This year, on the 25th and 26th of June 2026, the RICH research group Media, Popular Culture, and Social Change is hosting the annual Summer School of the Research School for Media Studies (RMeS) at our university. The programme investigates how media reflect, shape, and challenge various forms of disconnection in today’s world.
From the dominance of platform capitalism and its algorithmic filter bubbles, to the intensification of political polarization around the globe, and the resulting disillusionment that numbs our bodies’ capacity to engage with the world that can feel overwhelming: a sense of disconnection permeates every layer of contemporary life. As both symptom and amplifier of polarized and xenophobic discourse, anger emerges as a violent expression of frustration that accompanies social and political divides. Alongside this, exhaustion manifests as a shared condition of fatigue and withdrawal, part of a burnout culture that exposes how disconnection seeps into our bodies, distancing us from the world we inhabit.
Yet amid these negative feelings, hope flickers as a vital counterforce, found in acts of resistance, radical collective imagination, and depolarizing efforts to rebuild connection and solidarity, redirecting the other two affective modes toward more generative and transformative possibilities.
The summer school will include keynote lectures, by Sanne Kruikemeier (Wageningen University), Trine Syvertsen (University of Oslo) and Anna Watkins Fisher (King’s College London), as well as interactive workshops, and an informal screening at LUX on Thursday. While the full programme is designed for registered participants, the keynote lectures and screening will be open to colleagues and other interested attendees.
Programme
Thursday, 25 June 2026: Anger and Exhaustion
10:30-11:45: Sanne Kruikemeier (Wageningen University)
Angry in the Algorithmic Age: Do Social Media Fuel Polarization?
14:30- 15:45: Trine Syvertsen (University of Oslo)
Digital Disconnection, the Attention Economy, and the Paradoxes of Self-Regulation
Friday, 26 June 2026: From Exhaustion to Hope
11:00-12:15: Anna Watkins-Fisher (King’s College London)
Never Not On: On the Designing out of the Off Switch
