[Commlist] Call for papers: Nordic Journal of Media Studies, Vol. 7 (2025). Title: Influencers: Entertainment, Politics, and Strategic Online Culture

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*Call for papers: /Nordic Journal of Media Studies/, Vol. 7 (2025)*

**

*Title: Influencers: Entertainment, Politics, and Strategic Online Culture *

*Editors:*

  * Anne Jerslev (University of Copenhagen): (jerslev /at/ hum.ku.dk)
  * Mette Mortensen (University of Copenhagen): (metmort /at/ hum.ku.dk)

*Important dates:*

Deadline for extended abstracts: 3 April 2024

Deadline for full submissions: 1 September 2024

Peer review: October 2023–December 2024

Expected publication: Spring 2025

*Background and aim*

Influencers wield significant social, political, and economic influence, 
as they have transformed from micro celebrities (Senft, 2008; Jerslev, 
2016) and other Internet celebrities from the 2000s, operating at the 
intersections of authenticity and performance, creativity and commerce. 
Influencers navigate the realms of everyday life, entertainment, and 
politics, cutting across mainstream cultures and subcultures, the 
national, the Nordic, and the international (see, e.g., Abidin et al., 
2020). Over the past decade, influencers have taken a central stage on 
YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media, on which they “make 
a living from being celebrities native to and on the Internet” (Abidin, 
2018: 1). In their pursuit of sustained visibility, influencers 
construct relatable narratives and project identities and sets of values 
that are recognisable and desirable to followers. Most influencers adopt 
commercial marketing strategies; they are managed by influencer agencies 
and create themselves as brands by performing scenes from their 
relatably ordinary or (more or less) admirably extraordinary lives. Some 
influencers promote commodity goods to monetise on these self-branding 
strategies (Jerslev & Mortensen, 2023: 336), or they receive 
compensation from social media networks such as YouTube relative to the 
number of likes and followers they generate. Meanwhile, other 
influencers are driven by political objectives, functioning primarily as 
content creators and using their platform visibility to gain political 
impact (Lewis, 2020; Riedl et al., 2023). Influencers strategically 
appeal to specific target audiences defined by demographics such as age, 
life phase, gender, race, nationality, and more, or by shared interests 
in areas like gaming, fashion, financial investments, lifestyle, health, 
beauty, environment, sports, home handicraft, family life, food, pets, 
religion, and so forth.

Influencers cover a great span: Far-right female influencers project 
traditional family values as a form of empowerment and agency (Askanius, 
2022) or advocate anti-establishment in the context of the Nordic 
welfare state (Mortensen & Kristensen, 2023). Meanwhile, on the other 
end of the spectrum, feminist influencers advocate pro-choice and other 
women’s rights. Some influencers actively contribute to shaping 
narratives and discourses on wars by reporting from their daily life in 
conflict zones or propagate political opinions and calls for action. 
Others, like migrants, document their fearful journey towards a distant 
goal (Turkewitz, 2023). Others again use their popular cultural persona 
to promote issues related to the environment and sustainability 
(Schmuck, 2021). And many influencers perform catchy dances or dead-pan, 
comical scenes for younger audiences, who consume entertainment and 
information largely driven by promotional and commercial interests, but 
are, perhaps, also able to seek out role models fine-tuned to the 
formation of their own identities.

With this issue of /Nordic Journal of Media Studies/, we invite scholars 
to explore the following questions: How can we understand and measure 
the social, cultural, economical, and political power and impact exerted 
on and by followers? What does it mean to “follow” an influencer? What 
do online relationships and personal affective attachments to 
influencers mean to people in their everyday lives? Is it possible to be 
an influencer and, for example, an activist simultaneously in a digital 
economy guided by algorithmic logics (cf. Scharff 2023)? Which 
narratives of self are constructed by different influencer profiles?

Themes include but are not limited to the following:

  * Influencers and performance of values in relation to, e.g., gender,
    politics, culture, etc.
  * Influencer economies and digital labor
  * Influencers and marketing – business models, influencer agencies,
    self-branding strategies
  * Influencers and regulation, e.g., in a Nordic context
  * Influencer culture and gender
  * Children and TikTok – patterns of consumption, influencers as role
    models
  * Influencers as sources of news and information, e.g., in the context
    of Nordic public service media
  * Influencers and religion, e.g., in relation to worship and authority
  * Influencers, politics, and politicians
  * Influencers and cross-media communication (media, channels, genres)
  * Influencers and followers – forms of communication, parasocial
    interaction, and affect
  * Influencers, celebrity, and fandom
  * Influencers and the construction and commodification of authenticity
  * Influencer engagement and engagement measurement
  * Methodological approaches to the analysis of influencer accounts and
    following

We welcome theoretical, empirical, analytical contributions, and so on, 
just as we encourage interdisciplinary work and collaborative research 
produced with non-academic partners.

*Literature*

Abidin, C. (2018). /Internet celebrity:/ /Understanding fame online. 
/Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/9781787560765

Abidin, C., Steenbjerg Hansen, K, Hogsnes, M., Newlands, G., Nielsen, M. 
L., Nielsen, L. Y., & Sihvonen, T. (2020). A review of formal and 
informal regulations in the Nordic influencer industry. /Nordic Journal 
of Media Studies/, /2/(1), 71–83. https://doi.org/10.2478/njms-2020-0007

Askanius, T. (2022). Women in the Nordic resistance movement//and their 
online media practices: Between internalised misogyny and embedded 
feminism. /Feminist Media Studies/, /22/(7), 1763–1780. 
https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1916772

Jerslev, A. (2016). In the time of the microcelebrity: Celebrification 
and the YouTuber Zoella. /International Journal of Communication/, /10/, 
5233–5251. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/5078

Jerslev, A., & Mortensen, M. (2023). Celebrity news online: Changing 
media, actors, and stories. In S. Alle (Ed.), /The Routledge companion 
to news and journalism/ (pp. 334–342). Routledge. 
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003174790

Lewis, R. (2020). “This is what the news won’t show you”: YouTube 
creators and the reactionary politics of micro celebrity. /Television & 
New Media/, /21/(2), 201–217. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419879919

Mortensen, M., & Kristensen, N. N. (2023). At the boundaries of 
authority and authoritarianism in the welfare state: News coverage of 
alt. health influencers during the Covid-19 pandemic. /Javnost – The 
Public/, /30/(1), 35–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2023.2168442

Riedl, M. J., Lukito, J., & Woolley, S. C. (2023). Political influencers 
on social media: An introduction. /Social Media + Society/,/9/(2)/. 
/https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231177938

Scharff, C. (2023). Are we all influencers now? Feminist activists 
discuss the distinction between being an activist and an influencer. 
/Feminist Theory/. OnlineFirst. https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001231201062

Schmuck, D. (2021). Social media influencers and environmental 
communication. In B. Takahashi, J. Metag, J. Thaker, & S. E. Comfort 
(Eds.), /The handbook of international trends in environmental 
communication /(pp. 373–387). Routledge. 
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367275204

Senft, T. (2008). /Camgirls: Celebrity and community in the age of 
social networks. /Peter Lang.

Turkewitz, J. (2023, December 20). Live from the jungle: Migrants become 
influencers on social media. /New York Times/. 
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/20/world/americas/migrants-tiktok-darien-gap.html# 


**

*Procedure* 

Those with an interest in contributing should write an extended abstract 
(max. 750 words) where the main theme (or argument) of the 
intended article is described. The abstract should contain the 
preliminary title, five keywords, and a rationale for how 
the article fits within the overall aim of the issue. 

Send your extended abstract to Mette Mortensen ((metmort /at/ hum.ku.dk)) and 
Anne Jerslev ((jerslev /at/ hum.ku.dk)) by 3 April 2024. 

Scholars invited to submit a full manuscript (6,000–8,000 words) will be 
notified by e-mail after the extended abstracts have been 
assessed. All submissions should be original works and must not be under 
consideration by other publishers. All submissions are submitted to 
Similarity Check – a Crossref service utilising iThenticate text 
comparison software to detect text-recycling or plagiarism. 

  * Visit Crossref to learn more about Similarity Check 
    <https://www.crossref.org/services/similarity-check/>

 

After the initial submission and review process, manuscripts that are 
accepted for publication must adhere to our guidelines upon 
final manuscript delivery. You may choose to use our templates to assist 
you in correctly formatting your manuscript. 

  * Download a manuscript template (docx, 32 kB) 

<https://www.nordicom.gu.se/sites/default/files/nyheter-dokument/nordicom-manuscript-template-2023_1.docx>
  * Read the full instructions for authors 

<https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/publications/publish-with-nordicom/instructions-authors>

 

*About /Nordic Journal of Media Studies/*

/Nordic Journal of Media Studies/ is a peer-reviewed international 
publication dedicated to media research. The journal is a meeting place 
for Nordic, European, and global perspectives on media studies. It is is 
a thematic digital-only journal published once a year. The editors 
stress the importance of innovative and interdisciplinary research, and 
welcome contributions on both contemporary developments and historical 
topics.

  * Read the aims & scope of NJMS

<https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/publications/nordic-journal-media-studies>

*About the publisher* 

Nordicom is a centre for Nordic media research at the University of 
Gothenburg, supported by the Nordic Council of 
Ministers. Nordicom publishes all works under a Creative Commons 
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) 
licence, which allows for non-commercial, non-derivative types 
of reuse and sharing with proper attribution. All works are published 
Open Access and are available to read free of charge and without 
requirement for registration. There are no article processing charges 
for authors, and authors retain copyright. 

  * Read our editorial policies 

<https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/publications/publish-with-nordicom/editorial-policies>

  * Visit Creative Commons to learn more about our CC licence 
    <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode>

Link to the call on Nordicom’s website: 
https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/latest/news/call-papers-influencers-entertainment-politics-and-strategic-online-culture 
<https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/latest/news/call-papers-influencers-entertainment-politics-and-strategic-online-culture>

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