Hanna Starkova
Fellow 2024/2025
Media Studies
Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Amsterdam
aninanauka@gmail.com
Bio
Hanna Starkova is a scholar, activist and journalist from Kharkiv. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies. From 2011 to 2016, she held a teaching position at the Kharkiv State Academy of Culture, where she instructed students in the history of cinema and television.
Since 2018, she has been employed at the Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics, teaching journalism, production and media planning. Due to the full-scale Russian attack, she was compelled to leave her home city. In 2022, she was awarded a research scholarship at Paderborn University in Germany, where she prepared and delivered two 30-hour block seminars in the 2023-2024 academic year.
She was awarded the Safe Haven fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) for the winter 2024-2025 academic year. Her research interests include media studies, entertainment culture, and media anthropology.
Internet Memes in the Context of the War in Ukraine - How Do Internet Users from Ukraine and the Netherlands Use Memes to Highlight Attitudes to the War Unleashed by Russia in Ukraine?
With her research Hanna Starkova wants to show that individuals should be responsible for the content they share, regardless of whether it is perceived as “not serious” or humorous.
She will conduct an online survey on memes among young people in Ukraine and the Netherlands. The survey will prioritise the study of memes and their impact on the younger demographic and will be conducted among students of BA and MA programmes in Media and Communication Studies. Hanna focuses on young people because they are the key actors of our near future society. They will determine what the economy and politics will look like, including the economy and politics of the media and the Internet.
Analysing and comparing the results of the two surveys will help to understand how young people in Ukraine and the Netherlands assess memes in general and how memes play a role in wartime.