On Display: Instagram, the Self, and the City (Computational Social Science)

Two billion people around the world use Instagram, but so far social scientists have done little research on the platform. Despite Instagram's reputation for shallowness, the ongoing self-presentation it demands confronts users with profound dilemmas. Who are we? What do we want to show of ourselves? What do we aspire to be? On Display is a book about how people remake their worlds through social media. John D. Boy and Justus Uitermark provide an encompassing account of how a platform that is unfailingly polished and ruthlessly judgmental shapes us and our environments. They examine how personalities, relations, social movements, urban subcultures, and city streets change as they are represented on Instagram. Interviews and ethnographic vignettes render an intimate account of the desires and anxieties that animate the platform. Just as importantly, Boy and Uitermark reveal how Instagram is implicated in social inequalities. While previous accounts have argued that social media promote polarization, On Display shows that this is not the case for Instagram where users belong to large and diverse networks, compelling them to take many, often contradictory expectations into account. This means users shy away from producing statements or images that may cause offense as a way to preserve their public image and their social connections. Drawing on sociological theory, long-term qualitative inquiry in Amsterdam, and computational analyses, Boy and Uitermark argue that grasping the power of Instagram--and other social media platforms--requires seeing them not as digital networks of communication and sharing, but as a stage for the expression and affirmation of social status.

Politics & Social Sciences

Uitermark, Justus

Boy, John D.

Social Sciences

Oxford University Press

Cities and Social Movements: Immigrant Rights Activism in the US, France, and the Netherlands, 1970-2015 (IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change Book Series)

Through historical and comparative research on the immigrant rights movements of the United States, France and the Netherlands, Cities and Social Movements examines how small resistances against restrictive immigration policies do – or don’t – develop into large and sustained mobilizations. <ul>
<li>Presents a comprehensive, comparative analysis of immigrant rights politics in three countries over a period of five decades, providing vivid accounts of the processes through which immigrants activists challenged or confirmed the status quo</li> <li>Theorizes movements from the bottom-up, presenting an urban grassroots account in order to identify how movement networks emerge or fall apart</li> <li>Provides a unique contribution by examining how geography is implicated in the evolution of social movements, discovering how and why the networks constituting movements grow by tracing where they develop</li> <li>Demonstrates how efforts to enforce national borders trigger countless resistances and shows how some environments provide the relational opportunities to nurture these small resistances into sustained mobilizations</li> <li>Written to appeal to a broad audience of students, scholars, policy makers, and activists, without sacrificing theoretical rigor</li> </ul>

Nicholls, Walter J.

Sociology

Wiley/Blackwell

In 2006, Amsterdam's 66 East: Centre for Urban Culture organized a project in which artists and architects--including Theo Baart, Bas Princen, Ralph Kämena, Jannes Linders, Jeroen Musch and Hans Werlemann--examined Amsterdam's predominately Arabic and Turkish neighborhood, Indische Buurt, which had recently become home to studios and offices for the creative sector, often seen as the first step in gentrification. Adopting strategies ranging from critical commentary to activist intervention, the project and subsequent exhibition, Houses of Transformation, posits creative alternatives for urban planners, developers and administrators in responding to the inevitable and ongoing problems of urban renewal. This volume documents these strategies and proposals, while also casting a critical eye on similar neighborhoods in other European cities--including Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Brussels and London--putting the unique issues of Dutch gentrification into a larger perspective.

Houses of Transformation: Intervening in European Gentrification

Arts & Photography

Smith, Neil

Berg, Jaap Jan

Breznik, Maja

Reinders, Leeke

Architecture

nai010 publishers

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