Koen Leurs – project leader

Koen Leurs is an assistant professor in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He works on digital migration studies, and he is the principal investigator of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research-funded study “Young Connected Migrants. Comparing Digital Practices of Young Asylum Seekers and Expatriates in the Netherlands,” and the Dutch National Research Agenda funded participatory action research project “Media literacy through Making Media: A Key to Participation for Young Newcomers.” Leurs has recently published Digital Passages. Migrant Youth 2.0. Diaspora, Gender & Youth Cultural Intersections (Amsterdam University Press, 2015). Recently, with Sandra Ponzanesi, he guest-edited a special issue on “Connected migrants: Encapsulation and cosmopolitanization” for Popular Communication. International Journal of Media and Culture (volume 16.1, 2018), and a special issue on “Forced migration and digital connectivity in(to) Europe” for Social Media + Society (forthcoming march 2018). Currently, he is co-editing the Sage Handbook of Media and Migration.

He is the chair of the European Communication Research and Education (ECREA) Diaspora, Migration and the Media section.

Madhuri Prabhakar, research internship (2016-2017)

Jeffrey Patterson, research internship (2018)
Jeffrey Patterson is a masters student in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He has his undergraduate degree in Sociology and holds a minor in Psychology from Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. His growing interest in digital diaspora research and the critical perspective of intersectionality led him to this particular study. 

For part of Jeffrey’s masters programme Youth, Education, and Society he is currently conducting a thesis research project ‘We live here, and we are queer!: Young gay connected migrant network and identity formations in the Netherlands’ investigating their digital practices and online identity performances. This research is part of the broader VENI project ‘Young Connected Migrants’ of Koen Leurs.