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- Convenors:
-
Gabriella Nilsson
(Lund University)
Evelina Liliequist (Umeå University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- DIGITAL LIVES
- Location:
- Room H-203
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Digital platforms and technology offer new opportunities for reproducing and representing family relations and kinship. This panel examines a range of possibilities and problematic aspects of performances and displays of family and kinship in and through digital environments.
Long Abstract:
Digital platforms and technology offer new opportunities for reproducing and representing family relations and kinship. Having long been characterized by loud moral panics and a sharp generational divide between "digital natives" (people who grew up with the internet) and "digital migrants" (people who did not), in recent years the digital sharing practice "sharenting", among other normalized digital habits, has "almost become a social norm" (Brosch 2016, 226). Digital technology enables new ways and forms of becoming and being a family. With digital devices and platforms, families can organize, interact and express their kinships, belongings and identities, including new forms of family lore as digital storytelling emerge. However, social institutions like kinship and the family have always had the function of concealing abuse, exercise control, maintaining norms and counteracting change. This panel examines a range of possibilities and problematic aspects of performances and displays of family and kinship in and through digital environments.
The panel welcomes papers that focus all aspects of family life and kinship in a digital age. This includes, but is not limited to, issues such as the experiences and consequences of "sharenting" and "growing up online"; digital family lore and storytelling as ways to perform relationships and family values; influencers and the family as a digital business; the function of digital environments for reproductive- and kinship practices, strategies for parenting for a digital future, children's online privacy, and experiences of how digital technology affects which families may exist, which bodies may become parents, and by what methods.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 June, 2022, -Alma Aspeborg (Lund University)
Paper short abstract:
Through offering prenatal screening, the Swedish healthcare system reproduces ideas about the normal family. Observations of online family forums show how screening actualizes these norms in the lives of expecting parents, affecting how they take on the parent role and prepare to welcome a child.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1970’s prenatal screening has become an integrated part of Swedish antenatal care, providing expecting parents with more and more information about the fetus. Through screening for certain, specific conditions, such practices both produce and reproduce ideas about what is normal and not, and concretely help reproduce a certain, able-bodied nuclear family. Further, prenatal screening and other healthcare practices targeting the fetus rather than the pregnant person – often visualizing the fetus via ultrasound – construct the fetus as an individual, separate from the pregnant person.
Both these effects of screening come to the fore as expecting parents share their screening results on online family forums. A pilot study with ethnographic observations of such forums suggests that posts about prenatal screening can be roughly divided into two categories – those who test within the perceived bounds of normality and who, adopting a future oriented attitude, are trying to get to know their baby better through guessing its sex. And those at risk for deviations, who instead are frozen in a limbo of uncertainty, awaiting further tests results, or facing the decision of termination.
This paper presents the different ways in which Swedish parents share their screening results on anonymous online forums. Focusing on tone, questions asked, and the information and possible visuals included, it gives insight into how prenatal screening can affect the process of becoming a parent and how you emotionally prepare to welcome a child, but also how prenatal screening reenforces ideas about normalcy.
Agita Luse (Riga Stradiņš University)
Paper short abstract:
In school curricula, family tree is a tool that illustrates historic, social, or biological phenomena. Representing their own kinship relations, though, may leave students with conflicting feelings. The discussion will draw on interviews and a case study of a family history in Latvia.
Paper long abstract:
The paper aims to discuss challenges posed by the task of truthfully representing kinship relations, as far as students’ endeavours in Latvian schools are concerned. Acquiring History, Biology, and the Study of Society, pupils learn the concepts of family tree and pedigree from several angles. Compiling a genealogical chart of their own is proposed not as an aim of learning per se but as a tool intended to help the students to comprehend the phenomena under consideration in the school curricula. Among such phenomena are generations and family structure(s), transmission of memories and genes.
Some students get carried along and devote to their genealogical projects much more time than the curriculum prescribes. In the process, pupils as well as their teachers may have to make difficult choices concerning the patterns of representation. Difficulties are two-fold: while a degree of indeterminacy may characterize one’s kinship relations, the kin categories on the subject curriculum as well as on online genealogical sites are usually clear-cut and never numerous. To avoid indeterminacy and build comprehensible genealogical charts, a few representational strategies are being advanced. They serve the learning goals well but may leave students with conflicting feelings about their accomplishment, none the least about its correspondence to the nitty-gritty facts of life.
The discussion will draw on several expert interviews with teachers and in-depth interviews with their pupils. These data will be complemented by a case study that relates a family history and examines its representation in a genealogical chart, both offline and online.
Adrian Stoicescu (University of Bucharest)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the definition of shareting as ‘the ways many parents share details about their children’s lives online’ (Steinberg, 2017: 842), this paper will look at how public figures tend exploit homeliness settings and parental duties as a tool in status consolidation.
Paper long abstract:
With connectivity having become a commodity, the undiscriminated coverage and, especially, sharing of everyday life aspects on social media blurred the borders between private and public especially at the level of family and children upbringing. Celebrities of all kinds (politicians, singers, sports people, bloggers, and so on) keep funs connected by making public images of themselves and their family in contexts of domestic authenticity which appears to be like those of their followers.
As networks ‘become dominant central logic’ (Varnelis, 2008: 145) with narcissistic (Webb 2013) content generation spiking celebrities’ children upbringing public dissemination, the struggle to feed followers new content becomes paramount in exploiting further Facebook as a ‘“modern day baby book’ (Kumar & Schoenebeck, 2015). This leads to a stereotypical portrayal of children and family lives which tend to ‘humanise’ the public figures making publics witnessing practices and images from the private dwellings.
Drawing on the definition of shareting as ‘the ways many parents share details about their children’s lives online’ (Steinberg, 2017: 842), this paper will look at how public figures tend exploit homeliness settings and parental duties as a tool in status consolidation. Besides the ways, this paper also looks as the reasons leading to shareting arguing that the images represent more the parents and children as agents for their parent’s status consolidation. Finally, the paper will also look at and assess the content the celebrity sharenting cogenerates either in line with or different from the intended meaning of the posts.
Gabriella Nilsson (Lund University)
Paper short abstract:
For “family influencers”, pregnancy, childbirth and children create increased opportunities for reach, collaborations and financial gain through strategic intimacy. The paper analyses the various dilemmas and debates concerning the role of children within influencer life worlds.
Paper long abstract:
It is a common notion that digitalization has enabled girls and women to harness a range of digital media tools to enact and represent themselves as culture makers. As boundaries between online and offline have become harder to discern, so have the boundaries between private and public lives. An effect is the emergence of “influencer life worlds”, as, in particular, young women transform their private life narratives and self-representations into digital businesses. Another effect is the normalization of the digital sharing practice “sharenting”, parents publishing images of their children online. This paper focus on the intersection of these two phenomena.
Amongst the capital that influencers sell are credibility, authenticity and intimacy. Pregnancy, childbirth and children create increased opportunities for reach, collaborations and financial gain through strategic intimacy. The increasing popularity of posting ultrasound images of unborn fetuses, and livestreaming childbirth, are examples of a strategic intimacy. A growing branch of influencers are family influencers, where children, through parents sharing images and information about them, unwittingly become “co-producers” of digital content. A consequence is influencers being exposed to strong public criticism – “mom-shaming” – and even reported to the social services. In the recent year, making money from sharing pictures of children through marketing collaborations, “influencer marketing”, has been heavily criticized, leading many influencers not to disclose information about their children or show their faces in their digital content anymore. The paper analyses the various dilemmas and debates regarding the role of children within influencer life worlds.