We are looking for an MA-level student assistant (0.1 FTE) for the interdisciplinary project Narrative Trust on Trial: Gendered Credibility and Civic Resilience in the Digital Public Sphere, funded by TSHD seed money. The position runs from February 1 to December 1, 2026.
Below you will find a description of the project and the tasks associated with this position.
Interested? Please email i.g.m.vdven@tilburguniversity.edu.
Team members
- Inge van de Ven, TSHD (PI, DCU)
- Ruben Vanden Berghe, TSHD (DCU)
- Roos Slegers, TSHD (DFIL)
- Frank Bosman, TST
- Irene Kamara, TLS
- Esther Keymolen, TLS
- Ronald Leenes, TLS
Societal partner: LocHal, Libraries Tilburg (contact: Esther van Lieshout)
Other collaborator: Studium Generale Tilburg
Description
Democratic societies depend on shared storytelling practices that sustain public trust. Yet in today’s media environments, credibility has become precarious as information circulates through platforms that privilege exposure and blur boundaries between truth and fiction (Georgakopoulou, Iversen & Stage 2020). Once confined to literature, the label of the unreliable narrator now circulates widely in digital discourse, where audiences use it to legitimize or discredit real people’s voices (Van de Ven, forthcoming).
Such judgments are deeply gendered: women’s voices are often framed as emotional or manipulative (Banet-Weiser 2018). Social media infrastructures amplify these asymmetries, rewarding affective intensities and perpetuating misogynistic dynamics (Im et al. 2023; Regehr et al. 2024). Public controversies like the Heard–Depp and Lively–Baldoni trials reveal how female testimony is reframed through tropes of madness or deceit. This pilot examines how interpretive suspicion (Felski 2015; Van de Ven & Chateau 2024) shapes civic trust online and the gendered politics of credibility: how do digital audiences negotiate reliability and doubt in “he-said/she-said” trials, and what do these judgments reveal about civic trust?
To address these questions, Narrative Trust on Trial (NTT) assembles a team with complementary expertise. Van de Ven (PI) leads the conceptual design and coordination. Vanden Berghe (postdoc in Van de Ven’s Aspasia project) supervises data collection. Slegers adds philosophical and ethical reflection on gendered trust; Bosman studies moral narratives in digital media; Kamara, Keymolen, and Leenes contribute legal perspectives on accountability and digital sovereignty. Together, the team explores unreliability as both narrative practice—how stories are told and received—and a civic problem—how societies calibrate trust. The team previously collaborated on the now-discontinued Honors Program Trust in the Information Age.
A student assistant will collect and code a pilot dataset of online discussions of mediatized trials in which women’s credibility is publicly contested. Case studies will include US examples and topical European cases like the Patrick Poivre d’Arvor and Dani Alves trials, focusing on platforms such as X/Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube. Using qualitative coding and engagement metrics, the project maps patterns of (dis)trust: how audiences justify trust and how algorithmic dynamics and virality amplify these judgments. The dataset will be assembled through systematic sampling of public posts and comments. In parallel, a legal-philosophical strand examines how notions of (gendered)trust, accountability, and voice are articulated in EU digital-governance frameworks (e.g., Digital Services Act; AI Act) and how these intersect with gendered narratives of credibility identified through the media analysis.
Integration is achieved by interpreting empirical patterns of audience trust through legal-philosophical and hermeneutic lenses, aligning micro-level discourse with macro-level regulation. The project connects individual and collective acts of judgment in digital publics with the regulatory conditions that shape them, fostering dialogue between interpretive, media-analytical, and legal perspectives on narrative trust. A public workshop at LocHal and an interactive lecture with Studium Generale translate findings into civic dialogue on trust, gender, and credibility in digital culture.
NTT contributes to the Center for Resilient Democratic Society by addressing Democracy & Civic Vitality and Digital Sovereignty. It investigates how trust and distrust circulate online, how gendered and cultural biases shape judgments of reliability, and how biases can be mitigated through ethical and legal frameworks. Linking narrative theory, media analysis, and digital governance, NTT advances understanding of how credibility is negotiated within networked publics. It reframes narrative trust as both analytical framework and civic condition of democracy, showing how reading, judging, and regulating intersect. The collaboration develops a shared vocabulary for credibility and accountability and helps counter misinformation, polarization, and declining trust—core threats to democratic resilience.
Timeline
The project will run from January to December 2026.
| Month 1 (January) | Recruitment and onboarding of the Master’s student assistant, finalization of data management plan, and submission of ethics application to the TSHD Research Ethics and Data Management Committee. |
| Months 2–4 (February–April) | Conceptual refinement and preparation of the coding framework under supervision of Van de Ven and Vanden Berghe. The assistant will collect and curate a small-scale dataset of online discussions surrounding cases where women’s credibility is publicly contested |
| Months 5–8 (May–August) | Systematic coding and qualitative analysis using NVivo/MaxQDA. Parallel to this empirical work, the philosophy and law partners (Slegers, Kamara, Keymolen, Leenes) will analyze concepts of trust, accountability, and voice in EU digital-governance frameworks (Digital Services Act, AI Act). |
| Months 9–10 (September–October) | Interdisciplinary synthesis of findings; drafting of a co-authored paper and workshop materials. |
| Months 11–12 (November–December) | Organization of the public workshop at LocHal and interactive lecture with Studium Generale, followed by reporting and preparation of follow-up funding proposals (ERC, NWO Open Competition). |
Envisioned output
The project will deliver a pilot dataset of coded online discussions on gendered narrative credibility; an interdisciplinary analysis integrating narratological, ethical, and legal perspectives; and a co-authored article or conference paper. Results will be shared in a public workshop, interactive lecture, and report, providing groundwork for large-scale empirical and theoretical research on narrative trust and civic resilience in digital publics. The project may lead to further joint research endeavors with scholars from digital culture, literary and media studies, philosophy, and law to develop a cross-disciplinary framework for narrative trust in digital publics. Building on this pilot’s focus on gendered credibility, the consortium will examine how stories, interpretations, and governance infrastructures shape civic trust and accountability online: from social-media reading communities to policy debates on misinformation and digital sovereignty.
Works cited
Banet-Weiser, S. (2018). Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke UP.
European Parliament and Council. Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 on a Single Market for Digital Services (Digital Services Act). Official Journal of the European Union L 277, 27 Oct 2022.
European Parliament and Council. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 on Artificial Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act). Official Journal of the European Union L 1689, 12 July 2024.
Felski, R. (2011). Suspicious minds. Poetics today, 32(2), 215-234.
Georgakopoulou, A., Iversen, S., & Stage, C. (2020). A Narrative Analysis of Metrics on Social Media. Heidelberg: Palgrave MacMillan.
Im, J., S. Schoenebeck, M. Iriarte, et al. (2023). Women’s perspectives on harm and justice after online harassment. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6 (CSCW2): 1-23.
Regehr, K., C. Shaughnessy, M. Zhao, et al. (2024). Safer Scrolling: How algorithms popularise and gamify online hate and misogyny for young people. UCL IOE, University of Kent.
Van de Ven, I. (forthcoming, 2026). (Dis)Trust in Stories: (Un)Reliable Narrators Beyond the Book (book manuscript under review, Ohio State UP).
Van de Ven, I., & L. Chateau. (2024). Digital Culture and the Hermeneutic Tradition: Suspicion, Trust, and Dialogue. London: Routledge.