The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India. It looks at how the selfie, unlike the photograph, which was a gesture towards an external reality, remains intimately self-referential, yet reconfigures social ordering, identity formation, agency, and spaces in curious ways.

This volume approaches questions about the construction and performance of the self through the digital selfie and uses this situated, contextualized, and culturally specific phenomenon as a site to explore the themes of self-making, place-making, gender, subjectivity, and power. Highlighting the specific contexts of production, the authors examine the array of self-expressive capabilities realized in a multitude of uses of the selfie that simultaneously reconfigure the self, the space, and the world.

An important study of visual social media culture, the volume will be useful for interpreting everyday media experiences and will be of interest to students and researchers of image studies, visual studies, photography studies, visual culture, media studies, culture studies, cultural anthropology, digital humanities, popular culture, sociology of technology, and South Asian studies.

To add this to your library, visit here.

This article examines ‘instaworthiness’ as a classificatory category in discourses of place-making. It engages in social-semiotic analyses of the selfies clicked at instaworthy cafes and pubs in Kolkata to highlight how the photographic performativity of selfie-taking reconfigures the notions of placemaking. It accounts for: how is an ‘instaworthy’ spot made and consumed? What ramifications does showcasing the self within these specific sites have upon perceptions of identity, both of the self and the space in question? In locating photographic practices of selfies within the wider shifts of the heuristics of ‘instaworthiness’, this article teases out how the self interacts with a diverse range of non-human actors toward conferring visual apartness upon certain spaces. Thus, producing and circulating selfies as a performance warrant thinking through how discourses of the self and that of spatiality co-constitute each other.

To access the article, visit here.