Connecting Audience Capabilities with Structural Conditions to ensure Epistemic Welfare in AI driven media environments
The seminar explores how strengthening audience capabilities and improving structural media conditions can support people’s ability to form reliable knowledge and exercise epistemic agency within AI‑driven, datafied media environments.
Hovedinnhold
Abstract
Our field is abuzz with concerns that we are facing an epistemic crisis that, from a communication perspective, results from processes of datafication, algorithmization and platformization. These are seen to affect knowledge production, dissemination and acquisition, challenges that come on top of wider socio-political developments, including populism, autocracy and the dwindling credibility of scientific institutions. Colleagues from U Antwerp and U Freiburg and I developed a conceptualization aimed at finding a way out of this epistemic crisis. Combining insights from social epistemology, welfare studies and communication research, we work with the novel concept of epistemic welfare, defined as creating and maintaining the conditions and capabilities for individuals’ epistemic agency in the public sphere. In this seminar, I will discuss the various aspects of this framework with a particular focus on the audience capabilities and how they can contribute to individuals’ opportunities to exercise their epistemic agency and reach so-called epistemically valuable states.
Bio: Hilde van den Bulck
Professor of Communication Hilde Van den Bulck (Drexel University) researches the interplay between media structures, policies, and culture. Her work on media structures examines how technological, political, economic, and cultural shifts—especially algorithmization, datafication, and platformization—affect legacy and public service media, including how algorithmic personalization challenges universality and shapes trust in public media in Europe and the U.S.
In media culture, she studies how mediated communication shapes collective identities and celebrity culture, analyzing how celebrities and their activism spark public debate among fans, audiences, and policymakers. Her topics include celebrity and health, BLM, populism, and patterns of fandom and anti‑fandom.
She has written long‑running opinion columns for De Standaard and VRT, served 12 years as vice chair of the Flemish Sectorial Media Council, and previously held roles including Professor, Department Head, Associate Dean of Research, and Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Antwerp before joining Drexel.