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*** with apologies for cross-posting***

Making diaries, making archives, making blogs: accounting for everyday life online and exploring the spaces and practices of social media  

 

Friday May 24 2019, 13:00-17:00 

11 Bedford Square, Room 2-05 Royal Holloway, University of London

 

 

The purpose of this interdisciplinary afternoon workshop is to bring together scholars from the UK and overseas with a shared interest in methodologies for exploring social media, specifically blogs, vlogs and blog/vlogospheres and the opportunities and challenges involved in both their production and their examination. A further focus of the workshop is understanding these activities and spaces, as spaces where women can, and are, writing their own history. Here there is a multitude of questions that can be explored - such as: Why do women create such spaces of memory? In what ways do these creative spaces matter? How can we understand and approach these spaces? How do women’s pre-digital-era detailed accounts of everyday life – such as travel diaries, pocket diaries and photo albums – compare and contrast with their online equivalents? Are we in need of new tools and perspectives? How can we balance our understanding of the personal elements of such constructions with their professional and commercial aspects?

 

The workshop will include a talk by Dr. Sally Bayley (Oxford University), based on her recent study of the diary and journal as a form of literary and social self-construction. Her book The Private Life of the Diary From Pepys to Tweets: A history of the diary as an artform (2016) explores diary making as a form of private and public identity as it is constructed across history. This will be followed by a round table discussion. 

 

During the workshop, we also aim to identify and discuss the current state of knowledge and research gaps in order to develop a future research agenda for how we can better use and approach social media data, blogs and blogospheres from a feminist perspective. We hope this workshop will provide an opportunity to serve as the foundation for establishing a network of scholars working on such issues in the geohumanities and beyond.

 

Hosting institution: Centre for the GeoHumanities, Royal Holloway University of London

 

In collaboration with: 

Department of Geography University of Portsmouth 

Department of Geography Stockholm University

 

Organisers: 

Jenny Sjöholm Centre for the Geohumanities RHUL

Nina Willment Department of Geography RHUL 

Taylor Brydges Department of Geography Stockholm University 

Carol Ekinsmyth Department of Geography University of Portsmouth

 

Refreshments will be served

There is no fee for participation 

 

If you want to join please send an email with a brief statement of how your current/future work connects to the topic to Jenny Sjöholm ([log in to unmask]) by the 30th of April, 2019.