Based at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Joey Stofberg is a PhD researcher on the FWOS-funded project “LGBTQ+ Youth of Color”, under supervision of prof. dr. Serena Does (Verwey-Jonker Instituut and VU) and dr. Seval Gündemir (UvA). This project focuses on the intersectional challenges faced by LGBTQ+ young people of colour in the Netherlands in their everyday pursuit of community, joy, and empowerment. Besides contributing to closing a gap in existing research, the project aims to provide recommendations for policy, monitoring, and service provision practices that better align with the needs and experiences of LGBTQ+ youth of colour, taking into account the internal diversity of this group.
Situated at the nexus of politics, new media (technologies), and culture, Joey’s interdisciplinary research experiences coalesce in the overarching theme of “belonging” in post-digital and globalized contexts, with a particular interest in the interface of technology and society. Joey’s work typically employs a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative discourse analysis, informed by queer, decolonial, and intersectional theory, with quantitative analysis using computational tools.
In 2021, Joey obtained a Research Master’s degree in International Relations (cum laude) from the University of Groningen, with a thesis exploring how the microblogging platforms Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram have transnationally transformed LGBTQ+ self-advocacies since the mid-2010s. Two years earlier, Joey completed a BA degree in History (cum laude and extended with an Honours Programme) at the University of Amsterdam, being awarded the 2019 Skript Thesis Award (Skriptieprijs) for a thesis on early Dutch telephony as a simultaneously technological and socio-political phenomenon. Additionally, Joey completed research internships at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam and the National Museum of World Cultures in Leiden, focused on computational linguistics and decolonizing museum representations respectively.
As a 2022 Humanity in Action Fellow, Joey is presently also working on implementing an Action Project (an independent social justice venture). The objective is to produce an interactive, dynamic, web-based Online LGBTQ+ Self-Advocacy Guidebook, which maps the various ways in which social media can be used for LGBTQ+ self-advocacy, simultaneously focused on supporting LGBTQ+ communities and on informing researchers and policymakers seeking to better understand these digital self-advocacy practices.
