Axelle Asmar

Axelle holds a Master Degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) and a Master of Communication Sciences from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She has been working at SMIT since 2018, first on IDEALiC, a project on e-inclusion for the Federal Government; then as a teaching assistant for the department of Communication Sciences.

Axelle Asmar is a PhD researcher and teaching assistant at the Department of Communication Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). Her research explores the cultural power of SVODs such as Netflix: specifically, how said services increasingly put an emphasis on diversity (i.e., sexual, gender, racial, etc.) in their branding, distribution and production strategies to generate transnational appeal. She focusses on contemporary repertoires of representation—with a particular emphasis on television texts for young audiences (teen television)— to understand how images, narratives and discourses about diversity (gender, sexual, racial diversity, etc.) circulate transnationally in this new television culture.

Axelle has worked on projects related to digital inclusion, publishing on social support (social support) and the importance of understanding patterns of social support in relation to digital inequalities, as well as developing a conceptual model (conceptual model) to allow the formulation of an alternative lens through which to look at mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Currently, Axelle works on her doctoral research focusing on how cultural diversity is key to the transnational expansion of streamers such as Netflix (cultural diversity) with a particular emphasis on Netflix's teen series (Netflix's teen series) and its production culture (production culture)