'I was not like them' On quitting creative industries - Cecilia Ghidotti (Warwick)

Narratives from the creative sector often center on those who, despite the challenges, manage to keep going and eventually thrive in the cultural sector or as creative professionals. The focus on quitting brings under the spotlight the others, those who, after a series of attempts at staying in the creative industries, left the sector. This presentation centers on the case of Italian graduates from a creative writing program, and it investigates their biographies and reasons for quitting. It argues that in their cases, quitting depended on a set of expectations about the meanings and practices of work in culture and on their refusal to adhere to a series of implicit rules that they had to conform to if they wanted to stay in the publishing industry.

Cecilia Ghidotti is Teaching Fellow in Media and Creative Industries at Warwick. Her research focuses on patterns of exploitation and emancipation in the Media and Creative Industries. She has got two PhDs: in Media and Creative industries from Louborough University, and in Italian Studies from the University of Bologna.

October, 18th - 13:00 - 14:00 FAB 1.01

Medical influencers in the wellness realm: Lifestyle expertise and the question of credentials - Rachel O'Neill (London School of Economics)

Existing literature on wellness influencers takes for granted that such individuals lack accredited expertise, and further contends that their popularity indexes widespread public distrust in experts generally and medical professionals especially. These arguments overlook the existence of medical doctors who are themselves wellness influencers — who share dietary and lifestyle advice on social media, participate in industry trends and conventions, and monetise their followings through sponsored content and other commercial ventures. In this talk I introduce the figure of the medical influencer or ‘medfluencer’ as an object of critical enquiry, using a series of case study subjects from the UK context. Demonstrating the extent to which such individuals reproduce rather than resolve the tensions said to characterise their unaccredited counterparts, I argue that credentials are not in themselves sufficient to undo the problematics associated to wellness influencing and, moreover, may open out new realms of conflict and contradiction.

Dr Rachel O’Neill is an Assistant Professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. Her research centres questions of subjectivity, culture and inequality, pursued through a feminist lens. She is the author of Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy (Polity, 2018).

November 1st, FAB 1.01 13:00 - 14:00

Mixed feelings: on the platformisation of moods and vibes - Ludmila Lupinacci (University of Leeds)

Over the past few years, digital platforms have increasingly tailored their content to both respond to and create certain moods, vibes, atmospheres or ambiences (Roquet 2016). This trend has indeed begun to spark discussion on whether platforms such as TikTok represent the end of ‘social media’ as we know it, as the centrality of networks and interpersonal interactions is replaced by self-indulgent activities such as mindless scrolling. Engaging with those debates, in this presentation I will offer a critical assessment of social media’s current experiential turn and its specificities, and propose a critical-phenomenological framework for the theorisation of this ongoing shift precisely at the intersection of embodied affect and the political economy of platformisation. I take moods, ‘vibes’ and their mediation to be both foundational to embodied experience and yet deeply embedded in socio-technical and material practices (Highmore 2013). In this regard, this presentation also aims to engage with a discussion on how, through processes of datafication, personalisation, standardisation, and algorithmitisation (Stark 2020) bodily states such as moods become practices that can be managed through social media once those technologies become central to contemporary ‘regimes of sensory calibration’ (Starosielski 2021).

Ludmila Lupinacci is a Lecturer in Digital Media at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds (UK). She holds a PhD in Media and Communications (LSE, 2022), in which she completed a thesis on the new manifestations of the concept of liveness in our contemporary social media environment. Some of her research interests are: critical approaches to social media and everyday life, experience, embodiment, phenomenology, and qualitative methods. Currently, she’s interested in exploring the increasing platformisation of states of being such as moods and vibes.

November, 29th 13:00 - 14:00 FAB 1.01

Nudging the Internet - Elif Buse Doyuran (University of Edinburgh)