBTQIA+ gamers) in which they feel more included and safe. Yet even within these communities, traditional cultural narratives about gender and sexuality may be inadvertently reproduced, excluding transgender and gender-fluid youth. The overarching aim of this project is to build on earlier work (e.g., Turkle, 1995; Shaw, 2012) through an interdisciplinary investigation of how young queer people make meaning of and negotiate identities and cultural expectations within the context of online gaming (through chatting, playing and watching). 

Project 1: Interdisciplinary researcher-identity formation in Dutch academia

Are you interested in how researchers engage with interdisciplinary research? Are you curious about how researchers develop a sense of identity as a researcher working across disciplines? Do you care about how mentoring and training programs can improve the wellbeing and daily work of interdisciplinary researchers? If so, we encourage you to consider applying for this PhD project.

What do the family networks of older migrants in the Netherlands look like, and how do they relate to strengthening or weakening social cohesion? This project uses microdata from Statistics Netherlands (CBS) to analyse differences in the size, structure and spatial distribution of kinship networks among older migrants and non-migrants. This PhD project will compare patterns across diverse migrant groups and explore how these relate to key outcomes such as health, well-being, and loneliness in later life. This position offers the opportunity to work with rich population-level data and contribute to timely debates on ageing, migration and social inequalities.

Governments adopt policies for specific migrant groups. Such policies can help migrant groups thrive. However, they can result in negative responses from other groups who might perceive such measures as preferential treatment at their expense, thereby threatening social cohesion at large. In this PhD project, we aim to analyse how and under which circumstances migrant-specific policies facilitate the integration of migrant groups while simultaneously upholding social cohesion in and between all societal groups. The project will, amongst others, study the effects of tax benefits for knowledge workers on housing dynamics and social cohesion in the Netherlands throughout time.

Education is an important social divide, shaping political attitudes, identities and who interacts with whom. This PhD project investigates why networks are (increasingly) segregated by education and how this fuels polarization around issues like climate change and migration. Moving beyond traditional explanations, the project introduces avoidance as a new mechanism: do people actively avoid educational out-groups, and does this relate to political polarization? Using a combination of register data, ego network surveys, European Social Survey data and behavioural experiments, it offers an exciting opportunity to develop new theory and cutting-edge empirical research on social cohesion in the context of inequality.