[ecrea] CFP: Instagram Conference 2018: Studying Instagram Beyond Selfies

The Promotional Cultures Research Group at Middlesex is pleased to 
present: Instagram Conference 2018: Studying Instagram Beyond Selfies


Confirmed keynote speakers: Richard Rogers (University of Amsterdam) and 
Crystal Abidin (Jönköping University/Curtin University)

Date of event: 1 June 2018

Abstract submission deadline: 30 April 2018

Conference website: https://instagramconf.mdx.me.uk/

Full details:

With as many “users as Twitter (310 million), Snapchat 
(100-million-plus) and Pinterest (100 million) combined” (Forbes 2016), 
Instagram has become one of the most important social networking sites 
globally and in the process has transformed the role of photographs and 
photography in visual culture. Designed to exploit the affordances of 
mobile media (Carah 2015) and the immediate and intuitive logic of 
visual communication, Instagram is notably popular among young people 
(18-29 years old) (WordStream 2017).

The phenomenal success of Instagram has not gone unnoticed by brands and 
micro-celebrities that increased their investments and activities on the 
platform - (according to Forbes the current financial value of Instagram 
stays somewhere between $25 billion and $50 billion (Forbers 2016)).

Beyond its popularity and commercial value, Instagram is an environment 
but also a device that offers rich possibilities for that conducting 
social research. Most notably it opens up a number of new pathways for 
exploring socio-cultural processes related to the more mundane, tiny, 
and unseen aspects of people’s /ordinary lives/ (Williams 1989). 
Instagram enables researchers to see through the eyes of social actors, 
and glimpsing into their everyday micro-rituals, private moments, and 
back- as well as front stages – the essential material of sociology and 
anthropology, which were either unavailable or prohibitively expensive 
to explore before at scale (Latour et al. 2012).

*Challenges:*

To date there have been two major challenges that have arisen in 
research on Instagram, concerning both theoretical and methodological 
issues.

 From a theoretical point of view there is a scarcity of empirical 
research conducted through Instagram (if compared, for example, to 
Twitter). In addition, although Instagram has been used for exploring a 
variety of topics (from urban life to grief) (Boy, Uitermark 2015; Gibbs 
et al. 2015), the majority of projects have tended to focus on the 
selfie phenomenon (Manovich 2015; Warfield et al. 2016; Lim 2016). For 
all its zeitgeisty appeal, the selfie is in fact a niche phenomenon in 
the larger context of Instagram genres. Of approximately 40 billion 
photos posted on Instagram so far only 282 million are selfies, just 
0.7% (WordStream 2017). The attention given to selfies is more than 
understandable, given their importance to brands and micro-celebrities 
as promotional tools (Marwick 2015).

However, such users represent just a portion of the whole Instagram 
population. Hence a need for new theories and approaches capable of 
unlocking the full socio-anthropological potential of Instagram, and 
better enabling researchers to undertake the deep exploration of to 
everyday practices through the platform.

 From the methodological perspective the major issue concerning 
Instagram relates to that fact that in 2016 the platform heavily 
curtailed access to it feed API for non-commercial partners, rendering 
it particularly difficult for many academics to access it for research 
purposes (Caliandro, Gandini 2017). This poses serious limitations to 
the possibility of developing sustainable and effective strategies for 
collecting and analysing Instagram data. Again, we see here another 
major concern that is urgent to address and discuss within an 
International Conference.

*Call:*

Given the scenario we sketched above, we are therefore looking for 
contributors who are willing to discuss and address the aforementioned 
challenges.

We invite you to submit proposals for a single paper or a 
pre-constituted panel around a particular theme. Individual abstracts 
should be 350 words or 500 for a full panel proposal. Please also 
include a short bio of no more than 100 words per participant. *Please 
submit abstracts to Alessandro Caliandro, email (A.Caliandro /at/ mdx.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(A.Caliandro /at/ mdx.ac.uk)>  by 30 April 2018.*

Registration will open soon after the 30^th of April. Registration fee: 
£30 (for undergraduate students), £50 (for academics/practitioners).

Possible questions to address (but not limited to these):

*Theoretical Questions:*

/- What do ‘ordinary’ users use Instagram for? /

/- Subversive uses of selfies on Instagram/

-/Studying every day practices and rituals on Instagram/

/- Identity work on Instagram/

/- Brands on Instagram: how do brands relate to consumers on Instagram?/

/- Brands on Instagram: how do consumers relate to brands on Instagram? /

/- Instagram as a tool for PR, Advertising, and Marketing research/

/­/- /Children and/or Teenagers on Instagram /

/- Which kind of social formations does Instagram afford? Communities? 
Publics? Crowds? /

/- How is affective labour performed on Instagram? Which are the best 
strategies to capture and measure it?/

/- How can we study creative work through Instagram? /

/- How is creative work performed on Instagram? /

/- How does creativity work on Instagram?/

/- How is arts consumption influenced by Instagram? /

/- How do artists use Instagram? /

/- How is the concept of artistic value affected by Instagram? /

*Methodological Questions:***

/- Is still possible to explore Instagram without public APIs? And if so 
how? /

/- Innovative Instagram research methods that have gone beyond the API 
roadblock/

/- Content analysis on Instagram between traditional and natively 
digital approaches: which works better? Is it possible and advantageous 
to combine the two? How? /

/- Network analysis on Instagram: is network analysis a suitable 
approach for studying Instagram? What are the best strategies? /

/- Automated visual analysis: challenges, possibilities, and limitations /

/- Instagram Algorithms: how do they work? How do they shape the user 
experience? How do they shape the practices of researchers? Which are 
the best strategies for studying and understating Instagram algorithms? /

/- Data visualisation on Instagram: innovative approaches/

/- Big Data analysis on Instagram: challenges, possibilities, and 
limitations /

/- Studying Instagram via mobile devices/

/- How can we study Instagram via its new features, that is, Instagram 
stories and carousel? /

/- How can we study the urban space using Instagram?/

/- Can we study politics via Instagram? /

/- Is Instagram a good environment for studying the gig economy? /


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