Rikke Andreassen

Katherine Harrison

Tobias Raun

Michael Nebeling Petersen

Social media, characterized by user-generated content, interactivity, participation and community formation, have gained much research attention in recent years. At the same time, intimacy, affectivity and emotions are increasingly growing as fields of study. While these two areas are often interwoven, the actual interconnections are rarely studied in detail. This anthology explores how social media construct new types of intimacies, and how practices of intimacy shape the development and use of new media, offering empirical knowledge, theoretical insights and an international perspective on the flourishing field of digital intimacies. Chapters present a range of research tools used, such as interviews, online ethnography, visual analysis, text analysis and video analysis. There is also rich variation in sources for the empirical material studied, including Tumblr, YouTube, dating sites, hook-up sites, Facebook, Snapchat, Couchsurfing, selfies, blogs and photographs, as well as smartphones, tablets and computers. By focusing on the intersection between social media and intimacies, and their continuous co-constitution, this anthology offers new insights into the vast landscape of contemporary media reality. It will be a valuable resource for teachers, students and scholars with an interest in new media, communication, intimacy and affectivity.

Connectivities, Relationalities and Proximities

Mediated Intimacies

From the 1870s to the second decade of the twentieth century, more than fifty exhibitions of so-called exotic people took place in Denmark. Here large numbers of people of Asian and African origin were exhibited for the entertainment and ‘education’ of a mass audience. Several of these exhibitions took place in Copenhagen Zoo, where different ‘villages’, constructed in the middle of the zoo, hosted men, women and children, who sometimes stayed for months, performing their ‘daily lives’ for thousands of curious Danes. This book draws on unique archival material newly discovered in Copenhagen, including photographs, documentary evidence and newspaper articles, to offer new insights and perspectives on the exhibitions both in Copenhagen and in other European cities. Employing post-colonial and feminist approaches to the material, the author sheds fresh light on the staging of exhibitions, the daily life of the exhibitees, the wider connections between shows across Europe and the thinking of the time on matters of race, science, gender and sexuality. A window onto contemporary racial understandings, Human Exhibitions presents interviews with the descendants of displayed people, connecting the attitudes and science of the past with both our (continued) modern fascination with ‘the exotic’, and contemporary language and popular culture. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology, anthropology and history working in the areas of gender and sexuality, race, whiteness and post-colonialism.

Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ethnic Displays

Human Exhibitions

Kathrine Vitus

This book presents new empirical studies of social difference in the Nordic welfare states, in order to advance novel theoretical perspectives on the everyday practices and macro-politics of race and gender in multi-ethnic societies. With attention to the specific political and cultural landscapes of the Nordic countries, Affectivity and Race draws on a variety of sources, including television programmes, news media, fictional literature, interviews, ethnographic observations, teaching curricula and policy documents, to explore the ways in which ideas about affectivity and emotion afford new insights into the experience of racial difference and the unfolding of political discourses on race in various social spheres. Organised around the themes of the politicisation of race through affect, the way that race produces affect and the affective experience of race, this interdisciplinary collection sheds light on the role of feelings in the formation of subjectivities, how race and whiteness are affectively circulated in public life and the ways in which emotions contribute to regimes of inclusion and exclusion. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, with interests in sociology, anthropology, media, literary and cultural studies, race and ethnicity, and Nordic studies.

Rikke Andreassen

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