Influencer Research: Age, Body, and Gender in Contemporary Digital Culture

International research seminar.

Iris Apfel at MIFF. Photo: Wikimedia Commons and Flick (https://www.flickr.com/photos/55155430@N03/16733360409/)
Iris Apfel at Miami Film Festival. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Flickr

Influencers are a powerful factor in digital media culture because they reveal the zeitgeist, perpetuate stereotypes, they are role models and can challenge representations of age, body, and gender in a cultural and political context. We want to reflect on what kind of impact they are wielding in contemporary society and culture when communicating personal and often intimate as well as cultural and political issues. We aim to discuss how influencer research unfolds today and how influencers represent, perform, and negotiate gender, body and age on social media platforms and how they address and challenge political and cultural issues in different ways. 

The influencer is ‘always on’ and part of our everyday lives, but also always in dialogue with an engaged audience, online and offline, oftentimes challenging their status as role models, aspirational figures, lifestyle guides or political idols on social media platforms. In this seminar we explore issues of identity, performance, and engagement, with focus on influencers and/or their audiences. What are the implications for an authentic and intimate online performance in today’s digital culture considering these three aspects of age, body, and gender.

The seminar is open for registered participants only due to limited capacity: Please contact: h.h.haastrup@hum.ku.dk.

Programme

9:00 - 9:30 Welcome (Helle Kannik Haastrup, University of Copenhagen & Katrine Sommer Boysen, University of Copenhagen)

Introduction to Influencer Research: Age, Body and Gender in Contemporary Digital Culture (Helle Kannik Haastrup)
9:30 - 10:30
Bodies and power
  • Lene Bull Christiansen (Roskilde University): Negotiating positions in the Danish fat positive movement - a micro-influencer's struggle to fit in. 
  • Carsten Stage (University of Aarhus): ”Collaborating with Chronic Influencers - Powerlessness and Epistemic Injustice in Illness Communities on Instagram”
10:30 - 10:45 Break
10:45 - 12:15
Bodies, age and gender
  • Guilherme Giolo Rego (Erasmus University Rotterdam): Sacred Feminines and Prosperity Covenants: The Cultivation of Femininity as Reactionary Self-Help on Instagram.
  • Katrine Sommer Boysen (University of Copenhagen): “Communicate, educate, lubricate!” Naomi Watts’ celebrity entanglement of feminism, midlife and menopause on Instagram
  • Stinne Krogager (Aalborg University): Negotiating Masculinity and Authenticity in Social Media Communication of Green Food Brands 
12:15 - 13:15 Lunch (for delegates only)
13:15 - 14:45 Keynote speaker: Rosalind Gill Professor of Inequalities in Media, Culture and Creative Industries (Goldsmith College London): ‘We are all influencers now’: Young women and the work of being social.
14:45 - 15:00 Break
15:00 - 16:30
Authenticities of influencing
  • Eva Frijns (University of Copenhagen): Good influencer or bad citizen? An analysis of the clash between influencer logic and welfare state values in the Cathrine Wichmand scandal.
  • Charlotte Fabricius (University of Southern Denmark): ’Would an influencer do this?’ Insta-cartoonists negotiating authenticity.
  • Louise Yung (University of Roskilde): Tears and body insecurities: The ‘authentic’ influencer as change-maker?
16:30 - 17:00 Reception with bubbles (only for delegates)