Mette Simonsen Abildgaard

(Re-)Appropriating Instagram for Social Research: Three Methods for Studying Obesogenic Environments

The paper discusses three ways of appropriating Instagram for social research through the case of obesity. We draw on the notion obesogenic environments, in which obesity is understood as related to a wide range of cultural, social and physical factors. Together with a group of obesity researchers and cultural analysts we explored a dataset of 82,449 Instagram posts tagged with location from the five most and the five least overweight local authorities in the UK. The geo-located posts were studied through three distinct approaches to the data; each drawing on their own set of interdependent conceptualizations of what constitutes obesogenic environments, Instagram and cultural analysis respectively. The first approach values Instagram as a repository of images that can be coded and counted; while the second asks about the everyday practices of Instagram users. In a third approach we view Instagram itself as an analytical tool that produces a media-specific version of phenomena such as obesity. Following this third appropriation, we conclude that to unlock Instagrams potential for social research it must be considered as more than a collection of user-tagged images, but as an analytical context in its own right.

My Whole Life in Telephones: Material Artifacts as Interview Elicitation Devices

In this article, I address a methodological issue that has come into focus after the advent of the “material turn”; the matter of how to study historical, sociomaterial practices. In response, I propose a method for materially oriented qualitative interviews, in which historical artifacts are used as elicitation devices. I focus on three ways in which material devices can aid historical research in interviews: I first emphasize that materiality can aid the qualitative interviewer by providing specificity, as the material presence of historical artifacts can urge participants to remember details, directing the conversation toward the specificity of mundane artifacts whose characteristics can be difficult to recollect. Second, I suggest that such artifacts may be used also to aid narrative structure, guiding and prompting participants to follow the story they infer from a particular setup of artifacts. Third, I propose that the active engagement with historical artifacts in the qualitative interview allows participants to access body memories of using these artifacts, eliciting the particulars of abandoned bodily practices. I end by discussing the possibilities for improving the “materially oriented qualitative interview”—method and applying it in other contexts.

Sometimes I think it is hell to be a girl: a longitudinal study of the rise of confessional radio

Despite wide recognition in media studies, the significance of technology is often understated or overlooked in radio and sound studies. This article addresses this absence in a longitudinal study of uses by radio listeners and radio hosts of an ‘automatic telephone tape recorder’ (ATTR) in a Danish youth radio segment. The study shows that the two groups developed a range of uses for the ATTR from 1973 to 1996 and that especially confessional use, despite its paradoxical synthesis of public and private, emerged as the significant feature of the segment. An analysis of changes in users’ perception of technology over time is performed within a phenomenological media studies framework and the emerging field of postphenomenology, particularly through the concepts of ‘multistability’ and ‘dailiness’. I formulate a sociomaterial perspective on radio as the ‘intimate medium’ whose formation is negotiated through time in a multistable process between technology, listeners and radio hosts.