Clare Southerton

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Verified

Clare verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at Monash University (Australia)

Researching Contemporary Wellness Cultures is an edited collection that brings together scholars examining the various ways and spaces in which wellness is constructed and practices within various sociological sub-disciplines across and in related fields including anthropology, cultural studies, and internet studies.

Digital ethnographers acknowledge that online spaces are always co-produced within the social, political, material and sensory – never distinct from what we may think of as ‘offline’. However, in documenting our fieldwork (e.g. fieldnotes, screenshots and recordings) and representing our findings in research outputs, scholars tend to draw more firm...

In recent times, the micro-video sharing platform TikTok has become extremely popular globally, especially among young people. Psychological and medical topics are among the diverse array of issues addressed on TikTok, sometimes sparking controversies over how “accurate” or helpful the information is. One such issue concerns TikTok content relating...

Objective This paper examines the ways in which young people in Eastern Canada learn about menstruation and construct personal period pedagogies through embodied experiences and encounters with digital and social media. Design A qualitative exploratory approach was undertaken to elicit the stories and voices of young people who menstruate. Menstru...

As methodologies for studying TikTok continue to develop, deliberation among research communities can offer valuable insights to incorporate different approaches and iterate on emerging research designs. In July 2021, the TikTok Cultures Research Network held a public research forum on TikTok methodologies that was attended by over two-hundred rese...

Digital self-tracking devices increasingly inhabit everyday landscapes, yet many people abandon self-trackers not long after acquisition. Although research has examined why people discontinue these devices, less explores what actually happens when people unplug. This article addresses this gap by considering the embodied and habitual dimensions of...

This editorial explores how misinformation is expressed across a range of health practices and contexts.

Health misinformation on social media has largely been examined from a harms-focused perspective, with scholars seeking to identify what impacts misinformation has on public health and a popular focus on removing it from platforms. The act of debunking is one response wherein misinformation is corrected with knowledge from scientific sources. To da...

This chapter offers highly original perspectives on social media use from a new materialism perspective. Based on interview data, it reconsiders the role of agency in social media participation in order to challenge increasingly popular complaints about social media as purely manipulative or exploitative. As social media platforms such as Facebook...

With pandemic conditions and social distancing disrupting traditional research methods, the COVID-19 pandemic has left many researchers turning to digital and creative methods, perhaps for the first time. Despite the significant challenges qualitative researchers have faced during the pandemic, this chapter considers what potentials these condition...

Conspiracies have been a cultural mainstay for decades (Melley). While often framed as an American problem (Melley), social media has contributed to their global reach (Gerts et al.). Bruns, Harrington, and Hurcombe have traced the contemporary movement of conspiracy theories into the cultural mainstream from fringe conspiracist groups on social me...

Introduction There are many competing explanations for why people are drawn to conspiracy theories. Increasingly, conspiracy theories are mainstream sites of cultural engagement (Barkun). Conspiracy theorising, then, is part of, or at least brushes up against, people’s daily sense-making practices. However, many still think of conspiracy theorising...

Human bodies are frequently rendered into digitised and datafied formats. People go online, use apps, carry or wear mobile devices, and move around in spaces equipped with digital sensors. When people engage with these technologies, a plethora of information is generated with and about them. This might include their appearance and their bodily func...

Introduction Ever since the widespread distribution and adoption of digital technologies in everyday life from the 1980s onwards, two counter imaginaries have been expressed in both the popular media and the academic literature. The first imaginary deals with the techno- utopian dimensions of novel digital technologies: that is, the almost magical...

As nations reel from the effects of poverty, inequality, climate change and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels as though the world has entered a period characterized by pessimism, cynicism and anxiety. This book challenges individualized understandings of emotion, revealing how they relate to cultural, economic and political realities...

There is a pressing need to facilitate sensitive conversations between people with differing or opposing views. On video-sharing app TikTok, the diverse experiences of donor-conceived people and recipient parents sit uneasily alongside each other, coalescing in hashtags like #donorconceived. This article describes a method ‘Situated Talk’ which use...

For most young people in the western world, everyday routines are fundamentally entangled with digital surveillance. Data-hungry technologies have become deeply embedded in every aspect of life and mediate activities at school, at home and at play. It is no longer a question of when young people are under surveillance but how surveillance encounter...

We live in a pre-crime society. Within this society, information technology strategies and techniques such as predictive policing, actuarial justice and surveillance penology are used to achieve hyper-securitization. However, such securitization comes at a cost. In this new people-making society, the criminalisation of everyday life is guaranteed,...

Introduction ‘Data is the new currency’ has become a deceptively simple mantra of the past decade; it is the oil of the digital era, the hitherto untapped gold mine of the 21st century. If we take the metaphor a little further and think of the phrase ‘to have currency’ (meaning something has a lot of value), is it then to suggest that those who pro...

This article explores the queer practices of a subgroup of One Direction fans known as Larries. The Larries believe that former One Direction boyband members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson (referred to by the portmanteau ‘Larry Stylinson’) were, or are, in a relationship. This article draws on a digital ethnography with the Larry fandom conducted...

While TikTok’s popularity has risen dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, so too has concern about misinformation about the virus on the app. Many accounts of the“infodemic”—the war against misinformation being waged alongside the pandemic—call for an emphasis on authority and prioritizing content from official accounts on social media platfor...

In the context of recent controversies surrounding the censorship of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer online content, specifically on YouTube and Tumblr, we interrogate the relationship between normative understandings of sexual citizenship and the content classification regimes. We argue that these content classification systems and t...

The Preface and Introduction chapter for The Face Mask in COVID Times: A Sociomaterial Analysis

Facebook is the most used social media platform globally, despite frequent and highly publicised criticism of some of its practices. In this article, we bring together perspectives from vital materialism scholarship – and particularly Jane Bennett’s concept of ‘thing-power’ – with our empirical research on Australian Facebook users to identify what...

Over the past few years, the public image of the hugely successful social media platform and internet empire Facebook has been significantly undermined by high levels of negative publicity worldwide, concerning alleged user-privacy incursions such as the high-profile Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook is often portrayed in popular and academic d...

This article provides a queer theoretical reflection on the emergence of lesbian, gay, and queer (LGQ) youth as subjects of policy attention in Australia in the late twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which specific forms of social, bureaucratic, and organizational recognition have given shape to LGQ youth as categorical po...

Drawing on findings from qualitative interviews and photo elicitation, this article explores young people’s experiences of breaches of trust with social media platforms and how comfort is re-established despite continual violations. It provides rich qualitative accounts of users habitual relations with social media platforms. In particular, we seek...

The everyday adoption of digital technologies such as mobile phones and social media has had transformative effects on interactions within the family (Clark, 2013), as families become increasingly dependent on their capacities for coordinating day-to-day activities and maintaining intimate relationships (Licoppe, 2004; Ling, 2014). Concurrently, th...

This paper draws on a digital ethnography conducted via Twitter, of a controversial subnetwork of fans of boyband One Direction known as “Larries”. The Larry fandom is built around imagining a romantic relationship exists between One Direction band members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, referred to by the portmanteau “Larry”. Imagining relations...

This chapter systematically analyses emerging practices of sorting, sharing and storing digital photos in everyday family life. The purpose is to investigate what motivates the use of digital technologies in families and examine how parents describe and perceive their digital practices. Our study draws on empirical data from in-depth interviews wit...

Both in popular and academic discourse human belonging has been conceptualised as under threat in imagined futures that are increasingly mediated by technologies. These objects are positioned as obstacles to, or corruptors of, human intimacy. Examining intersections of popular culture and lived experience, we draw from qualitative interviews with s...

Like other fangirls, fans of former boyband One Direction (“Directioners”) have often been represented in media discourse as obsessive and hysterical, with fan behaviour interpreted as longing for heterosexual intimacy with band members. Subverting this heteronormative framing, a group of Directioners known as “Larries” have built a sub-fandom arou...

Online communities play an integral role in young people's education about sex and sexuality. This paper builds on accounts from qualitative data from the Queer Generations research project, which explored the experiences of two generations of LGBTQA young people: those born in the 1970s and those born in the 1990s. Younger participants emphasised...

‘You probably would feel left out if you were the only person not using it’ reflects an Australian student in relation to social media sites such as Facebooks and Snapchat. For young people today, the embeddedness of social media in their relationships and sense of connectedness complicates questions of privacy, and consent to the collection of the...

The growing presence of smartphones and other mobile digital devices, always within reach and already deeply embedded in everyday life, has been met with considerable anxiety. Concerns have been raised that we are perpetually distracted by our devices, alienated from the intimate relations that are proper to human sociability and that, consequently...

Smartphones and other mobile digital devices, now ubiquitous, are at the centre of a complex tension between new desires and old social norms. Within this entanglement the involvement of these objects in interpersonal interactions comes into conflict with underlying assumptions about what is healthy and what is normal. Consequently debates about...

The smooth surface of the smartphone, once cold, warms gradually with the constant contact with skin. During moments where hand and device are disentangled, there is still the familiar heaviness in the pocket that the fingers periodically stretch towards, sparked by an unrecognisable twitch. As mobile devices become enmeshed in everyday practices,...

In the context of growing anxiety around our relationships with digital devices like smartphones, loss of self-control over our use of these devices is often considered a sign of the threat these technologies pose to ‘the human’ as we know it. Indeed it is a very particular image of the human that is defended here, a rational and intentional, actin...

The image of a figure hunched over a brightly lit screen, their finger methodically flicking across it from top to bottom, is often considered to be the symbol of an increasing mechanisation that threatens to undermine what it means to be human. In the context of growing anxiety around the way new digital devices, like smartphones, transform our so...

With the ability to measure how we move and where we go, who we communicate with and when, as well as how we entertain ourselves and much more, the ubiquity of smartphones offers an enormous wealth of information about social life. Becoming our constant companions, perhaps it is the way smartphones come to feel like a part of our bodies, rather tha...

With the proliferation of functions performed by mobile phones, these technological objects have become increasingly embedded in daily practices. The formation of nonconscious habits around the use of smartphones renders problematic any conceptualisation of their use as being solely consciously willed by the user. There is considerable anxiety arou...