Digital Intimacy: Young Women & Social Transformation in Asia | Mini Symposium#4
How do young women understand and experience intimacy in the age of social media? Are their experiences qualitatively different after the millennial turn and the rapid expansion of digital technologies? What impact do these digital experiences and understanding of intimacy have on how millennial subjects experience, understand and negotiate social relations in globalising Asia?
This mini-symposia series is a part of the multi-sited ongoing research project, Digital Intimacy: Young Women and Social Transformation in Asia, which looks at college-going women in Bangalore, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou to understand how their lives in these aspiring “smart” cities are being shaped by the phenomenal growth of digital technology use in Asia in the past ten years. It aims to throw new light on emerging practices of digital intimacy, with specific reference to how young, college-going women cultivate digital personae of their selves, and how such personae forge new ways of negotiating and navigating the realms of (a) courtship/marriage, (b) kinship/family and (c) tertiary education.
The research is supported by the Research Grants Council, Hong Kong.
Mini-Symposium series | Digital Intimacy: Young Women & Social Transformation in Asia
Date: April 14, 2022 (Thursday)
Time: 20:30 HK/Singapore/China ; 18:00 India
Format: Zoom
Speakers: Li Sipan and Nisha Susan
Register here: https://lingnan.asia.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bl5HjGFGBgdZo2y
Speakers:
Li Sipan
Feminist Activist / Journalist
Associate Professor, the Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication, Shantou University
“The mainstreaming of feminist users on social media has increased awareness of more people, cultivated new activists, expanded the constituency and community network for online and offline mobilization, and also has created a supportive network for online and offline mobilization, and also has created a supportive climate for policy advocacy. However, its political and commercial roots has undermined the critical and emancipative potential of feminism, limiting the feminist agenda to the living world of urban middle-class people. Facing this uncertainty between activism and consumerism, how do we address the theoretical and practical problems of digital feminist activism online?“
Nisha Susan
Writer / Editor
Co-Founder, The Ladies Finger and Grist Media
“From 2000 to 2020, what are the ways in which Indian women formed friendships on the internet? This is a period when friendships thrived on the day’s scandal, the screenshot du jour, the decoding of the subtweet. You wanted to see and be seen online. Affection, in-jokes, gossip. All familiar material. Except that all you had in common (seemingly) was that you were on Twitter. With the rise of the corporate internet particularly after 2010, how did these friendships change? What happens when the niche interest your friendship is based on, is the internet itself?”
Organisers:
Centre for Cultural Research and Development, Lingnan University
Centre for Inter-Asian Research, Ahmedabad University
