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This project aims to analyze women entrepreneurs' online subjectivity, informed by success imaginaries and historically situated gender regimes. By an ethnography of women's online practices and dream-selling events, I explore how online aspirations shape new subjectivities amid economic precarity.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to investigate the case of Iranian women’s online home-based businesses as a response to the condition of inclusion and exclusion following the Islamic Revolution. While the rise of online entrepreneurship is considered as the result of the neoliberal economies, close anthropological attention to the phenomena points to a variety of value regimes that account for both the expansion of women’s online businesses and their struggles. This includes the link between women’s online entrepreneurship and their imaginations of success on social media. To delve into entrepreneurial aspirations for economic inclusion, I conducted a digital ethnography of women’s self-presentation on Instagram. I also participated and observed women entrepreneurs as they move from home as a workspace to dream-selling events and conferences, in which action plans and strategies for becoming a successful entrepreneur is discussed. Adopting a gendered approach to understanding what women aspire to, and how they strive to create a plan of action to realize these aspirations, this project aims to analyze women’s labor on social media, shaped by the platform affordances, success imaginaries, and historically situated gender regimes. Examining the various gender regimes that are affecting Iranian women’s entrepreneurial labor, this paper seeks to discuss the economic and social relations that come together on social media to induce new strategies for fulfilling the belated aspirations. How do digitally mediated success narratives cultivate particular hopeful lifeworlds and subjectivities? How do women negotiate the gap between platform-induced aspirations and the constraints of informality, economic precarity, and gendered exclusion?

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This paper examines how rurality is performed as an aspirational identity on Douyin. Drawing on digital ethnography, it shows how pastoral aesthetics, authenticity narratives, and everyday labor produce visibility, celebrity, and commercial success, blurring performance and becoming.

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This paper examines how rurality is strategically performed and cultivated as an aspirational identity within China’s short-video platform Douyin. Focusing on influencers who leverage the platform’s “rural” channel, it explores how creators gain visibility, followers, and eventually celebrity status and commercial opportunities through livestream e-commerce. Drawing on digital ethnography and content analysis of rural lifestyle creators, the study analyzes how pastoral aesthetics, moral narratives of authenticity, and affective rhythms of everyday labor are mobilized to produce aspirational selves that resonate with both urban nostalgia and platform logics.

Rather than treating rurality as a fixed background or inherited identity, this paper conceptualizes it as an aspirational project—one that is actively (per)formed through carefully curated visual styles, speech patterns, labor practices, and family relations. These creators craft a version of “the good rural life” that combines simplicity, diligence, and moral virtue with entrepreneurial ambition and platform-savvy self-branding. In doing so, they blur the boundary between lived rural experience and staged performance, revealing how influencer becoming involves continuous negotiation between authenticity, visibility, and monetization.

The paper further shows how platform infrastructures, including algorithmic categorization and monetization mechanisms, shape aspirational rural performances. While the rural channel promises transformation and upward mobility, such opportunities remain unevenly realized, producing new tensions between vulnerability and value. By foregrounding rurality as a digitally mediated aspirational identity, this study contributes to broader debates on aspiration, self-making, and becoming in platformized social worlds.

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This paper presents an ethnographic investigation of the creation and deployment of AI influencers, foregrounding how the automation of digital aspirational labor is transforming the creator economy on social media and further entrenching gendered tropes.

Paper long abstract

Influencers and the “creator economy” they are enmeshed in have long been at the center of discussions around digital aspirational labor. The recent proliferation of AI-generated content and personas online, however, is rapidly shifting the scale of the creator economy and the experience of social media, which is becoming less oriented around sociality and more around entertainment. Sharing findings from ethnographic interviews and participant observation on Instagram and TikTok, this paper explores the emerging phenomenon of AI influencers. Encompassing AI-generated doubles of human creators, entirely fictional avatars, and various shades of gray in between, AI influencers partially automate the aspirational labor of self-presentation and parasocial connection. As such, they seemingly unsettle the authenticity paradigm, one of the core logics of the Web 2.0 era, which signifies the desire for genuine experiences and emotions outside the purview of consumer culture even while entrenching a view of the self as enterprise (Banet-Weiser 2012). Rather than a complete departure from this earlier logic of social media, the paper shows how AI influencers are perceived as authentic not in the sense of being real but in terms of affective plausibility, vibe, and resonance, a shift that may signal the creator economy is giving way to a character economy driven by forms of post-authentic storytelling. Taking shape through the auspices of LLMs, social media affordances, and human users, such post-authentic storytelling often amplifies the gendered dimensions of digital aspirational labor, along with the objectification and control of female bodies and sexuality.

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Analyzing the posts, over five years, by a member of the “Non-Working Club” on Chinese social media Douban, this paper explores how aspirations for a “good enough life” lived outside of employment are articulated and sustained against ambivalence, through an aesthetics of slowness and simplicity.

Paper long abstract

In late capitalist and late socialist societies alike, the refusal of work has increasingly become one of the grounds through which normative aspirations for “the good life” get contested, giving rise to redefinitions of life, work, and self-making. In contemporary China, like elsewhere, digital spaces have been one of the sites through which such transformations have been enacted on an everyday basis, as many quit their jobs to “live in the present.” Contributing to a recent literature on expressions of anti-work and post-resignation accounts on digital platforms, this paper draws on an archive of posts on Chinese social media Douban, to examine the articulation, in written and visual form, of “non-working” lives and selves as desirable modes of being. Analyzing the public, digitally-mediated enactment of “non-working days” by one singular Douban female user spanning five years (2021-2025), I ask how narrating experienced idle time works to cultivate and sustain detachment from normative imperatives, against the ambivalence of subjectivity. In particular, the paper attends to the aesthetics of slowness and simplicity of these online diaries, as they rework normative views of “the good life” into that of the “good enough life,” and constitute an affective public. I will interrogate the role of this online “sociality of detachment” in moments of felt tension between the aspiration to make one’s own time and an occasionally arising sense of emptiness, where the iteration of words and images attract the expression of “envy” (xianmu) as a reaffirmation of life lived to its own (un)productive rhythm.

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This paper examines how female Muslim Instagram influencers in Kyrgyzstan shape religious aspiration, ethical selfhood, and processes of subject formation, showing how digital practices mediate performance and the pursuit of new ways of being a “good Muslim”.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how processes of performance and becoming are mediated through digital religious practices by female Muslim influencers on Instagram in Kyrgyzstan. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Islam experienced a significant revival across Central Asia, unfolding in a context shaped by decades of Soviet atheism and enduring gaps in religious knowledge. In this setting, the Internet and social media platforms have emerged as central sites for accessing Islamic knowledge and reshaping religious engagement.

Focusing on young female religious influencers, the paper explores how Islamic lifestyles are enacted through everyday digital practices that emphasize ethical selfhood, locally embedded notions of personhood, and aspirations for a “good life”. These aspirations shape both the production and reception of religious content, highlighting the relational nature of digital religious engagement.

The analysis draws on ethnographic research conducted as part of the project “Social Media and Religious Engagement among Muslim Youth in Kyrgyzstan”. Combining offline and virtual ethnography, a survey among Muslim youth in Bishkek, and in-depth interviews with female religious influencers, the study shows how digital performances enable young Muslims to imagine and pursue new lived possibilities of being “a good Muslim”. By highlighting aspiration, embodiment, and everyday practice, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on religion, digitality, and subject formation in the understudied context of post-Soviet Central Asia.

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This paper explores how Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong use digital spaces to share experiences of polarisation, build sisterhood networks, and transform vulnerability into collective resilience and empowerment through online interaction.

Paper long abstract

Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong experience multiple forms of vulnerability, both in liberal and ontological terms, which profoundly shape their everyday lives and social relations. These vulnerabilities are reflected and intensified in the digital spaces they inhabit, which become crucial sites where polarisation is narrated, discussed, and collectively reworked.

Drawing on participant observation in Hong Kong (repeated stays between 1998 and 2013) and digital ethnography conducted from 2019 to the present, and guided by an ethical framework based on informed consent, privacy protection, and respect for socio-cultural contexts, this paper examines how these workers use online interactions to navigate and address such vulnerabilities.

Within digital spaces, polarisation between workers and employing families emerges forcefully, manifesting in experiences of abuse, exclusion, as well as intimacy and well-being. The sharing of these experiences fosters identity-based networks grounded in a strong sense of sisterhood, providing emotional support and strengthening communal ties. Online platforms thus become arenas in which oppositions are not only reproduced but also actively challenged, enabling the collective development of strategies of response. In this sense, the digital realm emerges as a generative space in which polarisation is transformed into a resource for empowerment, resilience, and agency.

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This paper examines the role of social media as a labour platform and how digital performances are converted into political subjectivities.

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This work examines how social media, particularly Instagram, has reshaped the cleaning market in Brazil and the Philippines, giving rise to a new career path: the Personal Cleaner. Through online courses, domestic workers learn to use the platform as a sales tool, repositioning their professional identity and claiming dignity for their work. In this process, they present themselves as entrepreneurs, treating their profiles as “business headquarters”. Based on seven months of ethnographic research in Rio de Janeiro, this study examines how these entrepreneurial practices perpetuate a narrative of social mobility rooted in individual effort and competition, often accompanied by criticism of peers deemed unambitious (“poverty mindset”). This reorganisation of domestic work through social media implies changes in the political subjectivities of workers, who begin to operate in an environment driven by the attention economy and highly individualised. The visual aspect of the platform is also important in this process, as it allows the comparison of services and professionals, increasing competitiveness and comparison among them. This article argues that, while this reconfiguration opens new forms of agency, it also reveals a political shift that weakens collective aspirations and solidarity among domestic workers.

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How do digital mediation reshapes performance, becoming, and belonging for young women? Based on a year-long ethnography of art museums and the lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu in urban China, this paper explores the hybrid online-offline aspirational self-making and the underlying fractures.

Paper long abstract

In China, the rise of art museums coincides with the proliferation of lifestyle-sharing platforms like Xiaohongshu (RED). For young, urban women navigating new regimes of cultural distinction and middle-class aspiration, museum-going has evolved into a digitally mediated project of self-curation.

Drawing on a year-long ethnography, I conceptualise the museum visit as a rehearsal of the self, where visitors engage in performative acts of staging and photography to transform embodied experiences into visual narratives of an 'extra-ordinary' self.

This performance is only completed through aspirational labour- the post-visit curation of photos and captions. Central to this is fenweigan (氛围感, sense of atmosphere), which I frame as a digitally mediated affect and a form of aesthetic capital. Through fenweigan, visitors translate messy, often confusing encounters into a flattened, ‘at-ease’ visual grammar. This aesthetic labour manages the dissonance between the uncertainty felt in physical space and the desire for belonging in digital space.

However, a fracture emerges as the 'platform gaze' disciplines this creativity into a homogenised language. A tension exists between the desire for an ‘authentic’ self and the necessity of conforming to standardised aesthetics for algorithmic visibility. This reveals a capitalist logic where personal aspiration is flattened into quantifiable, collective performance that is highly gendered and classed.

Ultimately, becoming ourselves in the digital age is a hybrid loop of performance and mediation. By foregrounding fenweigan as an ethnographic concept, this paper contributes to debates on aspiration, platformed subjectivity, and the gendered aesthetics of middle-class becoming in contemporary China.

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This paper analyzes how non‑binary influencers in Abidjan use TikTok and Instagram to turn gender nonconformity into income and aspirational lifestyles, navigating algorithms, family negotiations, and backlash that make queer visibility both vital resource and persistent risk.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how non-binary youth in Abidjan navigate the digitalization of urban informal economies through social media as a terrain of aspiration, self‑making, and becoming. Drawing on long-term online/offline ethnography with a peer group of influencers in their twenties followed over several years, the analysis traces how self‑branding practices on TikTok and Instagram turn minoritized gender expressions into monetizable visibility and aspirational urban lifestyles, reconfiguring lived possibilities and the terms on which a “good life” can be imagined.

The entry point is an episode in late 2024, when staged displays of luxury, amplified by newspaper coverage and hostile daily livestreams from rival influencers, catalyzed a short but intense wave of digital outrage and anti-gender-diverse moral entrepreneurship targeting these youths’ socioeconomic and sexual legitimacy. Rather than a simple “pendulum” of openness and backlash, the paper conceptualizes a sequenced dynamic of queer visibility—gradual exposure, algorithmic amplification, moral panic, tactical retreat, and partial reconfiguration of audiences and gender performance—shaped by platform affordances and locally situated, classed aesthetics of ostentation.

By bringing debates on queer African media publics, anti–gender-diverse hostility, and “safe” online spaces into conversation with ethnographic attention to family negotiations, friendship networks, backstage labor, and practices of care and relational repair, the paper shows how gender‑diverse youth continually recalibrate what can be shown, to whom, and at what economic and existential risk, as they negotiate the frictions between the selves they must perform online and the precarious realities they inhabit offline.

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Women's craft labor is often undervalued as merely "domestic work." This study examines how rural Anatolian craftswomen use Instagram to combat this systematic invisibility. By securing paid work online, they are transforming perceptions of traditional labor and challenging stereotypes.

Paper long abstract

Across much of the globe, women’s labor remains systematically invisible. This invisibility is particularly striking within local craftswomanship, where women’s skills and significant contributions are frequently marginalized or entirely overlooked. As the feminist autonomist Mariarosa Dalla Costa has argued, assigning monetary value to labor fundamentally shapes how that labor is perceived socially. Because men are typically compensated for their contributions across various fields, activities coded as masculine become valued more by default, whereas women’s labor is often taken for granted and rendered invisible.

This phenomenon is acutely evident in Anatolian handicrafts: Women’s artisanship is often dismissed as mere domestic labor or voluntary, with no material value. Online searches for handicrafts rarely show the women whose labor makes these arts possible, instead displaying products or men in symbolic business interactions. However, instead of surrendering to this system, rural women are utilizing the rise of social media to fight back. They are increasingly using Instagram to become visible by forming craft collectives and raising their individual profiles.

This study examines precisely how Anatolian craftswomen use Instagram to gain visibility and secure paid work, ultimately aiming to transform entrenched perceptions of the traditional division of labor. Through Netnography and semi-structured interviews, the study identifies specific imagery and standard codes developed by craftswomen on Instagram, using it as an international stage for women who were previously dismissed as low-profile solely based on gender.

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This paper traces how users navigate tensions between curating a visible, aspirational spiritual self on devotional platforms and the lived, embodied reality of commitment (daily practice, affective investment, moral transformation).

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Hindu devotional app users curate and maintain their religious identities through the onlife—the conflated digital–offline condition where distinguishing “online” from “offline” practice becomes challenging. Drawing on Luciano Floridi’s concept of the onlife and Birgit Meyer’s theory of sensorial forms, I argue that devotional apps function as aesthetically-tuned sensorial forms that modulate practitioners into modes of becoming devoted, where the boundary between religious performance and religious becoming dissolves and collapses.

Sensorial forms are structured aesthetic and affective repertoires that organise access to the sacred and shape practitioners as religious subjects. When embedded in digital environments, these forms—audio mantras, guided rituals, responsive visual feedback, haptic notifications, algorithmic ritual sequencing—create sensory regimes that attune practitioners to particular devotional aesthetics. However, the onlife condition intensifies this: practitioners do not perform devotion through an app or practice “really” offline. Instead, they simultaneously perform and become. The app mediates an aspirational spiritual self that, through repeated sensorial engagement, gradually constitutes actual spiritual identity.

This paper traces how users navigate tensions between curating a visible, aspirational spiritual self on devotional platforms and the lived, embodied reality of commitment (daily practice, affective investment, moral transformation). Drawing on ethnographic and app-interface analysis of Hindu devotional mobile applications, I demonstrate how the onlife dissolves these categories: apps do not merely stage performances of piety but cultivate the conditions under which becoming a devoted practitioner unfolds, collapsing the distinction between aspiration and actualisation.

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"Healing" is a common but vague concept in South Korea, opposing both everyday struggles and social expectations, while it creates new aspirations. With a focus on methodological questions, this paper studies what "healing" is, what it “heals,” and how it is performed and regulated on social media.

Paper long abstract

"Healing" has become a widespread yet ambiguous concept in South Korea, particularly on social media, expressing an opposition to the everyday struggles of lived reality. "Healing" can be seen as an alternative aspiration to the more-or-less collectively imagined social expectation of "good life" in South Korea’s highly hierarchical and competitive society, which eliminates the need to achieve those social expectations, at least in that very moment, while it creates new ideals of the proper ways of "getting better" from a similarly vague problem. As a result, it becomes performance itself through social media, creating new becoming in the form of "healing". The paper asks how South Koreans define "healing", what it addresses, and how they are regulated and performed on social media. I argue that "healing" functions as an aspirational project which creates new distinctions between what kinds of problems and their solutions are rewarded and which are not. The methodology consists of digital multi-sited ethnography by following the phenomenon of „healing” on South Korea’s social media and beyond, including online and offline spaces, long-term participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. This paper introduces the methodological questions, including constructing the field, defining personhood in a non-identity-based social media, examining the visual and sensory elements and their role, and dealing with ethics regarding often anonymous but intimate and vulnerable digital contents. This paper contributes to anthropological discussions of aspiration by reconceptualising "healing" as an aspirational project oriented toward "getting better" rather than "having a good life".

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This paper analyzes how feminine aesthetics in digital China are organized through decorative, enhancing, and resistant readability. It shows how platform infrastructures shape desirable, aspirational, and refusing forms of femininity, making visibility a key site of power and resistance.

Paper long abstract

In China’s platform-mediated beauty culture, women’s bodies are styled, modified, and made socially readable through algorithmically organized visual regimes. This paper proposes a three-part framework—decorative, enhancing, and resistant readability—to analyze how femininity, desire, class, and power are rendered legible and contested within platform capitalism. Using digital ethnography and interviews with beauty influencers and users on platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin, this paper examines how these regimes shape embodied subjectivity and structure aesthetic opposition in contemporary China.

Decorative readability emerges through soft, carefully curated aesthetics that make femininity appear inviting without becoming risky. The pure-desire aesthetic captures this dynamic by allowing a faint shimmer of sensuality while preserving innocence and keeping desirability safely consumable.

Enhancing readability orients aspiration. Mixed-race aesthetics, supplemented by light mixed-race aesthetics such as Thai-style beauty and ABC/ABG looks, gain traction because they approximate Euro-Asian features rewarded by platforms as signs of cosmopolitan mobility, leaving other mixed-race possibilities comparatively marginalized.

Resistant readability operates through a different logic. The earth-mother aesthetic, marked by natural skin, physical weight, and emotional distance, reorients recognition rather than courting it, withdrawing from the affective availability that platform femininity typically demands and resonating with women seeking alternatives to the white-young-thin ideal.

Situated within platform infrastructures and postcolonial visual hierarchies, these regimes reveal how visibility in digital China is organized around contrasting conditions: safe desirability, algorithmic and class optimization, or refusal of platform-oriented norms. Visibility thus becomes a pivotal terrain through which gendered discipline, aspiration, and resistance are negotiated.

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This paper puts forward that algorithmic personalisation described by Kant (2020) stretches beyond the confines of the internet, in that interaction with the algorithm thoroughly and intimately impacts how content creators personify and perform their identity both online and offline.

Paper long abstract

The intersection of identity and authenticity in the social media context has become increasingly complex. This paper puts forward that algorithmic personalisation, described by Kant (2020), stretches beyond the confines of the internet, in that interaction with the algorithm thoroughly and intimately impacts how content creators personify and perform their identities both online and offline. Studying content creators who produce content professionally allows us to unpack identity construction and the performance thereof in a unique manner and point in time, especially considering the significance of 'genuine' connection with one’s audience who then become community juxtaposed with the embedded considerations of the algorithm and visibility optimisation. This paper unpacks three elements of identity construction and performance of affect online through the ethnographic stories of three young, black South African women who create content geared towards conversations about identity and their life experiences. The three elements that anchored the analysis were identity as constructed and/ascribed, the online self as character performance, and authenticity. These stories elucidate not only the complexity of building and maintaining identities mediated by algorithms but also emphasise the importance of affective labour in connecting with the audience and how this has become foundational in presenting and performing authenticity online.