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Paper short abstract

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 presents findings from ethnographic research on the creation and deployment of AI influencers, investigating how the aspirational labor of the human creators behind these characters 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 I argue augurs the emergence of "post-authenticity." Taking shape through the auspices of LLMs, social media affordances, and human users, the logic of post-authenticity often amplifies the gendered dimensions of digital aspirational labor, along with the objectification and control of female bodies and sexuality.

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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/or 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.

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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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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 examines how a gender-nonconforming creator and their peers in Abidjan use social media to make possible lives visible and partly valuable, as posts circulate across publics, making recognisability both a resource and, amid rising hostility, an embodied risk.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how a gender-nonconforming creator and their close peers in Abidjan use social media as a terrain of aspiration and becoming, making possible lives visible, partly valuable and intermittently habitable. Drawing on long-term offline/online ethnography centred on one creator in their early twenties, it traces the collective labour through which videos are staged and circulated, while visibility generates clients, gifts, collaborations, relationships and public standing without securing a stable income or protection.

The paper takes as its entry point a luxury-van video filmed at a friend’s birthday in early 2024, within a repertoire of rented vehicles and rooms, parties and carefully chosen venues. Against a backdrop of insults, threats and restrictions in the street that long preceded it, the post generated further hostility towards the group. But as a homophobic campaign targeting visibly gender-nonconforming people intensified in August 2024 and drew international coverage, the images travelled beyond their intended publics and were recoded as evidence of sexual and socioeconomic illegitimacy.

Rather than a simple pendulum between visibility and withdrawal, the paper traces a cumulative sequence of circulation, value-making, attack, tactical retreat, return and relational repair. Friendship networks, maternal support, frequent but temporary access to varied spaces and forms of mobility, and backstage creative labour shape what can be shown, to whom and at what cost.

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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 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 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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"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".