PhD position: Recording in social interaction

Job

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is offering a fully funded, four-year PhD-position, led by Dr. Elliott M. Hoey at the Faculty of Humanities within the Language and Communication group. The earliest start date of the position is May, 2025. Project description Modern societies since the turn of the century have been increasingly suffused with video recording devices. This change has come along with the amplification of observability, blurring the boundaries between local and external situations, and between private and public spheres. Body-worn cameras and bystander video, for instance, have transformed policing into a ‘high visibility’ occupation; unmanned drones and AI facial recognition are rapidly becoming embedded in the surveillance state; and, of course, smartphone cameras have created en masse a population of amateur videographers. This PhD project trains its focus on the ad hoc everyday usage of personal recording devices in actual social interactions. Consider how wielding a smartphone constitutes a meaningful action, one which was not possible before the commercial availability of such portable technologies. To aim your smartphone camera on some scene suggests to observers that the scene is worth recording and invites them to inspect it for whatever interest is to be found there. This act of recording takes on heightened significance when brought into social interaction. Consider an on-duty police officer who decides to activate his body-worn camera, or a customer who begins recording while making a complaint at a restaurant. In these situations, the camera and the act of recording become foregrounded as integral components of the participants’ interaction. Despite its mundane recognizability and its key place in debates about ‘cancel culture’, ‘Karens’, and our censorious mediatized age, this phenomenon—the action of recording others in social interaction—has received insufficient attention. The aim of this PhD project is therefore to arrive at an empirically-grounded account of how participants in different everyday settings use the camera as an object for action in interaction.

Initiator(s):
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Deadline: 01.03.2025
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands

https://workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/phd-position-recording-in-social-interaction-amsterdam-1140657

Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein