Emma Beuckels

Emma Beuckels is head of the Parents and Platforms Research Lab within CEPEC, where she leads an interdisciplinary programme of research on how digital media environments shape contemporary parenting cultures. Primarily by the use of audience-research, her work examines how the platformization and commodification of family life mutually shapes the online and offline lives of parents, children, and adolescents, situated at the intersection of media studies, family studies, and consumer culture.

Emma is currently a senior postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, supported by the Special Research Fund (BOF). Her own research project investigates how parenting advice is platformized and commodified, and how parents engage with these dynamics. Combining micro- and macrosociological perspectives, she traces how parenting discourses are shaped, commodified, and circulated through social media, and how these dynamics interact with everyday parenting practices and experiences. Alongside this, her work addresses the ethical implications of involving children in influencer practices and content. She approaches this from a multi-stakeholder perspective, moving beyond the responsibilisation of parents and towards a collective responsibility for children's rights online.

Emma supervises several PhD students within national and international research projects that explore how social media and influencer logics shape offline decision-making and health behaviors among adolescents, parents, and children. The projects led by Ellen Mertens, Gitte Dermaret, and Eline De Keyzer investigate topics including the polarization of infant feeding practices, influencer communication on parental and child food consumption, and the promotion of food media literacy among adolescents through social media influencers.

She collaborates with a wide network of international researchers and organizations spanning media studies, family studies, psychology, marketing, law, public health, obstetric care, and beyond. She is a board member of the Netherlands Flanders Communication Association (NeFCA) and an associate editor at the International Journal of Advertising.

Emma received her PhD from Ghent University in September 2020, with a dissertation on media multitasking and advertising processing.