Liesbet van Zoonen

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Liesbet van Zoonen (born May 1, 1959 in Hoorn ) is a Dutch professor of Popular Culture at the University of Rotterdam . The communication scientist's research covers the areas of gender and diversity studies, politics and popular culture as well as digital and social media .

Life

Elisabeth Aafje van Zoonen was born in Hoorn , a small town in the Netherlands , in 1959 . Until 1977 she attended the Atheneum Rijksscholengemeenschap in West Friesland. In 1979 Van Zoonen completed her bachelor's degree in political science at the University of Amsterdam and in 1984 her master's degree in the same subject. From there on, she worked as a student assistant / junior lecturer at this educational institution.

She wrote her doctoral thesis on Mass Media and the women's movement: the construction of public identity in 1991. In the same year, Van Zoonen married and later had two sons. Van Zoonen became a professor at the Department for Communication in 1994 and was also the seat of the Board of Directors of the Department for Communication from 2005 to 2008 . In 1998 she founded the “Center for Popular Culture” at the University of Amsterdam, where she was professor for Media and Popular Culture from 2002 to 2008. In January 2009 she left the University of Amsterdam and moved to Loughborough University (Great Britain), where she was a professor until October 2015 and was the seat of the media and communication department .

She has been invited as a guest lecturer from various other universities, e.g. Oslo and Jamaica, as well as from the University of Film and Television in Germany. She has been teaching Popular Culture at the University of Rotterdam since March 2009 and has also been the board of the Erasmus Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities since January 2014.

Scientific work

Her research covers the social sciences and humanities as she deals with issues related to popular culture, politics, and society. Because of her many years of work at various universities, she decided to focus less on gender studies and more on popular culture, in particular " Identity Management ".

Liesbet van Zoonen conducts research in the following areas:

In the field of gender and media studies, which were emerging and spreading at the time, she published a monograph “Feminist Media Studies” in 1994, which was also translated into five languages ​​(Chinese, French, Portuguese, Serbian and Italian): Schon The significance of existing gender structures in the media has long been recognized by feminists. Liesbeth van Zoonen examines how feminist theory and research contribute to a better understanding in today's society due to their many roles in the media. First, the main topics of Feminist Media Studies are mentioned and further topics such as the encoding / decoding model according to Stuart Hall , stereotypes and a new paradigm are pointed out. The text also contains specific models for understanding media. Furthermore, the author examines problematic concepts with regard to identities, but also terms that have to do with the subject of feminist media studies, such as representation, the structure of media organizations and the contradictions of the gender image. Ultimately, she comes to the conclusion that there is a very strong relationship between gender (stereotypes, pornography and ideology) and communication, but it is also the mass media that lead to a lot of critical and observable gender and There are identity structures in advertising, film and TV in general. With this work, Van Zoonen played a key role in the "third-wave-feminism" emerging during this period, the so-called third wave of the women's movement .

In 2005 the monograph “Entertaining the citizen. When Poltics and Popular Culture Converge “a book publication in the context of politics and popular culture. She deals with the topic of whether a combination of politics and entertainment is possible and whether political engagement can contribute to entertainment. Examples, such as the election of an actor as governor or political TV dramas, illustrate the convergence of politics and popular culture. Liesbet van Zoonen's main aim was to show that politics in connection with, for example, popular music could potentially increase political knowledge and enrich society by combining politicians and entertainment.

In 2013 Liesbet van Zoonen wrote the article “From Identity to Identification: Fixating the fragmented self” on her research focus. Van Zoonen believes that identity is what we do and not what we are. Contrary to most identity research, the author wants to address the fact that it is relevant to speak of individual identities and not always to focus on the whole.

Commitment and honors

She has received public grants for her research, for example 2000–2002 from the University of Amsterdam for the Center for Popular Culture she founded and 2015–2017 for Urban Big Data Lab from Erasmus University and the city of Rotterdam . Liesbet van Zoonen won the 1989 Western Speech Association Award for the best academic article in Women's Studies in Communication. She was also nominated twice for the Marie Curie Award (2001–2003; 2006–2008) and for the Dutch Science Foundation VENI fellowship (2007). Van Zoonen worked as a freelance journalist from 1984 to 1985. From 2000 to 2001 she wrote weekly articles for the daily Trouw . In the meantime (2007–2014) she worked as an editor on the publication of the European Journal of Communication. Liesbet van Zoonen has been Academic Director at the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for Big, Open and Linked Data (BOLD) Cities since 2016. The communication scientist also runs her own blog and provides information about her current work there.

Publications (selection)

  • Do fighting women need to be so rude? The women's movement and the media. SUA, Amsterdam 1991
  • Feminist Media Studies. Sage, London 1994, ISBN 0-8039-8554-1
  • A professional, unreliable, heroic, marionette (M / F): structure, agency and subjectivity in contemporary journalisms . European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 123-143, 1998
  • Media, culture and citizenship . Het Spinhuis, Amsterdam 1999
  • Popular culture as political communication . Javnost / The Public, 7 (2), p. 5-9, 2002
  • Entertaining the citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, USA, 2005, ISBN 978-0-7425-2906-9
  • together with D. Wring: Trends in political televison in the UK: Themes, characters and narratives, 1965–2009. Media, Culture and Society, 34 (3), p. 263-279, 2012
  • From identity to identification: Fixating the fragmented self . Media, Culture and Society, 35 (1), p. 44-51, 2013
  • Pleidooi voor de middenmaat. Sociologie, 11 (2), p. 289-296, 2015

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c LinkedIn profile. Retrieved December 20, 2016 .
  2. ^ Erasmus Graduate School of Social Sciences and the Humanities: EA (Liesbet) van Zoonen. Retrieved December 20, 2016 .
  3. ^ Liesbet van Zoonen: Feminist Media Studies . Sage, London 1994, ISBN 0-8039-8554-1 .
  4. ^ Liesbet van Zoonen: Entertaining the citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, USA 2005, ISBN 978-0-7425-2906-9 .
  5. ^ From identity to identification. (PDF) 2013, accessed December 20, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Zoonen, Liesbet van
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch university professor, professor of Popular Culture at the University of Rotterdam
DATE OF BIRTH May 1, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Hoorn