Dwelling as method: Lingering in/with feminist curated data sets on Instagram

Abstract

This article proposes and delineates “digital dwelling” as one method of grappling with a central methodological challenge that we, as feminist researchers, face of how researchers might account for the multiple entanglements of affect, history, culture, politics, and resistance within feminist digital media artifacts. Using our method of digital dwelling, we analyze three sets of carousel posts on Instagram from three different accounts: Intersectional Environmentalist Collective, For the Wild, and Richa Kaul Padte. We explore how the inter, para, and meta-textual arguments curated through these carousel posts change the ways audiences relate to one another and to the current political moment, and how audiences, including individual researchers, are situated in affective and embodied ways within the research scene. By demarcating small, embodied data curation as a key space of method and analysis, we suggest that the personal relationships we develop in community as researchers with located acts of transgression, like these posts, are significant to consider more fully through their emergent intertextualities, especially for those invested in contemporary social media, protest, and visual cultures.

Keywords

• social media
• visual methods
• digital culture
• activism