Martine van Selm investigates how the media contribute to shaping our views on an ageing society. To this end, she maps the way age and the elderly are portrayed in the media and, more specifically, how this applies to older workers. A key theme is the role played by the media in creating, maintaining and changing stereotypes about age, older workers and retirement.

In addition, she regularly publishes in leading journals on innovative communication tools in healthcare and on digital and qualitative research methods.

As director of the UvA’s College of Communication, Van Selm has made an important contribution to education innovation by, for example, initiating the open online courses Introduction to Communication Science and Ethical Dilemmas in Communication, an online matching programme for international students and the English-taught Bachelor’s track in Communication Science.

As professor, Van Selm will focus on the communication strategies of profit and non-profit organisations. More specifically, she will investigate the role of (corporate) media in generating, upholding and changing stereotypes surrounding certain group of workers and the accompanying implications for perceptions, attitudes and behaviours within organisations. 

About Martine van Selm

Van Selm has been associate professor and programme group director in the Corporate Communication group at the UvA’s Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) since 2010. In addition, she is director of the College of Communication. In 1998, Van Selm obtained her PhD from Radboud University Nijmegen on the subject of meaninglessness in the second half of life. Since then, she has combined her gerontological expertise on ageing with her background in communication science. From 1998 to 2010, she held a post at Radboud University’s departments of Communication Science and Social Science Research Methods. Van Selm has received various grants for education innovation and research within, among other things, the Socially Responsible Innovation programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).   

Van Selm is chair of the Foundation for Scientific Research on Commercial Communication (SWOCC), a member of the Advisory Board of Windesheim University of Applied Sciences’ Journalism programme and has had seats on several national and international teaching review committees.