Katharina Tittel

Please tell us about your research project. 

I am a 3rd year doctoral student in Sociology at Sciences Po Paris, affiliated with the Center for the Study of Social Inequalities, the médialab, and funded by the Institut Convergences Migrations. My research at the intersection of media sociology, (digital) inequalities, and critical migration studies analyses (social) media discourses on immigration in Germany, France, and the UK. I am particularly interested in how political power, group interests, platform power, and social inequalities are linked to framing and representation on- and offline, and how social media changes whose voices are heard on the topic. Combining computational and qualitative methods, I also study particular events both from an ethnographic perspective on the ground and their (digital) coverage to better understand the factors related to some perspectives being silenced and others amplified in mainstream and social media.
 

Could you please tell us a bit more about your scholarship/exchange programme?

My stay at the Maison Francaise Oxford is part of the OxPo exchange programme, through which I am affiliated with the Department for Politics and International Relations. I want to use my stay at the University of Oxford particularly to work on the theoretical framework of my thesis, to discuss my preliminary results with scholars, and to collaborate in-person with a fellow researcher here in Oxford.

First impressions of Oxford/the University?

The wealth of resources, libraries, events, and possibilities to engage with others is absolutely astonishing, and creates an atmosphere in which I want to spend all day studying, exploring and learning. To some extent, the University and the city feel like a parallel universe, separated from the rest of the world, being conducive to a focus on intellectual work that seems truly unique.