About the project – Exploring Ephemeral Feminisms on Portuguese Instagram

Social media platforms, like Instagram, allow for a wide range of people – including those outside traditional activist circles – to create or engage with feminist content within quotidian social media practices, with political content co-existing with personal, mundane, or aesthetically-oriented content. This project will explore how online feminist practices take shape in increasingly popular yet under- researched practices of ephemeral social media by focusing on Instagram Stories, exploring the new dynamics these carry.

This project explores the under-studied local context of Portugal. Portugal is experiencing a moment of political polarisation, which is reflected in its social media landscape. Feminist and political discourses are common on Instagram yet often met with backlash from conservative or right-wing voices. This is a rich and novel site for the analysis of these dynamics, revealing local particularities that are absent from Anglo-Saxon contexts.

This project addresses three research objectives: analyse how feminisms are expressed through ephemeral social media affordances; explore what conventions and concerns underly the creation of feminist content; and examine how audiences engage with feminisms on Instagram. This project proposes an innovative ethics-driven, multi-methodological approach. It combines qualitative strategies with the use of digital tools for an exploratory analysis of feminist Instagram Stories; in-depth interviews with feminist content-creators; and focus groups with social media users who engage with feminist content on Instagram.

The project “Exploring Ephemeral Feminisms on Portuguese Instagram” is being developed under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship, hosted at CICANT, Lusófona University, Portugal. Dr. Carla Cerqueira acts as the project’s advisor.

CICANT (DOI: 10.54499/UIDB/05260/2020)

About the researcher – Sofia P. Caldeira

Sofia P. Caldeira is a researcher whose work focuses primarily on feminist media studies, social media practices, politics of gender representation, and everyday aesthetics. She holds a Communication Sciences PhD from Ghent University, Belgium (2020), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

You can find her work on journals such as Social Media + Society, Feminist Media Studies, Information Communication & Society, amongst others. She is also the Chair of the Digital Culture and Communication section of ECREA.

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