Abstract
This research focuses on participatory photography and socially engaged photography and their intersection with the networked image. Through online workshops with a group of young women not in full-time education or employment, the research explores their experiences and interactions with social media, their current relationships to work and ultimately how this informs their sense of self. New types of youthful femininity and representations of women can be identified in the postfeminist digital mediascape aimed primarily at young women. Under digital neoliberalism, image representations and re-enacted self-representations can be related to systems of profit-making where gendered identities, amongst others, intersect with socioeconomic-based statuses. One of the defining features of social media platforms has become data algorithms and the promise of self-realisation, usually remaining unpaid, by engaging in creative digital labour and self-representation as a commodity for young women. In addition, young women’s potential for precarity under neoliberalism is exacerbated by significantly higher unemployment rates, a gender pay gap and disproportionately higher ratios of hidden labour. In addition to this, the research explores the notion of visual literacy, in the context of participatory photography, through group discussion, reflection and image-making. On the one hand, as a way, of exploring and deconstructing their performed identities through image production and interaction on social media and on another, as a way of critically constructing new visual narratives of their experiences and barriers to employment, thus utilising the same potential of the practice and process of self-representation and photography to inform and transform.
Presenters
Kallina BrailsfordPhD Candidate and HPL, Visual Communication, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Participatory Photography, The Networked Image, Representation of Young Women, Self-representation
