Disputas: Astri Moksnes Barbala

Tittel på avhandlingen:

Instagram feminism. Affect, agency and the uses of platform technology

Tittel på prøveforelesningen:

Reflect on ethical dilemmas that arise from conducting research in digital contexts?

Tid for prøveforelesning: 10:15 – 11:15
Tid for disputas: 12:15 – 15:30
Språk: Prøveforelesning og disputas vil foregå på engelsk
Sted: Levanger, Storsalen

Disputasleder: Prodekan Anne Wally Falch Ryan, Nord universitet

​Bedømmelseskomité: 

• ​Professor Simon Lindgren, Umeå universitet (førsteopponent) 
• Professor Lin Prøitz, Høgskolen i Østfold (andreopponent)
• Professor Yan Zhao, Nord universitet

Veiledere: 

• ​Hovedveileder: Professor Lisbeth Morlandstø, Nord universitet
• Medveileder: Professor Hendrik Storstein Spilker, NTNU

​Om avhandlingen: 

As viral campaigns such as #MeToo have highlighted, social media platforms have in the last decade been vital for mobilizing, broadcasting and performing present-day feminist activism. In Scandinavia, Instagram has been a central platform in this regard. This thesis studies the Instagram practices of an increasingly important group of political opinion leaders in the region: Microcelebrity feminists with a large following who use the Instagram platform in various ways for “doing” feminism. It asks: How do profiled Scandinavian feminists use Instagram, and how do these uses shape agency, materiality and affectivity?

In answering this, the thesis focuses on the complex relationship between the platform technology and this user group. The overall methodological framework for the study is digital ethnography, encompassing qualitative interviews and digital observations. The analytical approaches were inspired by actor-network theory (ANT), ethnomethodology and affect studies.

This thesis offers new ways to think about user agency within a platformized context, and shows how #MeToo established the feminist influencer in Scandinavia as an important player in the contemporary media ecology. It sheds light upon how platformization affects both the production of activist culture and these users’ everyday lives, zooming in on the enactment of the Instagram technology by these profiled feminists. Lastly, the study contributes to further advance three contemporary theoretical turns in the social sciences: The practice turn, the material turn and the affective turn. Throughout the four articles it is pinpointed how these turns are intertwined through the socio-material entanglements of human and nonhuman entities materializing through the Instagram platform technology. In conclusion, it is suggested that future research would benefit from a more content-based approach in order to provide a deeper and more multifaceted comprehension of present-day feminisms in Scandinavia.