Friday 10th of November 10:15-12.00 At Rum för lärande (HUM.F.221)On the 10th of November, Astri Moksnes Barbala, Doctor in Sociology and research scientist at SINTEF, will be giving a talk on “Willful subjects in the platform society: Feminist activism and user agency on Instagram”.
Abstract
As viral campaigns such as #MeToo have highlighted, social media platforms have in the last decade been vital for mobilizing, broadcasting and performing present-day feminist activism. In Scandinavia, Instagram has been a central platform in this regard and was where many soon-to-be viral #MeToo stories first were posted. Based on my thesis ‘Instagram feminism: Affect, agency and the uses of platform technology’, this talk will center around the topic of feminist user agency in a platformized context and discuss the following questions: How can a «feminist use» of digital platforms such as Instagram open spaces of action to challenge and negotiate with the platform technology? And how can platforms facilitate creative forms of resistance and function as feminist «objects of pleasure» (Ahmed, 2010) that create new networks between people – and between humans and machines? To discuss these questions, I build on understandings of agency as established in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), which emphasizes the flexibility of technology use, combined with feminist affect scholar Sara Ahmed’s concept of willfulness, defined as «…political art, a practical craft that is acquired through involvement in political struggle» (Ahmed, 2014: 134). The data material I draw from comprises interviews with central Scandinavian feminists as well as three years of digital observations on Instagram between 2017 and 2020.
Astri Moksnes Barbala is a research scientist at the Department of Software Engineering, Safety and Security at SINTEF Digital. She wrote her dissertation on “Instagram feminism: Affect, agency and the uses of platform technology” at Nord University.