Influencers are everywhere. At least, it can often feel this way.
The influencer industry has penetrated the mainstream to an unprecedented degree. Growing rapidly after the 2008 financial crash and demonstrating its economic power during the COVID-19 pandemic, it offered creative professionals opportunities to leverage their social and cultural capital into alternative streams of income. Critiques of social media platforms like TikTok evolving into teleshopping networks like QVC, and of influencers becoming little more than advertising models, have been gaining traction. Some commentators are even heralding the end of the influencer era.
We will follow the rise - and assumed fall - of the influencer industry and look at the broader phenomenon of content creators, focusing on a specific contemporary figure: the Tradwife. These women present housework as fulfilling, childcare as a natural female trait, and conservative family values as aspirational. These manicured, apron-wearing, devout, and oftentimes Christian content creators serve as an example of a broader societal drift to the political Right. While media and social scientists, as well as journalists, have been quick to call out the pitfalls of their natalist messaging, it remains unclear how - and if - these influencers actually influence our family and gender values. How can we analyze this phenomenon, critically engage with the hype, and question the platform logics behind our algorithmic social media feeds?
Alongside gaining knowledge and professional distance from the produced content, this seminar will take a practice-oriented approach: together, we will learn how to become researchers. Students will conduct their own case study of a content creator of their choosing.
In the first part of the seminar, we will learn how to develop a research plan, how to find the right method for a research question, and what methodology has to do with this. The second part of the seminar will test, question, and practically engage with these methods. By pairing research methods with a specific object of study, we can ask how to adapt our methods to our era of digital cultures. In the third and final part of the seminar, we will learn what to do with the data collected over the course of the semester.
- Dozent/in: Laura Hille