Edgar Gómez Cruz

Selfies, Image and the Re-making of the Body

This article explores the relationality between women’s bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women’s experiences of their bodies change through interactions, sense of community and taking and sharing selfies. This article provides an empirical elaboration on what sexy selfies are and do by analysing interviews, selfies and blog content of nine women in the NSFW self-shooters community on tumblr. For our participants, self-shooting is an engaged, self-affirmative and awareness raising pursuit, where their body, through critically self-aware self-care, emerges as agentic, sexual and distinctly female. Thus, this is a reading of selfies as a practice of freedom.

Creation and Control in the Photographic Process: iPhones and the Emerging Fifth Moment of Photography

This article underlines some aspects that relate, on the one side, to the technological devices necessary to photography production and, on the other, the kind of practices that shape and are shaped by those devices. It discusses how those relationships have shaped different visual regimes. Based on theoretical approaches like Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the Socio-technical Interactions Network (STIN) perspective, the article starts with a brief historical description focusing on the production of photos as a three-step process: 1) infrastructural elements of image production; 2) technologies of processing images; and 3) distribution/showing of images. It is proposed that photography has had four moments in this history. Finally, the article discusses the latest socio-technological practices, and proposes that the iPhone is the best example of the kind of devices that are possibly opening a fifth moment in photography technologies.

[Im]mobility in the age of [im]mobile phones: Young NEETs and digital practices

This article draws on research with young NEETs (not in education, employment or training) in Leeds in order to contest the assumption that technological qualities informing new media devices (here mobile phones) simply or transparently translate into social or ontological categories. We draw on a long-term ethnographic study of NEET individuals to argue that one of the underpinning principles of mobile phones – that they pertain to mobility and that mobility is positive and agential – is called into question. Our aim is not only to unpack a number of concepts and assumptions underpinning the mobile phone but also to suggest that these concepts unhelpfully (and even detrimentally) locate mobile phones in relation to the technological possibilities on offer without taking into account what is simultaneously made impossible and immobile, and for whom. Finally, when we set the digital experiences of NEETs alongside the discourses around mobile phones, we find that mobility is restricted – not enabling, and that it is forged in, and articulated as part of an everyday life that is dominated by the social and economic horizons set by the groups status as NEET.

Raw talent in the making: Imaginary journeys, authorship and the discourses of expertise

In the digital age, it seems that participation has been conflated with literacy, content with engagement, novelty with innovation and ubiquity with meaning (e.g. see Thornham and McFarlane, 2014; Gillespie, 2010; Dean, 2008; Livingstone, 2009; van Dijck, 2013) and encapsulated in terms such as ‘digital native’, ‘digital divide’ or ‘born digital’. In turn, these conflations have done something to technology, which is constructed as malleable, a supportive facilitator, and the user, who is constructed as active agent. Neither of these account for mediations nor for – crucial for us – the notion of the imaginary, which emerges in our research as so central to expertise. Drawing on ethnographic work carried out in Studio12, a media production facility for young people with disadvantaged backgrounds in Leeds, United Kingdom, we propose that the concept of expertise emerges through a bigger array of social capital as well as traditional structures of power such as class, gender and race. Expertise is claimed, evidenced and generated. For us, however, expertise emerged not only as elusive but also because it was premised on a disjuncture between lived and everyday youth and the promises of becoming in a future orientated (technological, imaginary and creative) landscape.

Trajectories: digital/visual data on the move

This article presents an outline of the concept ‘Trajectory’. I propose to understand trajectory not only as a trace of movement in a path but also as a working concept to reflect on the possibilities of visual/digital data collection for ethnographic research on the move. Images, I argue, along with some digital affordances such as metadata and GPS, can be a powerful device for ethnographic enquiry and a useful tool for reflexivity if used by making sense of the randomness of everyday mobility. The concept of ‘Trajectory’ seeks to reflect on the relationship between four elements: mobility, visual data, digital methods and reflexivity, focusing on the use of the mobile phone as a tool to engage with these elements while reflecting on them. The concept of trajectories is intended to establish a dialogue with that of the flâneur in de Certeau’s and Benjamin’s work and with some current approaches to visual/digital ethnography, especially those related to movement and senses, art and ethnography and mobilit...

Some ethnographic notes on a Flickr group

This paper presents a number of examples from ethnographic fieldwork with a group of amateur photographers in Barcelona. Based on Practice Theory approach, as a theoretical framework, the article stands as an example of the study of photography that moves away from a representational or semiotic approach towards a performative one. The examples described show how different practices enable and enhance mediations that are material, visual and digital at the same time and how these practices are performed by the group while they shape their collective identity.

Hackathons, data and discourse: Convolutions of the data (logical)

This paper draws together empirical findings from our study of hackathons in the UK with literature on big data through three interconnected frameworks: data as discourse, data as datalogical and data as materiality. We suggest not only that hackathons resonate the wider socio-technical and political constructions of (big) data that are currently enacted in policy, education and the corporate sector (to name a few), but also that an investigation of hackathons reveals the extent to which ‘data’ operates as a powerful discursive tool; how the discourses (and politics) of data mask and reveal a series of tropes pertaining to data; that the politics of data are routinely and simultaneously obscured and claimed with serious implications for expertise and knowledge; and that ultimately, and for the vast majority of hackathons we have attended, the discursive and material constructions of data serve to underpin rather than challenge existing power relations and politics.

Not just a number? NEETs, data and datalogical systems

ABSTRACT This paper draws on empirical research with NEET populations (16–24-year-olds not in education, employment or training) in the U.K. in order to engage with issues around identification, data and metrics produced through datalogical systems. Our aim is to bridge contemporary discourses around data, digital bureaucracy and datalogical systems with empirical material drawn from a long-term ethnographic project with NEET groups in Leeds, U.K. in order to highlight the way datalogical systems ideologically and politically shape people’s lives. We argue that NEET is a long-standing data category that does work and has resonance within wider datalogical systems. Secondly, that these systems are decision-making and far from benign. They have real impact on people’s lives – not just in a straightforwardly, but in obscure, complex and uneven ways which makes the potential for disruption or intervention increasingly problematic. Finally, these datalogical systems also implicate and are generated by us, even as we seek to critique them.

Mobile screens and the public event: screen practices at the Anzac Day Dawn Service

Abstract Following current literature on public and mobile screens, this paper discuses the relevance that screens have in our everyday lives by focusing on the combination of mobile and temporary screen-based practices in the digital mediation of a single public commemorative event. We present an ethnographic account of different screen practices at the Anzac Day dawn Service, an annual Australian commemorative ceremony on a public holiday, 25 April. By focusing our analysis in a single place for a limited time, we analyse how people relate to screens in different ways, from media reception to spatial organization to online connection. We suggest that screens form a fundamental element of the entanglement between public space and political narrative that needs further investigation because this relationship holds implications for both urban life and citizenship.

Datafication and data fiction: Narrating data and narrating with data:

Data do not speak for themselves. Data must be narrated—put to work in particular contexts, sunk into narratives that give them shape and meaning, and mobilized as part of broader processes of interpretation and meaning-making. We examine these processes through the lens of ethnographic practice and, in particular, ethnography’s attention to narrative processes. We draw on a particular case in which digital data must be animated and narrated by different groups in order to examine broader questions of how we might come to understand data ethnographically.