Maciej Grzenkowicz and Julia Munuera Garcia win Rudolf Agricola PhD Grants March 2024

We congratulate Maciej Grzenkowicz and Julia Munuera Garcia . They won the first of our Rudolf Agricola Phd Grants 2024!

Maciej Grzenkowicz  is PhD researcher in Multimodal Argumentation at the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Philosophy. He is looking in to ways to counter disinformation on TikTok. With the Grant he will employ four student assistants to help him in collecting and translating TikTok-clips in languages such as Arabic.

Julia Munuera Garcia, is PhD researcher at University College Groningen, Department of Social Science and the Faculty of Spatial Sciences. She is raising awareness on how accessibility, encounters and mobilities influence people with disabilities’ experiences in the city. With the Grant money she will produce a boardgame that will help raising awareness on how people with disabilities have to cope.

The Jury consisted of prof. dr. Ina Horlings and dr. Sara Strandvad.

Special thanks to our student assistant Lola Tucker for helping us to organize this event!

The deadline for the next round of Rudolf Agricola PhD Grants is 29 april 2024 at midnight.

More on the winners and their research

Maciej Grzenkowicz:  ‘The aim of my PhD project is to create guidelines for a persuasive construction of fact-checking videos on TikTok. To do so, I conduct a multimodal corpus study of fact checking videos published on TikTok representing different journalistic cultures around the world. I focus on the argumentative practices employed by the fact-checkers and on how they engage multiple semiotic modes in the argumentative moves.

Fighting polarization is a crucial condition for the sustainable development of the planet.'

The grant will be spent to employ four student assistants with different cultural backgrounds, who will annotate a selection of videos from a larger corpus using the developed annotation scheme with the software ELAN. Preference will be given to students with Middle Eastern and East Asian backgrounds.

Promotores: prof. dr. John Hoeks, dr. Jan Albert van Laar, supervisor Janina Wildfeuer.

Publications by Maciej Grzenkowicz

Julia Munuera Garcia: ‘My PhD, Everyday Geographies of Being and Becoming Disabled, aims at exploring how accessibility, encounters and mobilities influence people with disabilities’ experiences in the city. Hence, contributing to the broader global efforts to create cities that are sustainable, inclusive and accessible to everyone. Due to the number of Europeans with a disability (about 27% of the EU population) and the velocity with which the population is aging, accessibility and inclusivity are a pressing sustainability issue. In fact, the Sustainable Development Goal 11 of the United Nations (2023)

I use community-based participatory research to create knowledge with co researchers, who are residents at ‘s Heeren Loo (an organization that provides care and housing for people with disabilities).

During the past months, we recorded the lived experiences of the co-researchers in urban public spaces, researching the physical and social limitations imposed by the city. Currently, we have gathered a number of insights that we aim to disseminate through a board game. The board game aspires to raise awareness about the lived experiences of people with disabilities’ in- and outside academia while encouraging the audience to think about social sustainability and inclusive cities and practices. To do so, the board game targets the general public as well as educational institutions (e.g. mbo, hbo, wo and other institutions such as the University Museum), policymakers, municipalities and scientific initiatives.’

 Promotor: dr. Bettina van Hoven, supervisor dr. Julia Doornbos

Publications by Julia Munuera Garcia