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.
Poster presentation at MCAA 2025
Sofia P. Caldeira has presented a poster summarising the insights of the EPH-FEM-PI project during the MCAA 2025 conference, which took place in Kraków, Poland, on 21 and 22 March 2025.
Feminist Social Media Toolkit
Social media has steadily become a key tool for contemporary feminist and political action. Yet, its use carries not only potential but also risks and tensions that call for a critical and reflexive approach.
Drawing on the years of research of the Ephemeral Feminisms project, a short toolkit was put together with critical insights that aim to highlight relevant issues and prompt reflection.
Keynote communication at "Digital Horizons: AI, Media and Society"
On 23 January 2025, Sofia P. Caldeira gave a keynote communication entitled "The Age of Self-Representation?" at the event "Digital Horizons: AI, Media and Society." This event was held online and was organised by the students of the Doctoral Programme in Digital Media UP|NOVA|IST.
Keynote communication at the methods workshop "How to deal with ephemeralit?"
On 20 November 2024, Sofia P. Caldeira gave a keynote communication entitled "Ephemeral Feminisms? Challenges and Opportunities in Research of Feminist Practices on Instagram Stories" at the methods workshop "How to deal with ephemerality? Opportunities and challenges in analysis of ephemeral (audio-)visual content." This hybrid workshop - held at the ZeMKI of the University of Bremen, Germany, and online - was organised as a pre-conference of the international conference by the DGPuK (German Communication Association) Visual Communication Section and was co-sponsored by the Visual Communication Studies Division of the ICA.