Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Katherine Guinness & Grant Bollmer
Phenomenology for the selfie
Many attempts at grasping the “selfie” overlook the images themselves, deferring to the intention of
smartphone users or to the technical-performative context of smartphones. In this talk, we propose a
phenomenology for the selfie that builds on, but moves past this empiricism. We argue that a selfie is a
relational practice that requires the ontogenic formation of a “self” in front of, but distinct from, a
“background”. The relationship between self and background is political, and the background tends to
disappear in favour of the “self”—or, the “world” recedes as “background”, with the “self” produced
through the image central, yet ungrounded from a relational experience. This receding is not itself essential,
however. What is essential is the political relationality of the image. A different use and understanding of the
selfie does not celebrate the presence or visibility of the “self” recorded by the image, but acknowledges the
inherent embeddedness of that self in a background, and refuses to let the background disappear.
Anthony McCosker
Digital mental health, Instragram and the absent body of depression
Social media platforms offer very particular encounters with experiences of mental health. This paper
explores the role of social media in producing new forms of digital data-driven visibility for mental health. It
focuses on uses of Instagram, and in particular tagging practices for depression, and provides visual content
analysis to explore notions of visibility and invisibility. I frame this analysis with an understanding of social
media data and metrics as segmentary – that is, as slicing experiences so as to draw them into a range of
sociocultural codes. In the case of depression on Instagram, this results in bodily disappearance, as well as
the intense affective appearance of body parts and faciality through cutting and selfie practices. Other
techniques such as “tags for likes”, irony and play indicate disruptions or lines of flight that seek to break
with aggregate hashtag publics.
Larissa Hjorth
Visual afterlife: a case study of posthumous camera phone practices
In the sinking of the South Korean MV Sewol boat on 16th April 2014, mobile phones functioned across
multiple forms of haunting: individual, collective, social and cultural. They became repositories for damning
camera phone footage taken by the now deceased of procedures gone wrong. While photography has
always had a complicated relationship with power and representation, especially when those photographed
are absent or dead, now the digital is transforming its affect, amplified through camera phone practices like
selfies. The Sewol selfies were not about narcissism but about the numbness and misrecognition that trauma
can bring with it. Here the camera phone footage was not just a witness for court prosecutors and traumaladen
images for the families of the deceased but the footage also functioned as highly affective memorials
that quickly spread and consolidated global public outcry. This paper explores the role camera phones play
in the representation of loss and how, in turn, this is reshaping the relationship between media, loss and
memory.
1R Environmental Iterations: Digital Habitats and the Making of Multiple Screen Worlds (Chair, Jennifer
Hamilton)
This panel probes productive contradictions in the current media ecologies of networked cinema by grounding
analysis in the concept of environmental iterations, an idea that combines the notion of our worlds as subject to
change through series of minor mutations organized around the operation of the iterative, that which repeats,
morphs, responds, changes, and develops through code, interface, user-engagement, and platform. To make this
argument, we turn to a series of new media projects that marshal environmental iterations to build digital habitats.
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