Terri Senft is also working on selfies, and started up a Selfie Research Network on Facebook the other day. The group already has 180 members and is a very active site of sharing and conversation. There’s a Zotero bibliography and a shared Evernote folder as well, and a database of people is in the making, so feel free to join if you’re interested.

One of Terri’s questions to the group was whether we should submit an experimental session for AoIR in Bangkok  in October, and lots of great ideas come up. Me, I want to do an online workshop. Ideally for AoIR, perhaps for my students next semester, but definitely building on the way that the online self-portrait courses I’ve taken are structured – so requiring participants to share images – but also thinking about ourselves as scholars and researchers. Really, every piece of scholarly writing is a selfie, of sorts, more or less obviously. As we study visual, networked culture, we need to be thinking more about how we ourselves develop and communicate ideas visually, and a workshop where we actually create images and think through photography would be really interesting.

Foucault talks about technologies of the self, and about ways in which different cultures have seen it as necessary to cultivate (and discipline) the self, and that self-care for the ancient Greeks was seen as a pre-requisite for self-knowledge. Self-portraits and blogs can be a very deliberate form of self-cultivation, as the title of the book Blogging for Bliss suggests, and in addition to books there are online courses you can take in order to become a happier, more confident person through self-portraits, blogging or scrapbooking. I’m currently following Becky Higgin’s Project Real Life, and last year I followed the NOW YOU self-portrait course.

These courses are all about empowering women – always women – to see beauty in themselves and their surroundings. They can also be seen as a way in which women are disciplined, much as women’s magazines, as Angela McRobbie notes, have been “instrumental in the training of middle class young women,” from “cleanliness, hygiene, and the whole business of good housekeeping” to “fashion, beauty and rituals around the social calendar and courtship”.

I don’t have clear assignments in mind, but I’d like at least something that is very concrete and specific and that has participants actually taking photos. I’m not sure how far to delve into taking conventional selfies.

• Photograph workspace, or self doing research (writing? reading? in café? at desk? in bed? interviewing informants? thinking?)
• Everyone analyses the same selfie or case study (e.g. a celebrity’s selfie) together
• Everyone finds an example of certain kind of selfie (pregnant selfie, selfie with friend, selfie with children, selfie alone, sad selfie, funeral selfie, silly selfie, sexy selfie etc) and shares that image to the private group with a brief analysis. We see what happens when you read all the individual images and analyses together.
• Take photos of various research related items and create a collage. Write, um, something.
• Take a photo of an accessory, gadget or piece of clothing that helps you feel confident as an academic – for instance when presenting at a conference. Or that doesn’t help you feel confident.
• Creating academic memes, like Talan Memmott’s for electronic literature, or the ones Leonardo Flores has his students create.

I’m sure there are better ideas, this is just a start.

You could take something like this in many different directions. You could certainly do a sort of leading people through finding themselves as researchers through photography and writing thing. But I think what would be more interesting is if we can find ways to cultivate thinking visually as researchers.

Any ideas?