AF (Anne) Heslinga

Biography

**Annie Heslinga is a PhD candidate at the Erasmus School of History Culture and Communication (Department of History).** Her doctoral research is funded by the NWO PhD in the Humanities competition, under the project “Digital games and the rise of the platform economy in The Netherlands (1985-2020)” (promoters prof. dr. Ben Wubs and prof. dr. Paul van de Laar). The project investigates the growth of gaming in the Netherlands, illustrating how local contexts, particularly those outside of the United States, are crucial to understanding the global nature of the game industry. 

The research aims to address the uneven power relations between platforms on platform-dependent cultural producers. In doing so, the research also complicates the peripheral and platform-dependent nature of the Dutch game industry, illustrating how Dutch gamers and game developers have generated value within business ecosystems dominated by large, international platforms. 

Annie holds an International Master’s degree (2019, cum laude) from the Erasmus Mundus programme Global Markets, Local Creativities, conferred by Erasmus University Rotterdam, the University of Glasgow, and the University of Barcelona. She has worked as a researcher for New York University’s Department of Sociology and for the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Beeld en Geluid). Additionally, she has worked in grant writing for the education technology non-profit InnovateEDU in New York City.