Written by:
Klare Lanson, RMIT University, Australia
Ingrid Richardson, RMIT University, Australia

Abstract: The lived experience of being at home radically shifted during rolling COVID-19 restrictions throughout 2020, with significant impacts on genderised working and parenting practices. This photo essay draws on creative practice ethnography (Hjorth et al., 2020), mobile media studies and new materialism to critically unpack the performative shelfie as a digital-material assemblage that literally displays these effects. As part of a PhD research project entitled Digital Parenting Listening: A Gendered Mobile Media Creative Practice Ethnography, the participatory encounter #listeningtomediatedmothers (2020–2021) enacts the shelfie as a qualitative digital ethnographic probe to creatively explore work-life balance in the lives of 13 participants located in regional Victoria, Australia. It reveals mediated shelfies as complex, multidimensional, and dynamic representations of the mothering self. Lively experiences of digital materiality come to the fore with far reaching socio-technical and creative implications for ethnographies of social media selfie motifs—as a practice of participatory engagement, digital archiving and in situ research.

Keywords: performative, shelfie, self-care, participatory, digital ethnography, work-life balance, digital mother