Introduction

Niels van Doorn is Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture in the Department of Media Studies (Faculty of the Humanities) at the University of Amsterdam.

He holds an MSc and PhD in Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam. In February 2010 he defended his PhD dissertation on the performance of gender, sexuality, and embodiment on internet platforms that feature user-generated content. Through a comparative case study the dissertation investigates how the gendered, sexual body is translated and reconfigured in the digitally material spaces of the internet, paying particular attention to the medium-specific, technical affordances of the different online platforms and how they are embedded in the everyday lives of their users. 

After receiving aRubicon grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), he carried out a two-year postdoctoral research project in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (USA). Partly inspired by his PhD research, this project examined how we can rethink the relationship between sexuality, intimacy, and citizenship, when we conceive of the latter beyond its conventional scaffolding within a liberal, legalist, and nation-centered framework. Instead, we may understand citizenship as a 'practice of composition': a shared process of constructing a common world through affective bonds between people who have often been let down by traditional institutions of citizenship and public life. Through an ethnography of various collectives that make up Baltimore's LGBT and queer community, the project attended to the ways in which the intimate practices of these groups allow them to compose better architectures of 'the good life' based on alternative articulations of kinship, propriety, and solidarity. The ethnography itself also included a methodological experiment with the incorporation of smartphone technology into daily fieldwork activities, which generated a particular mode of sensing and making sense of the material and affective characteristics of 'the field'.  

His current research builds on his interest in public intimacy, social belonging, and economies of worth, by extending these themes into the various spaces and practices that constitute contemporary digital culture and inquiring into the relationship between recent transformations in labor regimes and new forms of collective value creation. In a neoliberal world of precarious labor and project-based work, how can one measure and improve one's value in different public spaces on the web? How do political and moral economies intersect in new spaces of peer production, evaluation, and collaborative consumption? What kinds of value are generated in these so-called 'sharing' and 'reputation' economies, and in what ways are these facilitated and/or appropriated by capital? 

Research interests : (digital) ethnography; political and cultural theory; the study of value and valuation; measurement devices; work/labor; precarity; neoliberalism; citizenship; the common; affect/feeling; intimacy; sexuality; gender; internet pornography; social media.   

Publications

Refereed Journals

Doorn, N. van (forthcoming) ‘The Neoliberal Subject of Value: Measuring Human Capital in Information Economies’, Cultural Politics 10(3)

Doorn, N. van (forthcoming) ‘The Fabric of our Memories: Leather, Kinship, and Queer Material History’, Memory Studies.   

Doorn, N. van (forthcoming) ‘Forces of Faith: Endurance, Flourishing, and the Queer Religious Subject’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies.

Doorn, N. van (2013) 'Architectures of The Good Life: Queer Assemblages and the Composition of Intimate Citizenship', Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 27(6): 901-932.

Doorn, N. van (2013) 'Assembling the Affective Field: How Smartphone Technology Impacts Ethnographic Research Practice', Qualitative Inquiry 27(6): 901-932.

Doorn, N. van (2013) ''Treatment is Prevention': HIV, Emergency, and the Biopolitics of Viral Containment', Cultural Studies 27(6): 901-932.

Doorn, N. van (2012) 'Between Hope and Abandonment: Black Queer Collectivity and the Affective Labor of Biomedicalized HIV Prevention', Culture, Health & Sexuality 14(7): 827-840.

Doorn, N. van (2011) 'Digital Spaces, Material Traces: How Matter Comes to Matter in Online Performances of Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment', Media, Culture & Society 33(4): 531-547

Doorn, N. van (2010) 'Keeping It Real: User-Generated Pornography, Gender Reification, and Visual Pleasure', Convergence: the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 16(4): 411-430

Doorn, N. van (2010) 'The Ties That Bind: the Networked Performance of Gender, Sexuality, and Friendship on MySpace', New Media & Society 12(4): 583-602

Doorn, N. van, S. Wyatt, and L. van Zoonen (2008) 'A Body of Text:Revisiting Textual Performances of Gender and Sexuality on the Internet', Feminist Media Studies 8(4): 357-374. Reprinted in: M.C. Kearny (Ed) (2011) The Gender and Media Reader . London: Routledge.

Doorn, N. van, L. van Zoonen, and S. Wyatt (2007) 'Writing from Experience: Presentations of Gender Identity on Weblogs', European Journal of Women's Studies 14(2): 143-159

Book chapters

Doorn, N. van and L. van Zoonen (2008) 'Theorizing Gender and the Internet: Past, Present, and Future', in A. Chadwick and P.N. Howard (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics , pp. 261-274. London: Routledge

Doorn, N. van, S. Wyatt, and L. van Zoonen (2011) 'A Body of Text: Revisiting Textual Performances of Gender and Sexuality on the Internet', in M.C. Kearny (ed) The Gender and Media Reader . London: Routledge. 

Grants, Fellowships and Awards

ASCA Article of the Year Award 2014, awarded by the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), for 'Architectures of The Good Life: Queer Assemblages and the Composition of Intimate Citizenship'. 

Rubicon Postdoctoral Research Grant, awarded by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), March 2010.

Postdoctoral Visiting Fellowship, awarded by The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS - KNAW), August 2009.

Previous positions

Sept 2010 - Sept 2012 :   
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States.

Sept 2009 - Dec 2009 :    
Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS), Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Sept 2007 - July 2010 :   
Lecturer and thesis supervisor in the Department of Communication Science, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

May 2007 - Aug 2009 :   
PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), The Netherlands.

May 2006 - Sept 2006 :   
Junior Researcher at the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS), part of the 'Dynamics of Digitization' project.

Sept 2005 - May 2006 :   
Junior Researcher at ASCoR, part of the 'Gender Bending on the Internet' project.

Nov 2003 - May 2004 :    
Research intern at ASCoR, part of the 'Youth and News Media Consumption' project.

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