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[Commlist] cfp: Gendered cultures in platform economies: entertainment, expertise and online selfhood
Mon May 08 10:24:42 GMT 2023
CALL FOR PAPERS
GENDERED CULTURES IN PLATFORM ECONOMIES: ENTERTAINMENT, EXPERTISE AND
ONLINE SELFHOOD
20th - 21st November 2023
ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa Avenida das Forças Armadas,
1649-026 Lisbon, Portugal
There is a hopeful narrative running through the scholarship around
media and communication studies, arguing that the internet and social
media are means of enhancing political and civic participation. While to
a certain extent this is the case, at least in the earlier internet
days, the rise of gigantic, privately owned, digital platforms as major
sites for regulating and disciplining contemporary production,
consumption, work and play further gestures towards a global
entertainification of online cultures. Looking, for instance, at the
most popular influencers in Italian media platforms (Miconi, 2023), we
can observe a contrast with recent trends in Internet studies arguing
that social media play a key role in mobilizing people in civic and
wider political terms (e.g., Vaccari & Valeriani 2021). Coaching advice,
parodies, food, fashion and sports seem to be overwhelmingly capturing
both the imaginary and the production and consumption cultures of the
main media platforms at the expense for example, of news and political
debate. As data infrastructures that capitalize on the user’s time,
labour and attention (Poell, Nieborg, Duffy, 2022), platforms only care
about keeping the user in their space; in this regard, the circulation
of online entertainment is more appealing than civic debates.
This conference looks at the gendered dimensions of platform economies
focusing specifically on how entertainment interweaves with expertise in
the construction of contemporary femininities and masculinities.
Platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook enable a
seemingly democratization of expertise, as anyone could become an expert
in any matter possible among niche communities, ranging from wine
tasters, perfume specialists, life coaches, fitness trainers, dieticians
and health consultants to sex therapists, pick up artists, mindfulness
gurus, city guides and gastronomic bloggers. In this context, popular
feminism intertwines with popular misogyny as online media give
visibility to emancipatory discourses while simultaneously limit the
effectiveness of collective action (Banet-Weiser, 2018).
The entertainification of expert knowledge in the 2000s begins with the
proliferation of television talent shows, including song, fashion and
cooking contests, that brought to the public realm the creative
celebrity-expert as an arbiter of good taste. The occupation of cooking,
to take one example, from being a behind the scenes, domestic, unpaid,
free and feminine labour became, in the form of the celebrity chef, a
creative, if not artistic, genius-male endeavor that can potentially
lead to stardom. These chefs are presented as having their own unique
artistic vision, cosmopolitan identities and cool instagrammable
personas. To the abundance of visible professional experts, we can add
the widespread micro-expertise of amateurs found online and offline on
trivial or nontrivial matters, from how to raise a child to how to grow
cactuses.
Aspirational labour and aspirational consumption in media platforms has
a strong gendered dimension. Erin Duffy (2017) argues that the
aspirational (unpaid) labour of creative entrepreneurs in media
platforms is primarily performed by women while aspirational (curated)
consumption creates particular fantasies of femininity, masculinity,
queerness and other gender identities. At the same time, while platforms
can offer visibility to progressive gender causes in public debate, they
can instigate a relation of ‘cruel optimism’ vis-a-vis ideal gender
constructions, to use Laurent Berlant’s term, as the latter becomes a
desirable object which at the same time creates anxieties and
frustration by being unrealizable (2012). The exposure of gendered and
classed selves to expert entertainment content, from eating food of
celebrity chefs to training with fitness gurus, perpetuates a feeling of
self-inferiority against gender and class success.
This conference explores gender in the context of expert entertainment
cultures in platform economics. We look for 250-word abstracts in the
following themes:
• Optimizing gender and sexuality
• Optimizing womanhood and motherhood
• Life coaches, self-help gurus and self-curating
• Manosphere, pick up artists and new masculinities
• Prank videos and sexism
• Queer identities between entrepreneurialism and empowerment
• ‘How-to-Succeed’ guides and cultures
• Growing plants and pets
• The performance of gender in animal videos (cuteness/ strength)
• Confidence culture and the psy-industries
• Feel-good economy, therapeutic cultures and neo-spiritualism
• The gendered self as a project and work of art
• Fitness, beauty and the body
• Discipline and self-restraint
• Amateur and professional labour
• Individualized gendered practices Vs. collective mobilisation
The Advisory Committee is composed by:
• Tonny Krijnen (Erasmus University)
• Joke Hermes (Inholland University)
• Sander De Ridder (Ghent University)
• Sofia Caldeira (Lusófona University)
• Cila Willem (Universitat Rovira i Virgil)
• Maria Helena Santos (CIS, ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute)
• Carla Cerqueira (Lusófona University)
The Organising Committee is composed by:
• Panos Kompatsiaris (IULM)
• Claudia Alvares (CIES, ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute)
• Andrea Miconi (IULM)
• Sofie Van Bauwel (Ghent University)
TIMELINE
9 June 2023 Abstract submission deadline
14 July 2023 Acceptance/Rejection notification
8 September 2023 Registration to the conference
20-21 November 2023 Conference in Lisbon
To submit your abstract, please send an email to: (conference /at/ eumeplat.eu)
Further details and updated information are available here:
https://www.eumeplat.eu/events/2023lisbonconference/
***
About the project
EUMEPLAT – European Media Platforms: assessing positive and negative
externalities for European culture is a Research and Innovation project
funded under the Horizon 2020 Programme, aiming at investigating the
role of media platforms in fostering or dismantling European identity.
Drawing on the assumption that European dimension has rarely been
dominant in media history and focusing on the “platformization” process
and its positive and negative externalities, the main research question
is whether or not the new platforms are making European culture more
European.
Through a multidisciplinary approach and the analysis of relevant
indicators related to the production and consumption of media contents
and to the representation of sensitive issues
– namely gender and migration – the research team looks for similarities
and specificities on a national, regional and European level. The data
and results collected are also investigated to come out with
recommendations addressed to the policy-makers on the evolution of the
European media landscapes.
The project runs from 1st March 2021 to 29th February 2024 and is
carried out by 12 partners from 10 countries: Libera Università di
Lingue e Comunicazione (Italy) // coordinator; Leibniz- Institut für
Medienforschung | Hans-Bredow Institut (Germany); New Bulgarian
University (Bulgaria); UNIMED – Unione delle Università del Mediterraneo
(Italy); Fundacio per a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain);
Universiteit Gent (Belgium); Bilkent Universitesi Vakif (Turkey);
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece); Iscte –
Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (Portugal); Università Ca’ Foscari
Venezia (Italy); Foreningen IKED (Sweden); Univerzita Karlova (Czech
Republic).
For more information, please visit the project website at
https://www.eumeplat.eu/. The main publications produced in the
framework of the project are available in the EUMEPLAT Community on
Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/communities/eumeplat/
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