Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media

Images of faces, bodies, selves and digital subjectivities abound on new media platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and others-these images represent our new way of being online and of becoming socially mediated. Although researchers are examining digital embodiment, digital representations, and visual vernaculars as a mode of identity performance and management online, there exists no cohesive collection that compiles all these contemporary philosophies into one reader for use in graduate level classrooms or for scholars studying the field. The rationale for this book is to produce a scholarly fulcrum that pulls together scholars from disparate fields of inquiry in the humanities doing work on the common theme of the socially mediated body.

The chapters in Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media represent a diverse list of contributors in terms of author representation, inclusivity of theoretical frameworks of analysis, and geographic reach of empirical work. Divided into three sections representing three dominant paradigms on the socially mediated body: representation, presentation, and embodiment, the book provides classic, creative, and contemporary reworkings of these paradigms.

Katie Warfield is a lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada, and Director of the Visual Media Workshop. Her recent writings have appeared in Social Media + Society, Feminist Media Studies, Language and Literacy, and Feminist Issues, 6th ed.

Crystal Abidin is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, Sweden, Researcher with Handelsrådet (Swedish Retail and Wholesale Development Council), and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University, Australia.

Carolina Cambre is Assistant Professor of Education at Concordia University, Canada. Her interests include the politics of communication, the issue of representation, critical policy analysis & critical visual sociology and anthropology, all with an eye to social justice issues as well as community and identity broadly speaking.