Papers by Ümit Kennedy
M/C Journal, 2024
This article examines the family video diaries of The Michalaks, an English vlogging family on Yo... more This article examines the family video diaries of The Michalaks, an English vlogging family on YouTube. The Michalaks offer a unique example of the first generation of family vloggers, who balance the authenticity demanded in the genre of vlogging with their profession as content creators and influencers. Like many family influencers, The Michalaks rely on sponsorship for most of their income. They produce a special kind of content for their sponsorships which they call “Silkeys.” Silkeys are heavily stylised, affective montages of family life which are peppered throughout their family video diaries. This article examines the personal, commercial, and protective functions of the Silkey, and argues that The Michalaks manage their authenticity despite the Silkey using two key strategies. Firstly, by calling out the Silkey as inauthentic, and secondly, by inviting viewers to participate in the construction of their vlogs.
M/C Journal, 2024
Australian children and young people are bearing the brunt of climate change. Depending on the la... more Australian children and young people are bearing the brunt of climate change. Depending on the landscape in which they live, they experience highly varied, and devastating, climate-related effects in their local environments and communities. This article examines the experiences and perceptions of 49 young people in three locations across New South Wales, including Western Sydney, the Upper Hunter and the Northern Rivers. Based on a seven-month research project involving multiple creative and participatory workshops with children in each region, the article highlights the specific climate-related challenges and fears that children face in each landscape, including rising temperatures and overcrowding in Western Sydney, the effects of mining in the just transition community of the Upper Hunter, and the impact of severe flooding in Northern Rivers. This article demonstrates that Australian children and young people are already facing the effects of climate change in their everyday lives, including access to resources, interruptions to schooling, loss of familial economic security, relocation of community structures and populations, and increasing amounts of eco-anxiety. It concludes that children’s perceptions and experiences of climate change are heavily influenced by geographic location and socioeconomic difference.
M/C Journal, 2023
Embroidery on Instagram is a subversive, therapeutic and communal activity. This article explores... more Embroidery on Instagram is a subversive, therapeutic and communal activity. This article explores embroidery as a form of personal and collective therapy, a way to process and respond to recent events at a time of deep personal and global anxiety. It explores the participatory, communal activity of sharing embroidery on Instagram, connecting people around the world, and producing a collective narrative about everyday experience and the issues affecting our society. Comprising of an autoethnography spanning two years, this article concludes that embroidery on Instagram continues its subversive feminist history offering a contemporary collective voice, extending literature on cyberfeminism and craftivism.
Life Writing, 2021
Vlogging on YouTube is a process of self-formation whereby a vlogger constructs and presents thei... more Vlogging on YouTube is a process of self-formation whereby a vlogger constructs and presents their identity in relationship with the platform, technology and all of its participants. I frame vlogging as Automedia — a process of being and becoming — forged through the merging of self with networked digital media. In order to understand this process, I argue the researcher must engage in the same activity of automediality. I detail my autoethnography on YouTube — my eighteen months of vlogging — and discuss the knowledge I gained from my experience of being and doing on the site. My autoethnography highlights the skill, labour and time involved in vlogging, the relational way that identity is formed and maintained on the site, the conscious and ongoing work of narrativising the self, and the vulnerable nature of automedial identities and narratives of this kind. I conclude that autoethnography is an essential part of an automedial investigation.
M/C Journal, 2018
Being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world is the only world: the "true world" is just a lie... more Being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world is the only world: the "true world" is just a lie added on to it…-Nietzsche. Anna Poletti: I'm attracted to autobiography in a non-narrative context because I'm very interested in texts that people create that demonstrate their thinking or their fantasies or their processing, generally. Lauren Berlant: Right, in that sense it's autobiography in your larger sense of what autobiography is: a record of […] processing.-Anna Poletti and Julie Rak with Lauren Berlant.
Thesis Chapters by Ümit Kennedy
‘Becoming on YouTube: Exploring the Automedial Identities and Narratives of Australian Mummy Vlog... more ‘Becoming on YouTube: Exploring the Automedial Identities and Narratives of Australian Mummy Vlogging’ examines 37 Australian mummy vloggers on YouTube and explores how these women construct and present their automedial identities and narratives in the participatory, networked digital space. Using a method of virtual ethnography, consisting of long-term observation and participation in the space, the thesis tracks how these women use vlogging to negotiate their social role as mothers, and construct their own performance of the role, in dialogue with all participants in the network including viewers, vloggers, technology, media, products and brands. Situating the automedial practice of vlogging as an intimate yet public process of ‘becoming’ that resembles the published diary online, this thesis finds that the automedial identities and narratives of Australian mummy vloggers are shaped and managed by community, reliant upon authenticity, include intimate and vulnerable others (children), and are ephemeral, always changing, appearing and disappearing. ‘Becoming on YouTube: Exploring the Automedial Identities and Narratives of Australian Mummy Vlogging’ contributes to scholarship in Communication and Media Studies, including Internet Research, particularly in the areas of Networked Digital Media and Identity, and to scholarship in Life Writing Studies, including Auto/Biography Studies, particularly in the area of contemporary digital life writing practices, and the emerging field of Automediality.
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Papers by Ümit Kennedy
Thesis Chapters by Ümit Kennedy