Karmen Babic Praljak

I am a long-standing practicing lawyer and psychoanalyst as well as a Warwick University third year Ph.D. student in Media and Communications at the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies.

In the contemporary online dating market, platforms and applications shape the dynamics of heterosexual relationships. As a Ph.D. student, my research interest lies in intricate gender politics within these relationships and understanding how Tinder and other platforms and dating apps affect the initiation, structuring and maintaining emotions and emotion based relationships in online space. I seek to contribute to the understanding of how the digital space of online dating platforms and apps intersects with Croatian offline societal expectations and, through knowledge, I aim to fight prejudice and stigmatization around online dating in general.

While exploring that area, I would like to focus on a particular socially invisible group, specifically women aged 40-60 in urban Croatia, where emotions and relationships initiated and structured online are still subjected to prejudice and stigmatization. These women, whose digital dating practices reflect a “feminist avant-garde” in the Balkans, often overlooked in research, bring a unique perspective to the study of emotions and relationships in digital space as their experiences as digital Tinder immigrants may differ significantly from younger people that are digital Tinder natives

My Ph.D. research is supervised by Dr. Carolina Bandinelli