This article explores how contemporary feminism has become increasingly platformized, focusing on how Scandinavian feminist opinion leaders negotiate Instagram as an integral part of their everyday lives. Drawing on 3 years of digital observations and interviews with activists with over 12,000 followers each, the article investigates the meeting between Instagram’s script and feminist users who might not utilize the technology in line with the platform’s intentions. The analysis takes cues from domestication studies and underlines the morality and materiality involved in the appropriation of technology, pointing at the tensions arising when doing feminism and making culture is intertwined through the everyday use of social media platforms. Building on recent scholarship on the platformization of culture, the article offers novel contributions into how platformization affects non-profit countercultural projects.
Datafication processes, the ongoing strive for making organizations data-driven, have in recent years entailed data-focused software projects and more interdisciplinary teamwork. Simultaneously as agile product teams have been directed towards increased use of data for software development, stronger data protection regulations such as GDPR have further complexified the software developer role, whose responsibilities and expectations now expand far beyond mere coding. Seeking to develop an understanding of how data-intensive product teams in the public sector maneuver the legal hurdles emerging in the wake of data governance, this paper builds on 19 interviews with members of two agile product teams in the Norwegian organizations NAV and Entur. Our findings indicate that including a legal expert in the team can boost confidence in data handling practices and avoid delays in deliveries, but it requires effort to synchronize and overcome interdisciplinary barriers.
This article investigates how affective hashtags on Instagram can contribute to forming intimate feminist entanglements transcending the digital sphere, resulting in offline demonstrations and rallies. In tracing the use of three Swedish hashtags emerging in the wake of #metoo, all surrounding women’s experiences with sexual harassment and violence, it is argued that affective hashtags can be a central component for explaining how social media-based campaigns can surpass online spaces and transition into more traditional forms of non-mediated feminist activity. Drawing from a 3-year immersion in feminist communities on Instagram, the article shows how hashtags here are reconceptualized into ‘affect triggers’, intimately entangling human and nonhuman entities along the way. It is suggested that a combination of feminist affect theory and insights from science and technology studies (STS) may offer a fruitful methodology for providing insights into the political potential of affect in forming augmented feminist realities.
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