Esther Hammelburg wins 6th Boekman Dissertation Prize

Prize for dissertation on live experience and media at cultural events

Esther Hammelburg is the winner of the sixth Boekman Dissertation Prize for arts, culture and policy. The award was presented at the research conference Culture as a problem solver?, organised by the Boekman Foundation and Erasmus University Rotterdam in Theater Zuidplein. Jury president Prof Susanne Janssen presented the prize in the presence of representatives of the organising partners and the NWO Social Sciences and Humanities domain.

Hammelburg received the award for her dissertation Being there live: how liveness is realised through media use at contemporary cultural events, in which she explores how the experience of live events is fundamentally changed by the use of digital media, in particular the mobile phone.

Other finalists were: 

• Pieter Bots, with his dissertation A valuable judgement: artistic quality in Dutch cultural policy (University of Amsterdam)
• Kirsten Schipper, with Architecture as a cultural act: an architectural-historical study of the central government's architectural policy (University of Groningen)

More information on their research is here find.

From the jury report

"In her thesis, Esther Hammelburg shows how closely the audience experience of live events has become intertwined with the use of digital media, in particular the mobile phone. That connection goes far beyond capturing a few images as memories. Hammelburg shows that for many people today, there is simply no experience of liveness without a phone. She talks about eventspheres: hybrid events that take place simultaneously in physical locations and in media environments. For makers, programmers and other professionals, she drew up ten practical design principles to make the hybrid live experience for visitors as powerful as possible. With her innovative and practice-oriented research, Hammelburg places, in the jury's opinion, the functioning of art and culture par excellence in the contemporary social context of concert-goers and festival-goers." 

Background

The Boekman Dissertation Prize is awarded once every three years by the Boekman Foundation and the NWO Social Sciences and Humanities Domain. The prize awards the best Dutch dissertation at the intersection of art, culture and society, and aims to bring recent scientific insights to wide attention. The prize comes with a cash prize of €10,000.

The winner will also be invited as a guest editor for a themed issue of the magazine Bookman, which focuses on the topic of the winning dissertation. The dissertation prize is in line with the ideas of Emanuel Boekman (1889-1940), who was the first in the Netherlands to do a PhD on the relationship between government and art.

Jury

The jury of the 6th Boekman Dissertation Prize consisted of:

• Prof Susanne Janssen (chairman), professor of Media and Culture, Erasmus University Rotterdam
• Prof Odile Heynders, professor of Comparative Literature, Tilburg University
• Prof Gabri van Tussenbroek, professor of Urban Identity and Monuments, University of Amsterdam
• Dr Femke van Hest, strategic advisor culture, municipality of 's-Hertogenbosch
• Toef Jaeger, arts editor, NRC