Amy S Dobson
Biographic Data
| ID | 4250202 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amy S Dobson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amy S |
| FAMILY NAME | Dobson |
| SIGNATURE | DOBSON A S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Curtin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4349-0815 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 125 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Algorithmic Gossip in Young People’s Accounts of ‘Unhealthy’ Advertising on Social Media
The algorithmic and individualised nature of advertising on social media - and the intentionally opaque and unobservable design of advertising algorithms - makes them difficult to study. We turn to participatory methods, working with 204 young Australians as 'citizen scientists' to collect 5169 screenshots of 'unhealthy' advertising on social media. Through SMS chat over a one week period, we engaged our participants in 'algorithmic gossip' to th…
Screenshot Methodologies to Collect and Analyse Social Media Platform Advertising
This paper presents three projects where we have developed participatory digital research methods designed to extend observability of digital advertising on social media platforms and engage with users’ individual experiences with digital advertising. In each approach, participants collected instances of digital advertising from social media apps by taking screenshots or using a screen-capture mobile app. Participants also assumed active roles in…
Cinch, filter, erase
Selfie-editing technologies (including in-phone editing tools, filters, and apps like Facetune) provide the ability digitally edit and “enhance” facial and body features in photos. This article extends a theorization of “the virtual” developing from earlier approaches in feminist sociology and digital media studies, to consider the implications of selfie-editing capacities for how young people navigate selfhood in contemporary visual cultures. We…
All the rage - and other feelings
Feminist anger and rage have taken on a new visibility in the post-#MeToo moment, after decades of muting and prohibition related in part to the dominance of a postfeminist sensibility, and the ongoing force of normative femininity with its renunciation of anger. In this article, we extend a body of research on #MeToo and rage which has centred on 'feminist flashpoints', the cultural products of #MeToo and digital feminist activism. Our focus is …
Hang on, why am I editing my photos?' Disrupting the virtual gaze through selfie-editing workshops
This article presents findings from a qualitative study that aimed to provide some of the first detailed accounts of how young people use selfie-editing apps, and the implications for young people's embodiment, body concerns and wellbeing. In particular, the article introduces the method of 'smartphone live capture' in selfie-editing workshops as a way of studying the actual practice and meanings associated with editing in 'real time' with small …
Observing “tuned” advertising on digital platforms
The hyper-targeted advertising that emerged on digital platforms over the past two decades is now more productively understood as tuned advertising, a dynamic and unfolding process where ads are continuously algorithmically "optimised" to users in real time. Following Rieder and Hofmann (2020), we aim to develop a framework for the "conditions for the practice of observing" algorithmically-tuned digital advertising. We draw on our research across…
No Targets, Just Vibes
Digital advertising's cultural surround is algorithmically tuned. The popular narrative about digital advertising is that it is hyper-targeted and customized. In this article, we argue that digital platforms' targeted advertising is more productively understood as tuned advertising, where algorithmic models optimize the resonance between ads and consumers in a continuous rhythmic flow of images, videos, and text. We develop the concept of tuned a…
The Algorithmic Flow of Harmful Industries Advertising on Social Media Platforms
Advertising shapes our larger public culture but the typical experience of advertising is now confined to our private and algorithmically-customised social media feeds. In this project, with our partner VicHealth, we used a participatory digital method to work with 204 young Australians aged 18 to 25 to collect 5169 examples of alcohol, gambling and fast food advertising from their social media feeds. We analyse the collections of advertisements …
Tinder marketing and transnational postfeminist media cultures
This paper explores how Tinder marketing responds to gender politics and discourses within contemporary postfeminist media cultures transnationally. We provide a comparative semiotic analysis of the prominent Tinder advertising campaign Single, Not Sorry, which runs across several European countries, as well as the UK and USA, with marketing material from Tinder India’s YouTube page. Challenging sexist cultural stereotypes and norms of feminine s…
Making do on not much
In the years following the 2008 global financial crisis (“GFC”), feminist media scholarship has drawn attention to the gendered calls in Western media culture to remake subjectivity in line with imperatives of thrift required in conditions of austerity. In the shared symbolic environments that “gender the recession” (Negra & Tasker, 2014), media ranging from news, reality television, and film have placed further, intensified demands on women’s do…
We’re just data
Social media platforms and apps have become increasingly important tools for governance and the centralisation of information in many nation states around the globe. In China, the government is currently piloting a social credit system in several cities in an ambitious attempt to merge a financial credit score system with a broader quantification of social and civic integrity for all citizens and corporations. China has already begun to experimen…
For myself and others like me”
Vulva-positive websites, a sub-type of body-positive sites, reveal women’s discursive, affective, and pragmatic responses to ideals of “normal” and “beautiful” female genitalia. Body-positive sites have been positioned by critical feminist and Foucauldian theorists as facilitating women’s self-surveillance and regulation. To understand how women represent what a vulva-positive site does and what it means to them, we analysed a year’s textual post…
From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry
Feminist scholars have begun to unpack the ways in which neoliberalism is underpinned by particular gendered affective investments: drives for perfection, confidence, and the careful observance of feeling rules mandating a pleasing balance of resilience and approachability. In this context, we are interested in mapping the cultural production of affective dissonances with neoliberal modes of thriving. We draw attention to post-recessional televis…
Sext education
In this paper, we explore how what we term ‘sext education’ pedagogies intersect with young people's understandings of, and talk about, sexting through a feminist analysis of two cyber-safety campaign films: Tagged from Australia and Exposed from the UK. The films tell alarming stories about the ways in which teenage girls' digital interactions and representations can be misused by their peers. We explore the normative construction of schools as …
From the dancehall to Facebook
Shayla Thiel-Stern’s From the Dancehall to Facebook maps moral panics in US mass media centrally involving girls and young women. The chapters cover news media stories about girls attending danceha
Algorithmic Hotness
This article examines how the circulation of images on mobile and algorithmic social media platforms is gendered. We draw on data from a research project that examines the interplay between promotion, drinking culture, and social media. In this project, informants documented flows of images between their social media accounts and a nightlife precinct. We show how the human capacity to use bodies to affect other bodies, and to make critical judgme…
Postfeminist Digital Cultures
This book explores the controversial social media practices engaged in by girls and young women, including sexual self-representations on social network sites, sexting, and self-harm vlogs. Informed b
Post-girlpower
Roughly 10 years since the Spice Girls exited the global music charts, having thoroughly implanted a ‘girlpower’ ideal and aesthetic in the popular cultural landscape, where are we now? In 2009, Go
Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times
Post-structuralist youth studies theorists have argued for nuanced perspectives on agency that are not reliant on an assumption of subjects as rational and internally coherent individuals, and understand subjectivity and social structure as produced in concert. These are important theoretical developments that have shaped recent scholarship on girls' identities and cultures. In this paper, we seek to give them some further sociological grounding …
Laddishness Online
In a textual analysis of public social network site (SNS) profiles owned by young women aged between 18 and 21, many of the profiles contain representations of self which would typically be considered 'unfeminine'. Photos of young women and their friends posed with wide open mouths and protruding tongues and images depicting drunkenness and raucousness are common. This kind of 'laddish' performativity by young women leaves feminists, especially t…
Performative shamelessness on young women’s social network sites
In this paper, I ask what the self-representations of young women on social network sites can tell us about the conditions and experience of inhabiting femininity in the digitally mediated post-feminist context. First, I outline four conditions of post-feminist girlhood that I suggest young women must navigate in the processes of subjectivity construction. I then describe some of the common kinds of performativity found on a small selection of so…
Sexy” And “Laddish” Girls
Unpacking ideologies at work within contemporary popular media discourses about young womanhood can be challenging when the terrain of their representation is often presented in a kind of binary-oppositional fashion. There is concern that in contemporary popular culture traditional gender roles are becoming even more entrenched, with femininity increasingly defined around notions of (hyper, hetero-normative) “sexiness.” At the same time, it seems…
Individuality is everything’
This article explores some popular constructions of young femininity on MySpace profiles through an examination of the affirmative or ‘inspirational’–style mottos and self-descriptions commonly posted on a sample of 45 public profiles maintained by Australian women aged between 18 and 21. In these texts self-esteem, self-worth, and self-determination are expressed in markedly uncompromising tones. Such textual expressions, I argue, may indicate a…
Socioeconomic position and hysterectomy
OBJECTIVES: To examine the associations between indicators of socioeconomic position (SEP) and hysterectomy in two Australian and two British cohorts. STUDY POPULATION: Women participating in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health (ALSWH), born 1921-1926 and 1946-1951, and two cohorts of British women, the British Women's Heart and Health Study and the MRC National Survey of Health and Development, born at similar times (1920 to 1939…
Performative shamelessness on young women’s social network sites
In this paper, I ask what the self-representations of young women on social network sites can tell us about the conditions and experience of inhabiting femininity in the digitally mediated post-feminist context. First, I outline four conditions of post-feminist girlhood that I suggest young women must navigate in the processes of subjectivity construction. I then describe some of the common kinds of performativity found on a small selection of so…
Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times
Post-structuralist youth studies theorists have argued for nuanced perspectives on agency that are not reliant on an assumption of subjects as rational and internally coherent individuals, and understand subjectivity and social structure as produced in concert. These are important theoretical developments that have shaped recent scholarship on girls' identities and cultures. In this paper, we seek to give them some further sociological grounding …
From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry
Feminist scholars have begun to unpack the ways in which neoliberalism is underpinned by particular gendered affective investments: drives for perfection, confidence, and the careful observance of feeling rules mandating a pleasing balance of resilience and approachability. In this context, we are interested in mapping the cultural production of affective dissonances with neoliberal modes of thriving. We draw attention to post-recessional televis…
Individuality is everything’
This article explores some popular constructions of young femininity on MySpace profiles through an examination of the affirmative or ‘inspirational’–style mottos and self-descriptions commonly posted on a sample of 45 public profiles maintained by Australian women aged between 18 and 21. In these texts self-esteem, self-worth, and self-determination are expressed in markedly uncompromising tones. Such textual expressions, I argue, may indicate a…
Sexy” And “Laddish” Girls
Unpacking ideologies at work within contemporary popular media discourses about young womanhood can be challenging when the terrain of their representation is often presented in a kind of binary-oppositional fashion. There is concern that in contemporary popular culture traditional gender roles are becoming even more entrenched, with femininity increasingly defined around notions of (hyper, hetero-normative) “sexiness.” At the same time, it seems…
For myself and others like me”
Vulva-positive websites, a sub-type of body-positive sites, reveal women’s discursive, affective, and pragmatic responses to ideals of “normal” and “beautiful” female genitalia. Body-positive sites have been positioned by critical feminist and Foucauldian theorists as facilitating women’s self-surveillance and regulation. To understand how women represent what a vulva-positive site does and what it means to them, we analysed a year’s textual post…
Algorithmic Hotness
This article examines how the circulation of images on mobile and algorithmic social media platforms is gendered. We draw on data from a research project that examines the interplay between promotion, drinking culture, and social media. In this project, informants documented flows of images between their social media accounts and a nightlife precinct. We show how the human capacity to use bodies to affect other bodies, and to make critical judgme…
Post-girlpower
Roughly 10 years since the Spice Girls exited the global music charts, having thoroughly implanted a ‘girlpower’ ideal and aesthetic in the popular cultural landscape, where are we now? In 2009, Go
Tinder marketing and transnational postfeminist media cultures
This paper explores how Tinder marketing responds to gender politics and discourses within contemporary postfeminist media cultures transnationally. We provide a comparative semiotic analysis of the prominent Tinder advertising campaign Single, Not Sorry, which runs across several European countries, as well as the UK and USA, with marketing material from Tinder India’s YouTube page. Challenging sexist cultural stereotypes and norms of feminine s…
Cinch, filter, erase
Selfie-editing technologies (including in-phone editing tools, filters, and apps like Facetune) provide the ability digitally edit and “enhance” facial and body features in photos. This article extends a theorization of “the virtual” developing from earlier approaches in feminist sociology and digital media studies, to consider the implications of selfie-editing capacities for how young people navigate selfhood in contemporary visual cultures. We…
Socioeconomic position and hysterectomy
OBJECTIVES: To examine the associations between indicators of socioeconomic position (SEP) and hysterectomy in two Australian and two British cohorts. STUDY POPULATION: Women participating in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health (ALSWH), born 1921-1926 and 1946-1951, and two cohorts of British women, the British Women's Heart and Health Study and the MRC National Survey of Health and Development, born at similar times (1920 to 1939…
Sexy” And “Laddish” Girls
Unpacking ideologies at work within contemporary popular media discourses about young womanhood can be challenging when the terrain of their representation is often presented in a kind of binary-oppositional fashion. There is concern that in contemporary popular culture traditional gender roles are becoming even more entrenched, with femininity increasingly defined around notions of (hyper, hetero-normative) “sexiness.” At the same time, it seems…
Individuality is everything’
This article explores some popular constructions of young femininity on MySpace profiles through an examination of the affirmative or ‘inspirational’–style mottos and self-descriptions commonly posted on a sample of 45 public profiles maintained by Australian women aged between 18 and 21. In these texts self-esteem, self-worth, and self-determination are expressed in markedly uncompromising tones. Such textual expressions, I argue, may indicate a…
Laddishness Online
In a textual analysis of public social network site (SNS) profiles owned by young women aged between 18 and 21, many of the profiles contain representations of self which would typically be considered 'unfeminine'. Photos of young women and their friends posed with wide open mouths and protruding tongues and images depicting drunkenness and raucousness are common. This kind of 'laddish' performativity by young women leaves feminists, especially t…
Performative shamelessness on young women’s social network sites
In this paper, I ask what the self-representations of young women on social network sites can tell us about the conditions and experience of inhabiting femininity in the digitally mediated post-feminist context. First, I outline four conditions of post-feminist girlhood that I suggest young women must navigate in the processes of subjectivity construction. I then describe some of the common kinds of performativity found on a small selection of so…
Postfeminist Digital Cultures
This book explores the controversial social media practices engaged in by girls and young women, including sexual self-representations on social network sites, sexting, and self-harm vlogs. Informed b
Post-girlpower
Roughly 10 years since the Spice Girls exited the global music charts, having thoroughly implanted a ‘girlpower’ ideal and aesthetic in the popular cultural landscape, where are we now? In 2009, Go
Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times
Post-structuralist youth studies theorists have argued for nuanced perspectives on agency that are not reliant on an assumption of subjects as rational and internally coherent individuals, and understand subjectivity and social structure as produced in concert. These are important theoretical developments that have shaped recent scholarship on girls' identities and cultures. In this paper, we seek to give them some further sociological grounding …
Sext education
In this paper, we explore how what we term ‘sext education’ pedagogies intersect with young people's understandings of, and talk about, sexting through a feminist analysis of two cyber-safety campaign films: Tagged from Australia and Exposed from the UK. The films tell alarming stories about the ways in which teenage girls' digital interactions and representations can be misused by their peers. We explore the normative construction of schools as …
From the dancehall to Facebook
Shayla Thiel-Stern’s From the Dancehall to Facebook maps moral panics in US mass media centrally involving girls and young women. The chapters cover news media stories about girls attending danceha
Algorithmic Hotness
This article examines how the circulation of images on mobile and algorithmic social media platforms is gendered. We draw on data from a research project that examines the interplay between promotion, drinking culture, and social media. In this project, informants documented flows of images between their social media accounts and a nightlife precinct. We show how the human capacity to use bodies to affect other bodies, and to make critical judgme…
For myself and others like me”
Vulva-positive websites, a sub-type of body-positive sites, reveal women’s discursive, affective, and pragmatic responses to ideals of “normal” and “beautiful” female genitalia. Body-positive sites have been positioned by critical feminist and Foucauldian theorists as facilitating women’s self-surveillance and regulation. To understand how women represent what a vulva-positive site does and what it means to them, we analysed a year’s textual post…
From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry
Feminist scholars have begun to unpack the ways in which neoliberalism is underpinned by particular gendered affective investments: drives for perfection, confidence, and the careful observance of feeling rules mandating a pleasing balance of resilience and approachability. In this context, we are interested in mapping the cultural production of affective dissonances with neoliberal modes of thriving. We draw attention to post-recessional televis…
We’re just data
Social media platforms and apps have become increasingly important tools for governance and the centralisation of information in many nation states around the globe. In China, the government is currently piloting a social credit system in several cities in an ambitious attempt to merge a financial credit score system with a broader quantification of social and civic integrity for all citizens and corporations. China has already begun to experimen…
Making do on not much
In the years following the 2008 global financial crisis (“GFC”), feminist media scholarship has drawn attention to the gendered calls in Western media culture to remake subjectivity in line with imperatives of thrift required in conditions of austerity. In the shared symbolic environments that “gender the recession” (Negra & Tasker, 2014), media ranging from news, reality television, and film have placed further, intensified demands on women’s do…
The Algorithmic Flow of Harmful Industries Advertising on Social Media Platforms
Advertising shapes our larger public culture but the typical experience of advertising is now confined to our private and algorithmically-customised social media feeds. In this project, with our partner VicHealth, we used a participatory digital method to work with 204 young Australians aged 18 to 25 to collect 5169 examples of alcohol, gambling and fast food advertising from their social media feeds. We analyse the collections of advertisements …
Tinder marketing and transnational postfeminist media cultures
This paper explores how Tinder marketing responds to gender politics and discourses within contemporary postfeminist media cultures transnationally. We provide a comparative semiotic analysis of the prominent Tinder advertising campaign Single, Not Sorry, which runs across several European countries, as well as the UK and USA, with marketing material from Tinder India’s YouTube page. Challenging sexist cultural stereotypes and norms of feminine s…
Observing “tuned” advertising on digital platforms
The hyper-targeted advertising that emerged on digital platforms over the past two decades is now more productively understood as tuned advertising, a dynamic and unfolding process where ads are continuously algorithmically "optimised" to users in real time. Following Rieder and Hofmann (2020), we aim to develop a framework for the "conditions for the practice of observing" algorithmically-tuned digital advertising. We draw on our research across…
No Targets, Just Vibes
Digital advertising's cultural surround is algorithmically tuned. The popular narrative about digital advertising is that it is hyper-targeted and customized. In this article, we argue that digital platforms' targeted advertising is more productively understood as tuned advertising, where algorithmic models optimize the resonance between ads and consumers in a continuous rhythmic flow of images, videos, and text. We develop the concept of tuned a…
Algorithmic Gossip in Young People’s Accounts of ‘Unhealthy’ Advertising on Social Media
The algorithmic and individualised nature of advertising on social media - and the intentionally opaque and unobservable design of advertising algorithms - makes them difficult to study. We turn to participatory methods, working with 204 young Australians as 'citizen scientists' to collect 5169 screenshots of 'unhealthy' advertising on social media. Through SMS chat over a one week period, we engaged our participants in 'algorithmic gossip' to th…
Screenshot Methodologies to Collect and Analyse Social Media Platform Advertising
This paper presents three projects where we have developed participatory digital research methods designed to extend observability of digital advertising on social media platforms and engage with users’ individual experiences with digital advertising. In each approach, participants collected instances of digital advertising from social media apps by taking screenshots or using a screen-capture mobile app. Participants also assumed active roles in…
Cinch, filter, erase
Selfie-editing technologies (including in-phone editing tools, filters, and apps like Facetune) provide the ability digitally edit and “enhance” facial and body features in photos. This article extends a theorization of “the virtual” developing from earlier approaches in feminist sociology and digital media studies, to consider the implications of selfie-editing capacities for how young people navigate selfhood in contemporary visual cultures. We…
All the rage - and other feelings
Feminist anger and rage have taken on a new visibility in the post-#MeToo moment, after decades of muting and prohibition related in part to the dominance of a postfeminist sensibility, and the ongoing force of normative femininity with its renunciation of anger. In this article, we extend a body of research on #MeToo and rage which has centred on 'feminist flashpoints', the cultural products of #MeToo and digital feminist activism. Our focus is …
Hang on, why am I editing my photos?' Disrupting the virtual gaze through selfie-editing workshops
This article presents findings from a qualitative study that aimed to provide some of the first detailed accounts of how young people use selfie-editing apps, and the implications for young people's embodiment, body concerns and wellbeing. In particular, the article introduces the method of 'smartphone live capture' in selfie-editing workshops as a way of studying the actual practice and meanings associated with editing in 'real time' with small …
Gender, Feminism, and Media (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Social media (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Advertising (7 works) · Business (7 works)