Lisa Lindqvist

 
PhD Student in Sociology

Research

My PhD project looks into practices of digital feminism in the Swedish context, using #MeToo as a case study. I am interested in how social media intersects with, and produces, particular kinds of feminist messages and forms of activism, and the way social media users utilize, work alongside or resist, the technical affordances of platforms to 'do' feminism. Thus, the starting point is an understanding of digital feminism, and #MeToo, as techno-cultural phenomena. In the project, I use mixed methods to look into both the discourse of #MeToo and other feminist hashtags used in Sweden on various social media platforms, and the way participants in these activities make sense of, and strategize around, online, feminist activity. My point of departure is that digital feminism that uses feminist hashtags is a form of epistemic practice that is mediated through the functionality of social media. Thus, my aim is to produce knowledge about the various ways in which power moves through social media platforms – by automatic sorting of content, business goals producing particular decisions around moderation, user interface design, and encounters with social media users and their practices – so as to add to our cultural understandings of social media platforms and the politics that are done within and through them.

Collaboration

Publications