REGISTRATION: https://auws.au.dk/negotiationofidentityinsocialmedia

Time: Oct 11-14, 2016 (Just after the AoIR conference in Berlin)
Place: Aarhus University and DOKK 1,  Aarhus, Denmark
Online: We’ll post an online participation option soon. Check back!

Instructors:
Nancy Baym (Microsoft Research New England and MIT);
Annette Markham (Aarhus University);
Katrin Tiidenberg (Aarhus University and Tallinn University).

Description: This course introduces participants to contemporary concepts for studying how self, identity, and contexts are negotiated through interactive processes involving visuality, relationality, and emotionality. The metaphor of labor is used to highlight how these practices are constrained and enabled by economic rationalities, affordances of digital technologies, and contemporary norms around building identity through social media.

1. Emotional Labor was developed as a sociological concept to understand certain workplace practices. This theory usefully addresses how, within an economic framework of producing the self as a ‘brand’ via social media, a labor model of controlled emotionality is invoked. This critical stance toward identity performance is a useful lens for studying how people perform and negotiate identity in social media contexts.

2. Relational labor, a term developed by Nancy Baym to illustrate how performers build ongoing connections with disparate audiences, is an extension of emotional labor. This concept helps us consider the neoliberal frames within which our identity practices are caught, when using social media platforms geared toward audience building, and how the issues raised by emotional labor play out when moved from particular interactions to the unending connectivity social media demand.

3. Visual labor is a concept that, like the previous two, can help researchers consider issues and practices around the digitally saturated self as a product of a visual economy.

Who can attend? Course is appropriate for PhD students, postdocs, and early career researchers in media studies, information studies, anthropology, sociology, political science, and other fields addressing social media practices or negotiation of identity. No prerequisite knowledge is necessary.

Readings:

Emotional labor:

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tracy, J. S. (2000). Becoming a character for commerce: emotion labor, self-subordination, and discursive construction of identity in a total institution. Management Communication Quarterly, 14(1), 90–128.
Kang, M. (2003). The managed hand: the commercialization of bodies and emotions in Korean immigrant-owned nail salons. Gender and Society, 17(6), 820–839.

Relational labor:

Baym, N. K. (2012). Fans or friends?: seeing social media audiences as musicians do. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 9(2), 286–316.
Baym, N. K. (2014). Connect with your audience! the relational labor of connection. The Communication Review, 18(1), 14-22.

Bounded rationality/bounded emotionality:

Mumby, D. K., & Putnam, L. L. (1992). The politics of emotion: a feminist reading of bounded rationality. The Academy of Management Review, 17(3), 465–486.

Interpersonal relations:

Baxter, L. A., & Montgomery, B. M. (1996). Chapter 1 “Thinking dialectically about communication in personal relationships.” In Relating: dialogues and dialectics. New York: The Guilford Press.

Identity:

Gergen, K. (2000). Chapter “Truth in trouble” and chapter “From self to relationship.“  In The saturated self: dilemmas of identity in contemporary life (pp. 81 –110). New York: Basic Books.
Goffman, E. (1966) Chapter “Interpretations”. In Behavior in public places (pp. 193–242). New York: The Free Press.
Goffman, E. (1981). Footing. In Forms of talk (pp. 124–159). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (we assume that participants have read Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life).
Markham, A. (2013). The dramaturgy of digital experience. In C. Edgley (Ed.), The drama of social life: a dramaturgical handbook (pp. 279–293). Farnham: Ashgate.

Visuality:

Tiidenberg, K, & Gomez Cruz, E. (2015). Selfies, image and the re-making of the body. Body & Society, 1–26.
Abidin, C. (2016). “Aren’t these just young, rich women doing vain things online?”: influencer selfies as subversive frivolity. Social Media + Society, 2(2), 1–17.

Preliminary schedule:

Tuesday, October 11, 2016:
09:30-12:00: Introduction to the course and discussion
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch
13:00 – 14:30: Public Lecture by Annette Markham on Emotional Labor

Casual (self funded) dinner with the seminar participants, location TBA

Wednesday, October 12, 2016:
09:30 – 12:00: Discuss emotional labor (previous day’s lecture plus texts)
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch
13:00 – 14:30 Public Lecture by Nancy Baym on Relational Labor
15:00-16:30: QTC Wednesdays at the DLRC (Digital Living Research Commons). Informal conversation with Nancy Baym

Dinner with Media Studies and Information Studies faculty: Location TBA

Thursday, October 13, 2016:
9:30- 12:00: Discuss relational labor (previous day’s lecture plus texts)
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch
13:00 – 14:30 Public Lecture by Katrin Tiidenberg on Embodiment and Visual Labor
15:00-16:00 Discussion of issues, ethics, and concerns
16:00-17:00 wrap-up and evaluation

Organized dinner with participants, location TBA