Selfie Citizenship

16 April 2015
The Shed, Digital Innovation, MMU
Organised by Adi Kuntsman, Farida Vis and Simon
Faulkner
Sponsored by Digital Innovation and MIRIAD,
Manchester Metropolitan University, and The Visual
Social Media Lab, The University of Sheffield

The workshop brings together researchers from a variety of

disciplines, fields and backgrounds to explore the notion of selfie
citizenship -- the growing use of the selfie-genre and, more
broadly, the networked circulations of individual and group selfportraits for acts of citizenship (Isin 2008).
In the recent years we have become accustomed to photographs
of individuals with hand-written banners, as well as to various
selfie memes and hashtag actions (#NoMakeUpSelfie,
#WeAreAllClean, #SmearforSmear as well as #ICantBreathe,
#BlackLivesMatter and #UseMeInstead, to mention just a few),
spread on social media as actions of protest and political or social
statements. Their circulation is global, and their iconography is
often deceivingly similar, yet their motivations, causes and context
vary some stand against police abuse or military occupation,
others call for clearer cities or smaller classrooms, yet others
promote a charity cause or a social awareness, and there are
those that incite violence or call for a war. Further, while some
perform citizenship as a form of nationalism, others mobilise
notions of global citizenship, and yet others operate in contexts
where citizenship is absent, in question or violently denied.
Such mobilisation of the selfie genre understood broadly as selfportraits in viral digital circulation clearly challenges the
prevalent popular view of selfies as narcissistic, inherently apolitical and even anti-social. Yet selfie citizenship still remains to
be theorised, both as a framework for different understanding of
selfies, and as a way to think differently about citizenship in the
social media age. This workshop was set up to create a space for
an intellectual and political conversation around the notion of selfie
citizenship, bringing together scholars of visual culture, social and
digital media, and cultural citizenship, into a much needed
dialogue that explores the work of selfies, but also charts new
directions to think about citizenship as a political, affective, visual
and networked phenomenon.

Programme
9.30-10.00 Registration

10.00-10.30 Introduction
Adi Kuntsman Acts of Selfie Citizenship

10.3011.30 - Plenary 1
Jill Walker Rettberg Biometric Citizens: Adapting Ourselves
to Machine Vision

11.30-11.45 Break

11.45-12.45 Plenary 2
Crystal Abidin Vote for my Selfie: Politician selfies as
charismatic leadership

12.45-2.00 Lunch

2.00-3.00 Panel
Sanjay Sharma Black Twitter, Hashtag Activism and
Networked Selfies
Simon Faulkner A civil contract of the networked
photographic image?
Farida Vis - Algorithmic Visibility: Edgerank, Selfies and the
Networked Photograph
3.00-4.00 Discussion

Abstracts
Crystal Abidin - Vote for my selfie: Politician selfies as
charismatic leadership
Politicians taking selfies have received their fair share of praise for
connecting with voters during campaign trails, and flak for
inappropriate displays ala the widely publicized Cameron-ThorningObama selfie at Nelson Mandelas funeral in December 2013. But
what happens when politicians take to regularly publishing selfcurated selfie streams on their personal social media accounts?
When selfies are the new political photo op, the everyday and
mundane can become a spectacle and a site for naturalized
vernacular campaigning. This talk looks at Singaporean Minister of
Parliament (MP) Baey Yam Keng as a case study in investigating
how charismatic leadership can be mediated through the
repertoire of social media and popular selfie tropes. In the wake of
voting campaigns taking to online ground in the most recent
General Elections 2011, and with the ruling party having garnered
its lowest share of electoral votes since state independence, MP
Baey has emerged as a press-branded selfie king, social media
celebrity, and Twitter influencer for engaging with the online
citizenry since publishing his first selfie in March 2013, with a fan
base to boot. Drawing on his Instagram feed and selfie-related
engagements, this talk seeks to demonstrate how politician selfies
can be exercised to solicit affect and mobilize public sentiment
among voters.

Simon Faulkner - A civil contract of the networked

photographic image?
In 2008, the Israeli writer Ariella Azoulay published her influential
book The Civil Contract of Photograph. One of the key ideas in this
book involves the suggestion that photography can create a civil
relationship between spectators and people pictured in
photographic images. This idea involves the philosophical

abstraction and idealisation of relationships between the

production, circulation, and use of photographic images. To some
degree this abstraction of photographic relations works with the
isolated images that Azoulay discusses. However what happens
when these ideas are applied to the messier conditions of social
media images? To begin thinking about this question, the paper
will consider an image circulated on Twitter in 2014 of two
demonstrators in the West Bank village of Bilin who are holding
up a sign upon which is written: I cant breathe! Justice for #Eric
Garner #From Palestine To Ferguson. This image appears to
involve an act of informal and virtual citizenship through which the
plight of others (in the United States) is recognised on the part of
people (in the occupied West Bank) who themselves lack full civil
rights. With this image and others like it in mind, the paper seeks
to explore whether the use of photography on Twitter constitutes
an actual rather than idealised means of realising civil relations
through photography.

Adi Kuntsman - Acts of Selfie Citizenship

Selfie citizenship, as a practice and a concept, opens up new
ways of thinking about citizenship practices in the digital age, that
do not dismiss selfies as a self-centered obsession, nor idealise
selfie-based actions as inherently positive and transformative.
Rather, selfie citizenship is a critical conceptual tool to look at the
many forms of individualised, and collective political engagement
via the visual language of social media, or what can be coined,
following Engin Isins terms, acts of selfie citizenship. Such acts
need to be analysed as a visual phenomenon (What kind of
iconographies do acts of selfie citizenship mobilise? How do these
images travel?), and as a networked one (How and where are acts
of selfie citizenship circulated? How and when they can become
visible, and to whom? Who are their human and non-human
audiences?) But crucially, it is also a phenomenon involving a
specific social practice an act of citizenship that is mobilising the
individual body and face through a set of digital gestures,
generating particular forms of spectatorial intimacies and
performative affects.

Sanjay Sharma - Black Twitter, Hashtag Activism and

Networked Selfies
Black Twitter has been associated with modes of hashtag activism
which contest and bypass the gate-keeping function of
mainstream media. Recent protests against the deaths of AfricanAmericans at the hands of the police in the USA have garnered
attention vis--vis the viral circulation of hashtags such as
#blacklivesmatter and #icantbreathe. My discussion explores the
possibility of Selfie citizenship which operates beyond the
prevalent view of Selfies as narcissistic practices of (micro)celebrity. Arguably, the display or tagging of Selfies with politicized
hashtags appear to transforms these images beyond individualistic
pursuits of self-promotion, and mark a shift towards more
collective forms of visual protest and solidarity. However, to
examine such claims in relation to Black Twitter, we will need to
consider issues of authenticity, the performance of networked
identities and the attention economy.

Farida Vis - Algorithmic Visibility: Edgerank, Selfies and the

Networked Photograph
In October 2011 I saw a picture of an Egyptian protester pop up
on my Facebook newsfeed. I saw it because a friend of mine had
commented on the image. Because of our perceived close tie, it
was shown to me. The image showed a man holding up a home
made cardboard sign highlighting his solidarity with the Occupy
protests that were occurring in Oakland, in the US. The sign
included a hashtag and the arresting words dont afraid. The
composition of the image, the sign and the mans face (seemingly
inviting us to look) stopped me in my tracks. Months later when I
tried to find the image again I was surprised that I couldn't. I
couldnt find it anywhere on my friends wall, it was as if I hadnt
seen it or it hadnt been shown to me in the first place. I have
thought a lot about that image since. I have since tracked it down,
and made contact with the photographer. I also found a series of
other images from the same protest. In the context of thinking
through what selfie citizenship might entail and how such
networked images are able or not to give rise to the possibility for
acts of citizenship, however fleeting, it is important to consider the

role algorithms play in what we may term algorithmic visibility.

This then asks us to consider what happens before we see or are
shown a networked image: how algorithms like Facebooks
Edgerank might make certain images visible to us, but not others.
This forces us to think about what such algorithmic sorting might
mean for the opening up or indeed prematurely closing down of
possibilities for selfie citizenship

Jill Walker Rettberg - Biometric Citizens: Adapting Ourselves

To Machine Vision
Selfies have become an important way in which we express
ourselves to each other, but we rarely stop to think about the nonhuman audiences for the images we share. Facial recognition
software grinds through photos posted to Facebook, Tumblr,
Instagram and elsewhere. Faces are matched and sorted, to make
users' image curation more seamless but of course also for
commercial and surveillance purposes. Emotion detection software
is emerging as another way in which images of faces are being
interpreted in ways that are beyond the control of the subject and
photographer of the selfie. This presentation explores a selection
of photography apps and devices targeted at ordinary users and
explores how they become active cognizers, to use N. Katherine
Hayles term, structuring and directing the user's choices in
creating a photograph. In this way, algorithms guide us into
creating images of ourselves that are easily parsed by machines,
whether to affirm identity or assess whether we are in need of
assistance or are a threat. Biometrics and expression analysis are
becoming new method for regulating citizens.

Speakers
Crystal Abidin is pursuing a PhD in Anthropology & Sociology,
and Communication & Media Studies at the University of Western
Australia, Perth. She is also currently a Visiting Doctoral Fellow at
the Media Management and Transformation Center at Jnkping
University, Sweden. While Crystal primarily researches Internet
culture, her academic interests include gender & sexuality
performance and identity, social media commerce, virality, and
youth use, and mixed race studies. She has most recently
published on disorder and intimacy with technological devices, and
the commercial appropriation of Instagram.
Simon Faulkner is the Programme Leader in Art History at
Manchester School of Art, UK. His current research is on
relationships between visual culture and the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Recent publications include The Most Photographed Wall
in the World (Photographies, September 2012), about
photographs of the West Bank Barrier and Images and
Demonstrations in the Occupied West Bank (JOMEC Journal,
November 2013). This research has also involved collaborative
work with visual practitioners, for example, Between States, a
book developed with the Israeli artist David Reeb, will be
published 2015. He is also currently a co-investigator on Picturing
the Social, an eighteen month long ESRC funded research project
on social media images.
Adi Kuntsman is lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University,
UK. Adi published extensively on queer and migrant on-line
communities, regional Internet cultures in the Middle East and
Eastern and Central Europe, practices and aesthetics of cyberhate,
conflict and memory in digital domains, digital emotions, and more
recently, political violence and militarism on social media . Adis
recent books include Figurations of Violence and Belonging:
Queerness, Mingranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and
Beyond; Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion: Feelings,
Affect and Technological Change, Basingstoke and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan (co-edited collection (with Athina
Karatzogianni); and Digital Militarism: Israeli Occupation in the
Social Media Age (co-authored with Rebecca Stein).

Sanjay Sharma is a Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences, Media &

Communications, Brunel University London, UK. His recent work
includes exploring the pedagogy of racialized representation and
affect, and technologies of race. In particular, he is interrogating
the materialities of digital race and networked racisms. He is the
author of Multicultural Encounters (2006, Palgrave), and is a cofounder/editor of the open access darkmatter Journal.
Farida Vis is a Faculty Research Fellow in the Information School
at the University of Sheffield. Her Fellowship is on Big Data and
Social Change, focusing on social media, Big Data, data journalism
and citizen engagement. She develops critical methods and tools
for analysing social media data and has worked in this area for
nearly a decade. She sits on the World Economic Forums Global
Agenda Council on Social Media, the Board of Directors for the Big
Boulder Initiative as well as the Editorial Boards of several new
journals, including Big Data & Society and Social Media & Society.
Farida advises several UK research councils on developing funding
opportunities in social media research, for example through the
ESRCs Social Media Working Group. She is currently principal
investigator on the ESRC Picturing the Social project and directs
the Visual Social Media Lab. She is a regular public speaker and
tweets as @flygirltwo.
Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the
University of Bergen, and her research centres on how we tell
stories online. Her most recent book is Seeing Ourselves Through
Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to
See and Shape Ourselves, published by Palgrave in October 2014
and available both in print and as a free download. She is also the
author of Blogging (Polity Press, 2008, 2nd ed 2014) and co-editor
of a scholarly anthology of articles on World of Warcraft (MIT
Press 2008).