SNSF Ambizione Grant Awarded to Daniela Jaramillo-Dent

Daniela Jaramillo-Dent has been awarded an SNSF Ambizione Grant for a a four-year research project titled "Influencers as Visual and Platform-Based Authorities: How Epistemic Authority Is Claimed, Portrayed, and Perceived on Digital Platforms".

We warmly congratulate our colleague Daniela Jaramillo-Dent on this outstanding achievement and wish her every success with the project!

Summary

In today's platform era, online content and influencers have become central to how people learn about the world, seek guidance, and decide who to trust, whether that means following a finance influencer before making an investment or a diasporic influencer to understand the documents needed to migrate to a country. Institutions like the World Health Organization or the UNHCR already recognize and collaborate with influencers, often regardless of their formal credentials, signaling a broader transformation in how knowledge is generated and validated, and reshaping epistemic authority: who gets recognized as a trusted source of knowledge, and how that trust is built, claimed, and legitimized.

This 4-year project, funded by an SNSF Ambizione grant, examines how influencers across three domains, science, diasporic culture, and finance, acquire, maintain, and exercise authority through visual and platformed means, actively constructing it through content, platform affordances, and audience engagement.
The project employs a mixed-methods approach to examine how content, influencers, and audiences interact to portray, claim, and perceive epistemic authority, developing new frameworks for understanding how authority, trust, and expertise operate in social media environments, and what this means for institutions navigating a knowledge landscape that is increasingly shaped online.

Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) – Starting Grant 2025 
Total Funds: CHF 736'723
Principal Investigator: Dr. Daniela Jaramillo-Dent 
Project Duration: 2027–2031