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- Convenors:
-
Gabriella Nilsson
(Lund University)
Evelina Liliequist (Umeå University)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- DIGITAL LIVES
- Location:
- Room H-203
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 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 Wednesday 15 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper demonstrates how grandmothers are negotiating and capitalising on the recent proliferation of digital communication. I outline four resources that are being deployed to navigate the new technologies. These I posit are the foundation of current distant family folkloristic interactions.
Paper long abstract:
A good sense of personal identity contributes to mental resilience in young adults (Fivush and Duke: 2008). If the grandmother, as is often the case, the ‘most trusted kin keeper’ of family lore, stories, and connections, her reaching out to family has profound implications. For grandmothers in geographically distant families, the experience of passing on family folklore has changed from embodied learning – visual and bodily behaviours enabled by sharing the same space – to short physical visits supplemented with, and even overtaken by, digital communications.
Through auto-ethnographic observation and interviews, this paper demonstrates how active grandmothers are negotiating and capitalising on the recent proliferation of digital modes of communicating. These grandmothers, with their experience of a past analogue world, have a unique perspective as ‘digital immigrants’, compared to their ‘digital native’ grandchildren (Tasha et al: 2020). I outline four key resources that are being deployed to navigate new technologies successfully: (1) a sense of responsibility to past family culture, (2) a reluctance to give up familiar cultural attitudes, (3) an ability to be reflexive within unfamiliar digital interactions, and (4) powerful feelings of love and desire that provide the sustaining energy to keep trying.
References to Artificial Intelligence (Turing: 1950), grandmother chatbots (Vlahos: 2019) and current science fiction (Black Mirror: 2013) are touched upon as indicators of the radically changing modes of documenting family folklore.
In the end, the underlying predispositions that grandmothers have for ‘trusted kin keeping’ are, I suggest, the foundation of current family interactions.
Paper short abstract:
Based on a long-term ethnographic study among transnational families in Tokyo, this paper addresses the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on digital family practices, displays and performances and the (re)doing of (digital) transnational family life in times of restricted mobilities.
Paper long abstract:
Research on transnational, multi-local or dispersed families has revealed the importance of Information and Communication Technologies for ‘doing family’: Digital family practices are crucial for maintaining familial ties and a sense of belonging across distance and despite mobility. Based on an on-going, long-term ethnographic study among transnational families in Tokyo and relying on a variety of qualitative methods like informal group discussions, daily encounters, participant observations and autoethnographic accounts, the paper asks: How have the pandemic and pandemic related policies like (inter)national travel restrictions impacted (digital) family practices – including displays and performances – of highly mobile, transnational families? First finding reveal that transnational families can build on already established digital family practices and therefore can cope rather well with the overall situation. Nevertheless, the pandemic and concomitant policies have forced these families to re-negotiate, re-evaluate and re-organise their transnational (digital) family life in specific ways; in particular with regard to further developing their digital family practices and with regard to digital displays and performances for different (global) audiences. Further, the on-going pandemic not only shows the deficiencies of current technologies and a (completely) digital family life but also highlights (global) inequalities: privileges of economically well-off, elite transnational families are clearly being (re)produced.
Paper short abstract:
Digital sharing of humour has become an integral part of everyday family life, allowing family members to follow the customary patterns of communication while adapting them to new circumstances. The paper explores the forms, topics, ways and challenges of sharing humorous folklore digitally.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses the specific features and dynamics of sharing humorous content digitally within a family in the context of daily communication. The data, collected from Belarusian families via oral interviews and an online survey, suggest that sharing humour digitally within a family can take various forms, some of which parallel oral face-to-face interactions, while others complement them. The digital forms of sharing humour thus cannot be juxtaposed to the oral ones; the process of family humorous communication is viewed as a continuum of various hybrid forms that combine features of oral and digital interaction.
The most preferable ways of sharing are those that ensure the privacy of conversation, thus providing family members with an opportunity to follow the customary patterns of communication while adapting them to new spatiotemporal circumstances. Even though the process of selection of humorous content shared within the family is often implicit, some tendencies clearly transpire: visual and generic forms of humour are more popular than the textual and personal. Sharing such humour presupposes certain considerations about its recipients, thus making family audience an important factor in the practice of digital sharing.
While the practices of sharing humour digitally found their way into family communication rather quickly, the implications of digital sharing in the traditionally face-to-face realm of family interactions are still somewhat unclear and ambiguous, especially among the older generations of some families. The paper sheds light on these ambiguities and outlines opportunities and challenges pertaining to various forms of humorous communication within a family.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on publicly shared same sex family photographs on Instagram, in relation to queer visibility. How, and in which ways, can same sex family photographs function as subversive objects in relation to queer visibility? How are normative notions of family challenged, and/or reproduced?
Paper long abstract:
In technology-integrated societies today an ever-increasing number of family photographs are taken daily and shared on social media. The parental digital sharing practice called sharenting (share/sharing + parenting) has in a few years become so widely applied that it has "almost become a social norm" (Brosch 2016, 226). On Instagram an increased queer family visibility can be noted. Mundane family photographs and sharenting practices open for qualitative ethnographic knowledge production on and about the social, cultural, and political aspects of everyday life (cf Ehn & Löfgren 1996), as well as parenting and family life, in and through digital media in a digital age.
From a queer theoretical perspective, this paper focuses on publicly shared same sex family photographs on Instagram, in relation to queer visibility. The paper discusses and empirically exemplify how, and in which ways, same sex parents' public displays of their families and everyday family life can be understood as "proud pictures" - forms of (personal) political statements, both as an outspoken activism and in more subtle, yet present ways. How, and in which ways, can same sex family photographs function as subversive objects in relation to queer visibility? How are normative notions of family challenged, and/or reproduced in same sex families' publicly shared family photographs on Instagram?