Prof. Dr. Gaëlle Ouvrein

Gaëlle obtained her PhD in 2019 at the University of Antwerp, Faculty of Social Sciences. Her PhD research looked into the phenomenon of online celebrity bashing and approached it from three different sides: Bystanders (How do bystanders perceive this phenomenon and how does it make them feel?), perpetrators (Who are the perpetrators of online celebrity bashing and what are their motives?) and celebrity-victims (How do celebrities feel when confronted with celebrity bashing and which coping strategies do they use?). Next, Gaëlle worked on a FWO postdoc project where she further extended the knowledge of the bystanders of online celebrity bashing with a longitudinal approach. After finishing the postdoc project Gaëlle worked for two years as an assistant professor at the University of Utrecht, in the faculty of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences. Since October 2023 Gaëlle works as an assistant professor in Marketing at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Faculty of Social Sciences & Solvay Business School. Gaëlle is also member of the Imec-SMIT MUX unit. She teaches several marketing courses within the Department of Communication Sciences and supervises several doctoral researchers on related topics.

The research of Gaëlle focusses on positive and negative interactions between media-figures and adolescents in a digital context. Whereas her PhD research mostly focussed on negative interactions and specific cases of celebrity bashing, she now also includes positive interactions. More specifically, Gaëlle looks into the concept of parasocial relationships, how this concept has evolved in the digital world and what these kinds of relationships can mean for the development of adolescents.

Gaëlle is working on her own project on the role of parasocial relationships in the development of adolescents within the digital world. She is also supervising a PhD project that is focussing on the association between meat and masculinity and whether and how we can change this association among men by approaching this idea from identity and polarization theories. A second PhD project she is supervising is a collaboration with the Statistics Department of the University of Utrecht and focuses on the long-term effects of cyberbullying among adolescents. Gaëlle is also involved in some smaller projects which all focus on interactions with social influencers, but within different contexts, such as meat consumption, body positivity, online identity, cancel culture etc.