Publications
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The regulation of social media influencers and content creators has become an increasingly important law and policy area that has triggered a lot of interest at the European and national level from both state and private regulators. In this chapter, we first make an overview of applicable European Union (EU) legislation relevant for influencers, and we emphasize the problem of regulatory coherence and interpretation. We then discuss some of the most recent law and policy developments at EU level, by highlighting the role of the existing Influencer Legal Hub, as well as the expected Digital Fairness Act for influencer regulation, and we complement this analysis with a brief examination of self-regulation proposed by advertising industry bodies. Lastly we reflect on what the content creator industry should expect from regulators in the following years, and why it is important for creators to improve their overall legal literacy. In doing so, the chapter aims to offer a succinct yet broad picture of the current state and future of influencer regulation in the European Union.
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https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v20i1.42671
To facilitate accountability and transparency, the Digital Services Act (DSA) sets up a process through which Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) need to grant vetted researchers access to their internal data (Article 40(4)). Operationalising such access is challenging for at least two reasons. First, data access is only available for research on systemic risks affecting European citizens, a concept with high levels of legal uncertainty. Second, data access suffers from an inherent standoff problem. Researchers need to request specific data but are not in a position to know all internal data processed by VLOPs, who, in turn, expect data specificity for potential access. In light of these limitations, data access under the DSA remains a mystery. To contribute to the discussion of how Article 40 can be interpreted and applied, we provide a concrete illustration of what data access can look like in a real-world systemic risk case study. We focus on the 2024 Romanian presidential election interference incident, the first event of its kind to trigger systemic risk investigations by the European Commission. During the elections, one candidate is said to have benefited from TikTok algorithmic amplification through a complex dis- and misinformation campaign. By analysing this incident, we can comprehend election-related systemic risk to explore practical research tasks and compare necessary data with available TikTok data. In particular, we make two contributions: (i) we combine insights from law, computer science and platform governance to shed light on the complexities of studying systemic risks in the context of election interference, focusing on two relevant factors: platform manipulation and hidden advertising; and (ii) we provide practical insights into various categories of available data for the study of TikTok, based on platform documentation, data donations and the Research API.
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https://doi.org/10.14763/2025.3.2014
Abstract
Social media platforms are significant actors within the creator economy, shaping the visibility vital for content distribution and facilitating a range of monetisation models. Private governance, established through platform documentation, determines rules for influencers and regulates how monetisation takes place. This article brings together work from influencer studies with the field of platform governance to examine the regulation by platforms in the creator economy. Using TikTok as a case study, we systematically examine the classification of influencers and monetisation practices within platform documentation. Drawing on a data set of 85 policy documents, the article demonstrates the complex configuration of documentation influencers must navigate, drawing attention to hyperlinking practices and issues of accessibility. It approaches the documentation qualitatively to examine the discursive construction of influencers as creators’ which collapses boundaries between ordinary and monetising users, softens the hierarchy of eligibility shaped by region and metrics, and downplays professional identity. We also address the specificities of governance across different monetisation practices, which are nested within TikTok’s consistent downplaying of responsibility. Within its documentation, TikTok showcases its power to establish and set rules for monetisation and engender dependence whilst ensuring its obligations towards influencers remain tightly constrained and strategically vague.
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-025-09598-x
The popularity of influencer marketing is ever growing. Based on parasocial relationships rooted in authenticity and relatability, the appeal of influencers is effectively used to promote commercial goods and services. This popularity is increasingly migrating outside of commercial advertising. In the past years, governments around the world have collaborated with influencers for public interest communication such as supporting wars, promoting Covid public health policies or financial literacy. Although entrenched in promoting the public good and facilitated by public funding, the dynamics of these collaborations remain very much unknown. Shedding light on how governments employ influencers can help us understand how commercial strategies shape the advertising of public goods as state propaganda. From a regulatory perspective, commercial advertising has been subject to a lot of rules relating to the content as well as the transparency of commercial messaging. Yet government communication—whether called propaganda, public service communication, or the advertising of public goods—has not been governed with the same level of clarity. This study explores comprehensive materials from 10 freedom of information requests on government influencer campaigns answered by the Dutch government between 2020 and 2024 (N = 1302 pages). Using qualitative content analysis, we focus on understanding the characteristics of advertising contracts between the government and the influencers in their service, in order to critically reflect on the transparency of the monetisation entailed by these transactions.
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https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.08385
Like other social media, TikTok is embracing its use as a search engine, developing search products to steer users to produce searchable content and engage in content discovery. Their recently developed product search recommendations are preformulated search queries recommended to users on videos. However, TikTok provides limited transparency about how search recommendations are generated and moderated, despite requirements under regulatory frameworks like the European Union's Digital Services Act. By suggesting that the platform simply aggregates comments and common searches linked to videos, it sidesteps responsibility and issues that arise from contextually problematic recommendations, reigniting long-standing concerns about platform liability and moderation. This position paper addresses the novelty of search recommendations on TikTok by highlighting the challenges that this feature poses for platform governance and offering a computational research agenda, drawing on preliminary qualitative analysis. It sets out the need for transparency in platform documentation, data access and research to study search recommendations.
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Under the DSA, social media platforms must provide clear tools for influencers to disclose paid content. But how well do they meet this obligation—and how rigorously is compliance assessed? This post compares eight DSA audit reports on influencer marketing disclosures and finds striking inconsistencies in how audits were conducted, what was measured, and how “compliance” was defined. The findings raise broader concerns about audit transparency, platform-defined standards, and the need for clearer guidance on what adequate disclosure—and meaningful oversight—should look like.
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https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.5117/9789048562718-5/
Social media platforms have been understood as the “governors of the new public squares” (Klonick 2018), regulating freedom of expression and interaction. The impact of private governance, however, is not only consequential for users as citizens but also as consumers. Given the reliance of platforms on advertising for revenue, users are targeted with commercial messaging interspersed with user-generated content, and this interpellation as consumers brings with it additional legal frameworks due to associated harms and vulnerabilities. Critically, monetization of content goes beyond “platform ads” as influencers also integrate advertising into their ongoing curation of relatable and authentic self-brands and the cultivation of parasocial relationships with audiences. That is, influencer marketing is one of the many business models that enable influencers to earn revenue from their content. As such, Goanta (2023b) proposes our “new social media” are characterized by “content monetization” along with “social commerce.” To understand this emerging, dynamic phenomenon, conceptually and empirically, the HUMANads project theoretically and empirically examines the regulation of content monetization and contributes to the development of regulatory frameworks and digital monitoring tools for consumer protection.
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https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.4.1814
Abstract
Social media platforms mediate and regulate how influencers engage in monetisation practices. In this social-legal paper we examine one form of monetisation, influencer marketing, to understand how platform policies and interfaces shape commercial content for influencers. We situate our inquiry of governance by platforms within the governance of platforms, by focusing on the legal obligation to disclose commercial content under European consumer law. Combining an analysis of platform documentation for Instagram, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube, with insights from a walkthrough of each platform, we present five findings. First, we explore the terminology used by platforms to refer to influencers. Second, we outline how platforms frame commercial content and situate business models of influencer marketing. Third, we analyse how platforms present the duty to disclose commercial content and assign responsibility for compliance. Fourth, we examine how platforms facilitate disclosure through their in-app tools. Finally, we look at the articulation regarding the moderation of undisclosed commercial content by platforms. Our analysis unveils tensions between the law (governance of platforms) and what platforms do (governance by platforms). Overall, as platforms hold significant power in shaping monetisation practices, we argue that enforcing influencers’ disclosure practices must be contextualised within the dynamics of platform governance.
Platform governance
Conceptualising influencers, monetisation practices and labour
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https://doi.org/10.1177/29768624261457280
Although the formal integration of e-commerce through TikTok Shop has not yet been fully launched in Europe, users leverage other platform affordances, such as livestreaming, to facilitate shopping. In the Netherlands, TikTok LIVE serves as a hybrid space where entertainment, interaction and commerce come together, exemplifying the platformisation of consumer culture on social media. This article examines how streamers and viewers stage shopping as an interactive, participatory spectacle during Black Friday week, exploiting the governance arrangements that regulate livestreaming. Based on qualitative textual analysis of 131 LIVE sessions across 80 accounts, we observe and document how e-commerce unfolds both within and beyond the app. First, we identify norms of interactions and self-governance of shopping across three formats: live auctions mediated via chat, external sales directing users to websites and community-driven giveaways that reward previous buyers. Second, we analyse roles performed by users during LIVEs, highlighting a range from charismatic influencers to transaction-oriented sellers, and the division of labour among streamers, moderators and viewers. Finally, we reflect on the implications of these practices for consumer law, highlighting how the temporality, emotional engagement, self-surveillance and commercial orientation, which are fundamental to the live shopping phenomenon, are enabled by the legal uncertainty regarding TikTok's role.
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https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2674878
Abstract
Influencer marketing is a core monetisation practice within the creator economy, which contributes to the presence of commercial content on platforms. To ensure audiences are informed, influencers are legally and platform-mandated to disclose when their content is advertising. This article examines how disclosure, as a form of governance, is negotiated on TikTok by influencers who call out and are called out for undisclosed ads, as well as by users whom disclosure allegedly aims to protect. By analysing callout videos, their comments, and comments on the alleged undisclosed ads, the study explores interpretations of disclosure – relying on and extending beyond legal frameworks – and the strategic use of regulation by actors who position themselves as governors of influencer culture. I unpack how the absence of disclosure is constructed as (1) meaningful, aligning with the influencer's commercial goals, and leaving certain groups vulnerable because they are presumed to be unable to decode its commercial nature; and (2) unnecessary due to ambivalence toward governance through disclosure. Building on research about informal governance via calling out in influencer culture, I demonstrate how calling out is mobilised for engagement, contributes to the gendered policing of feminised digital labour, and oscillates between condemning harmful behaviour and causing harm.
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https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241304657
Abstract
Our article delves into the emergence of ‘kidfluencers’ within the content creator economy, highlighting how children’s participation intertwines their identities with monetisation strategies on platforms. Focusing on TikTok, we blend ethnographic and legal analysis of 215 videos from 23 kidfluencers in Israel, New Zealand and the Unites States, illuminating the complexities of monetising childhood across cultures. We highlight four monetisation and visibility practices in which children are exposed, mobilised and commodified in their parents’ content: (1) kids as props; brands as playmates, (2) transactional childhood, (3) aspirational child-ification and (4) regulative parenthood. Our analysis shows how children become concealed commodities, with varying degrees of (in)visibility in monetisation practices, from playful participation in branded content to embodying idealised notions of childhood for brand visibility. We situate our analysis within regulatory frameworks, revealing how TikTok’s policies conceal children’s role in monetised content, and reflect on platform liability under the European Union’s Digital Services Act.
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https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251323951
Abstract
This article examines the construction of the ideal influencer across two sites of articulation within the influencer ecology: influencer coaches and platforms. It seeks to make visible the normative model that underpins and regulates influencer identities, practices and monetization, which is tied to the interests and values of different actors. Drawing on a sample of 70 TikTok videos and Instagram posts from influencer coaches, a dataset of 69 TikTok and Instagram policies, and a walkthrough of TikTok and Instagram creator accounts, I analyze what constitutes the ideal influencer through a critical feminist approach to influencer labor. In content shared by influencer coaches, the influencer is framed as a strategic actor who offers value to their community and embraces their identity as a professional entrepreneur. Through platform policies and interface design, the influencer is constructed as a skilful creator who engages their audiences in the “right” ways and assumes responsibility for complying with regulations. I argue that these constructions converge on the assertion that influencers should monetize for the “right” reasons. This steers influencers toward a worker subjectivity that is ideal for the platform, linking the construction of influencers as users—rather than workers who should be rewarded but not compensated for their labor—to the professionalization of the industry.
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https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/24596
As part of navigating the visibility logics of the creator economy, influencers may leverage their visibility to promote social justice by drawing attention to specific social causes and political issues. This article analyzes the 15 most-followed Dutch influencers on Instagram and TikTok to explore when and how social justice is invoked within the blurred boundaries between promotion and expression. Findings reveal the (1) visibility of social justice through brand alignment, (2) construction of platform relevance through temporal references and templates, and (3) divergent approaches to monetization. Social justice can be a narrative in monetized content, and monetization can serve as a vehicle for promoting social justice or remain entirely disconnected from it. Uniting these practices is the shared logic that social justice must align with the influencer as brand—whether articulated through organic content, where personal beliefs advance self-branding efforts, or through monetized content, where politicized themes intersect with commercial strategies—ultimately rendering social justice as “on-brand” for only some.
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https://doi.org/10.14763/2025.3.2014
Part of Special Issue: TikTok Creators and Digital Economies
Abstract
This article grapples with the tension between understanding influencers as individuals with lived experiences and as economic actors who behave like traders. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, it explores the boundaries of discrimination faced by influencers in their treatment by brands. It combines a feminist, intersectional approach with legal insights to examine the case study of a Black influencer who publicly withdrew from a brand trip due to unequal treatment and the ensuing drama on TikTok. Analysing a dataset of 137 TikTok videos, the study demonstrates how narratives of unfairness, racial discrimination, and responsibility are reconfigured by the legal status of influencers as independent contractors, reflecting on the limits of legal protections available to them.
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Available open access: https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollbook-oa/book/9781035332816/9781035332816.xml
The Hashtag Hustle: Law and Policy Perspectives on Working in the Influencer Economy is a new open access book in the Elgar Law, Technology and Society series. This timely book sheds light on the cultural, economic and legal aspects of content creation as a form of labour, investigating concerns over working conditions, worker protection, and the status of the working relationship. Chapters written by leading experts in the field explore two opposing, yet complementary sides of work: labour as an invisible and underappreciated effort made by influencers, and labour as an economic enterprise
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https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.nllp-1.12
Abstract
The rise of influencer marketing has blurred boundaries between organic content and sponsored content, making the enforcement of legal rules relating to transparency challenging. Effective regulation requires applying legal knowledge with a clear purpose and reason, yet current detection methods of undisclosed sponsored content generally lack legal grounding or operate as opaque “black boxes.” Using 1,143 Instagram posts, we compare gpt-5-nano and gemini-2.5-flash-lite under three prompting strategies with controlled levels of legal knowledge provided. Both models perform strongly in classifying content as sponsored or not (F1 up to 0.93), with Gemini favouring recall (0.93) and GPT favouring precision (0.95), though performance drops by over 10 points on ambiguous cases. We further develop a taxonomy of reasoning errors, showing frequent citation omissions (28.57%), unclear references (20.71%), and hidden ads exhibiting the highest miscue rate (28.57%). While adding regulatory text to the prompt improves explanation quality, it does not consistently improve detection accuracy. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it makes a novel addition to regulatory compliance technology by providing a taxonomy of common errors in LLM-generated legal reasoning to evaluate whether automated moderation is not only accurate but also legally robust, thereby advancing the transparent detection of influencer marketing content. Second, it features an original dataset of LLM explanations annotated by two students who were trained in influencer marketing law. Third, it combines quantitative and qualitative evaluation strategies for LLM explanations and critically reflects on how these findings can support advertising regulatory bodies in automating moderation processes on a solid legal foundation.
Digital cultures & the everyday
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https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251391301
Abstract
As the year draws to a close, the marketing campaign ‘Spotify Wrapped’ invites users to share their personalised data story on social media. We draw on empirical insights from five creative workshops to examine how university students perceive and respond to the logics of this ‘algorithmic event’ and assertion of identity through ‘wrappification’. Our analysis identifies four themes: the resonance of Wrapped, limits of the Wrapped self, ambience of music and contestations of Spotify’s governance. These themes reflect the multifaceted emotions evoked in users, ranging from celebration of personalisation to critique of data capture. They also demonstrate contradictory views of classification systems. While our participants are deeply attuned to the algorithmic and commercial forces of streaming, their engagement with music often transcends the platform’s affordances. By examining these negotiated practices during an algorithmic event, our study extends debates on the platformisation of culture, especially regarding music’s aesthetic and functional values.
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494241310675
Abstract
Generic visuals like stock photos and simple data visualizations circulate in the news with increasing frequency, and so do dominant narratives about them. Stock photos are clichéd and inauthentic, data visualizations represent facts, so the narratives go. Such narratives suggest that generic visuals have limited capacity to function as public images – that is, as visual media for social thought and civic spectatorship. Findings from our research contradict this. We found that while UK-based news audiences mobilized dominant narratives when talking about stock photos and simple data visualizations in general terms, this did not happen in specific engagements with particular generic visuals. In these cases, participants moved beyond dominant narratives, as generic visuals activated emotions, experiences and participants’ different identities. We argue that generic visuals in the news are resources with which people make sense of their everyday lives and that people’s everyday lives are resources with which they make sense of generic news visuals. As such, generic visuals do, in fact, function as public images, connecting and engaging audiences in public life and foregrounding the role of the personal in engagements with the social issues portrayed in the news.
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https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2024.2433674
Abstract
Each year, Spotify nudges users to share aesthetically pleasing data stories ‘wrapped’ and repackaged from their listening behavior. This article approaches Spotify Wrapped as an annual algorithmic event, defined as a moment in time in which there is a collective orientation towards a particular algorithmic system and its associated data. It offers a methodological contribution to research on datafication of music taste and identities through the development of a workshop format aimed at ordinary Spotify users. The workshop delivers insights into practices of datafication and the normative assumptions baked into Spotify data stories. Drawing on a data feminist framework, we outline three interconnected but distinct creative exercises, which take participants on an analytical journey. We combine feminist arts-based research methodologies with critical reflection and the walkthrough method to centre people’s experiences and equip them to analyze different layers of Wrapped. Our theoretical and methodological approach seeks to destabilize the logics of data extraction that further Spotify’s commercial aims and its associated claims of ‘knowing us’ through the aggregation of user data. As such, our workshop transforms the marketing campaign into a site for critical reflection on Wrapped as an algorithmic event.
(Digital) memory work & memory narratives
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2026.103182
The concept of ‘weather-heritage’ suggests that weather is so central to everyday life that it should be considered a form of intangible cultural heritage, and protected through this lens. Weather contributes to sense of place, and it is through perceived changes to normal weather that people experience atmospheric changes caused by greenhouse gas emissions. This study explores and develops this concept through a study of the weather memories of mainly older people in southeast England. Participants situated their weather memories in relation to notable years in the cultural memory such as the warm summer of 1976, and constructed prototypical seasonal conditions associated with particular weather conditions, such as snow in winter, and phenological progressions such as the date of flowering plants in spring. Whilst researchers did not specifically ask questions about climate change, many participants situated their weather memories in dialogue with their perceptions and comprehension of recent change, although they occasionally questioned the reliability of these memories. Participants were wary of generalisations, but felt that recent changes in what they considered to be normal weather conditions were eroding sense of place, and in some cases, sense of Englishness. We argue that weather-heritage represents a promising entry point to alternative productive engagements with climate change, but draw attention to pitfalls that must be avoided if climate change is to be viewed through a heritage lens.
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https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980251330559
Part of Special Issue: Micro-memories
Abstract
This article explores memory as a process of assembling fragments of the past and the concept of memory as assemblage. It examines how the lens and language of assemblage are employed in a 3-minute extract from a research interview, which was selected for analysis by the contributors to this special interview. It uses the interviewer’s articulation of memory work by ‘put[ting] all the pieces together’ as the starting point to discuss how memory is co-constructed by two individuals in a specific interaction. Adopting a narratives-in-practice perspective, the micro-analysis looks at (1) the role of the interviewer as a memory agent and co-constructor of memory and (2) how two stories are told in the interview by the participant with a focus on material traces and objects. This article brings the analysis of assembling memory and mnemonic assemblages within the interaction into dialogue with frameworks and theories of assemblage memory studies to demonstrate how they are mobilised in everyday talk.
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https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800377059.00030
Abstract
The ‘social media scroll back’ (Robards & Lincoln, 2017) is a qualitative research method where a researcher and participant together ‘scroll back’ through the participant’s social media platform to co-analyse social media data. This chapter brings together four authors (Moran, Renaud, Annabell and Yang) who reflect on their use of the scroll back method in their projects. The four case studies cover a range of different research topics (identity, race, sexuality, gender, and media industries), groups of participants (migrants, women, queer femmes, and media workers), different social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and WeChat), and a variety of modes of engaging with participants (in-person and via video conferencing). Within these case studies these authors offer a set of examples as to how the scroll back method may be utilized within different research contexts and in doing so, identify some of the opportunities, challenges and limitations involved with using this method.
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https://doi.org/10.1017/mem.2024.3
Editorial for Special Collection: Platformization of Memory Collection guest-edited by Rik Smit, Benjamin Jacobsen, and Taylor Annabell
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.21074.ann
Part of Special Issue: Bringing memory studies and interactional narrative studies together
Abstract
This article examines the performance of remembered experience within sharing in-the-moment carried out by young women on Instagram. I propose that the small stories analytical framework provides a way to examine at a micro level sharing of ‘memories’ online by addressing practices of selecting the past, showing and telling the past and interacting with the past in digital traces. For digital memory studies, this moves beyond a focus on affordances and infrastructure transformed memory and the examination of how people engage with memories that have been predefined. The analysis demonstrates how the performance of remembered experience is displayed and positioned across the interplay of past, present and future. Young women’s sharing in-the-moment reconfigures the function and meanings of ‘memories’ beyond the platform’s mobilisation of the term. It is part of how they express feelings and experiences about their unfolding lives.
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https://doi.org/10.1017/mem.2023.6
Part of Special Collection: Communicating Memory Matters
Abstract
This article explores how the concept of remediation is part of digital memory work performed by young women on Instagram. While remediation has been used to make sense of the ways sites of memory are represented across time and through different media, mnemonic media practices and forms are remediated in digital memory work. This article draws on interviews, observations of Instagram activities, and focus group data to analyse how other media practices and forms are integrated into digital memory work on Instagram and mobilised by young women to make sense of their mnemonic use of the platform. The analysis focuses on how practices of digital memory work use direct remediation of material objects and remediation of the functionality of mnemonic media practices. It addresses how the comparisons participants make to other mnemonic media practices reveal how digital memory work involves negotiation of personal and public, private and professional, and the authentic and staged. In addition, it grapples with the way that sharing happy experiences and moments to produce a ‘highlight reel’ or ‘hall of fame’ in postfeminist digital culture has valuable and potentially harmful implications.
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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_2
Abstract
A social obligation to remember Covid-19 as it unfolded is reflected in the range of public memory initiatives instigated by cultural organisations and institutions. This chapter argues that the moral imperative was internalised by ordinary social media users, shaping their practices of sharing. Drawing on qualitative interviews, focus groups and digital traces shared on Instagram and Facebook by young women living in London, this chapter explores how the memorialisation of Covid-19 was embedded within and shaped by postfeminist digital culture. It demonstrates how young women conceptualised Covid-19 as worth remembering on platforms, prioritised sharing happy “memories” of lockdown and celebrated the role of platforms in facilitating connection and memory-making in times of crisis. Through this empirical analysis, the chapter reveals how the experience of the pandemic shaped practices of sharing and remembering on platforms and was part of how Covid-19 was experienced and managed by young women.
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https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980221133729
Abstract
This article examines how young women conceptualize memories within their language use. Through a microanalysis of how the term ‘memories’ and related expressions are mobilized by participants in interviews and digital traces shared on platforms, the study offers insight into everyday articulations of memory. The term ‘memories’ not only denotes the selective reconstruction of the past in the present but also signals how certain experiences, moments and feelings are assessed as worth remembering. Talking about ‘memories’ becomes a way for young women to signify and anticipate the value of experience in the present and future. In making this argument, the article contributes to existing debates on metaphors of memory and the production of memories through mediated objects by demonstrating how mnemonic language is reconfigured within digital culture.
New Zealand Identity & Cultural Policy
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https://doi.org/10.1002/jocb.1514
Abstract
This article explores narratives of how COVID-19 impacted the performing arts sector, by drawing on interviews with creative workers in Aotearoa New Zealand. Despite the late exposure to COVID-19 and the adoption of an elimination approach that afforded opportunities for performing arts to continue to varying extents between 2019 and 2022, cultural workers in Aotearoa New Zealand, as with their overseas counterparts, experienced significant and consequential disruption to their working conditions and lives. Taking into account the specificity of Aotearoa New Zealand's performing arts sector and the government's COVID-19 response, the article contributes to the empirical examination of COVID-19 experiences by teasing out narratives of impact from cultural workers. The thematic analysis demonstrates how participants presented (1) COVID-19 as responsible for financial, emotional, and psychological costs, (2) framed opportunities arising from disrupted working conditions and wage subsidy as “silver linings,” (3) were reliant on digital technologies, and (4) constructed the return to “normal” as marked by the COVID-19 “aftermath.” The article argues that uniting these perceptions and articulations of impact is the ongoing (re)evaluations of risks and benefits by cultural workers of working conditions that predate COVID-19.
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https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2018.1521857
Abstract
New Zealanders were presented with the opportunity to change the national flag and opted to retain the current New Zealand flag, despite arguments that it was unable to reflect national identity adequately. This article unpacks the particular version of national identity constructed in discourse in the infographic, Our Nation. Your Choice. which was released prior to the final referendum that determined the outcome of the Flag Consideration Project. We used Fairclough’s (1992. [Discourse and social change. Cambridge, England: Polity Press]) critical discourse analysis to examine the discursive construction of national identity by the Flag Consideration Panel that oversaw the process. The authoritative assertion of national identity on behalf of New Zealanders emphasised inclusiveness and unity by acknowledging cultural diversity. Biculturalism was confined to an old understanding of New Zealand identity while the ideology of multiculturalism, not yet officially implemented, was positioned as common-sense. There was a focus on situating New Zealand in a global context to distance New Zealand from colonisation and connection to Britain. The positive, cohesive conceptualisation of New Zealand suggested that the Flag Consideration Project was, in fact, an exercise in re-positioning New Zealand in the global context, in which the national flag would represent the national brand rather than contribute to national identity.