shelfie

Editorial: What Shelfies Can Tell Us About Pandemic Life

Editorial: What Shelfies Can Tell Us About Pandemic Life

Written by:
Yasemin Allsop, University College London, United Kingdom
Ekaterina Rzyankina, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Sumin Zhao, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Jennifer Rowsell, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Abstract: There are two stories to tell in this multimodal special issue of Digital Culture and Education. One story involves a group of female academics in need of inspiration during pandemic days who decided to produce a multimodal special issue. The other story is a colourful whistle-stop tour of public and private shelves. The through-line connecting both stories is Covid lives lived over a multitude days and ways framed by objects, rites, restrictions interspersed with nature walks, YouTube yoga, and cats on keyboards. Shimmering, fragile, and captive, pandemic life remains in our minds and hearts forever. This issue visualises these extraordinary moments through shelves of all sorts, shapes, and sizes.

Keywords: shelfie, multimodal, pandemic, creativity, visual essay

#Listeningtomediatedmothers: Reflections on the Performative Shelfie at the Digital-Material Nexus

#Listeningtomediatedmothers: Reflections on the Performative Shelfie at the Digital-Material Nexus

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