Research Elisabetta Costa

Abstract

The social impact of the internet on the lives of gay men has been extensively explored in sociology and media studies (Johnson 2020; Farci and Scarcelli 2022). In this project, I contribute to established academic corpus an innovative, inter-generational perspective which aims to see the World Wide Web in its already decades-old historical development as a medium and locus for queer community-building. In an increasingly digitalized world, queer men increasingly find the vocabulary, the concepts and the connections necessary for their coming out process online: this is certain. However, what does "online" mean for different generations of these individuals? The internet, although often referred to as "new media", has existed for many years and is to be studied as the historical stratification of different media technologies. In pursuing this path, I include in my project accounts on queer media and social forms that are not digital and which somewhat "predate" (although some keep their significance even today) digital media; it is crucial, in fact, to see digital modes of sociality in continuity to "physical" or "analog" media and spaces, as their potentials and affordances for queer discourse and identity is not unique to digitality and the lives of queer men in the 21st century are not either "online" and "offline" but are woven in a complex and multifaceted digital-analog fabric. The resulting overall project involves deep ethnographic engagement in the queer spaces of Milan, Italy, as well as qualitative interviews and Life History methods tackling different generations of queer men. Moreover, some key focal points have been selected to be studied with specificity as representations of wildly different modes of queer sociality each reaching their golden years at different times in recent media history and representing the preferred method of sociality of different generations of gays: urban sexual networks, magazines personals, online forums and dating apps. Each of these four key media will be questioned using methods most appropriate for them: interviews, and observation will elucidate the social use of urban sexual networks, while archival work is best suited for studying magazines from the seventies and eighties. Content analysis and online ethnography will be used in tackling online forums, while dating apps are going to be studies with phone-walkthrough interviews. Oral history, surveys and interviews are going to provide general framework and commentary to these four key sites that this project is going to study to position each of them within a wider context and use each result in a cohesive whole. The multidisciplinary nature of this projects, at the crossroads between anthropology, queer studies, media studies and history will be advantageous because of the wide amount of possible publishing avenues and scholarly collaboration. University of Antwerp provides, due to the wide breadth of its Communication Studies department, an excellent arena for the final phase of this project: data elaboration and publication.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Costa Elisabetta
• Fellow: Sassaro Marco

Research team(s)

• Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Remote work has become normalised as an important aspect of people's lives across different professions, social classes and geographic regions. In the knowledge economy, work is now lesstied to specific physical locations and isre-spatialised in new hybrid ways. But what are the consequences of remote work and always-on-connectivity on people's everyday lives? How do these affect social institutions such as the home, family, household and friendship, and broader processes of social change? ReWorkChange aims to answer these questions by delivering a comparative ethnographic study of the societal consequences of remote work, defined as work tasks performed outside the traditional office setting. Most research on remote work has been carried out in the fields of management and organisational studies and is limited to case studies in the global north. In contrast, ReWorkChange's scope is far radically more comprehensive and wide-ranging. The project will build on practice theories to conduct a comparative study of the consequences of remote work on people's everyday lives in six countries with an advanced knowledge economy: China, India, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands and Turkey. It will provide rich and compelling ethnographic evidence of everyday practices to generate theories of social institutions and a broader theory of remote work and social change. The PI has extensively explored family life, kinship, love, romances, gendered relations, home and homeland as mediated practices, in Lebanon, Turkey, Italy and the Netherlands. Additionally, she has previously worked towardsthe conceptualisation of digital media and social change. She is, hence, the ideal candidate to achieve the ambitious goal of exploring and theorising the impact and implications global processes of digitalisation and transformations of work have on cultures and societies worldwide.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Costa Elisabetta

Research team(s)

• Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Remote work has become normalised as an important aspect of people's lives across different professions, social classes and geographic regions. In the knowledge economy, work is now less tied to specific physical locations and is re-spatialised in new hybrid ways. But what are the consequences of remote work and always-on-connectivity on people's everyday lives? How do these affect social institutions such as the home, family, household and friendship, and broader processes of social change? ReWorkChange aims to answer these questions by delivering a comparative ethnographic study of the societal consequences of remote work, defined as work tasks performed outside the traditional office setting. Most research on remote work has been carried out in the fields of management and organisational studies and is limited to case studies in the global north. In contrast, ReWorkChange's scope is far radically more comprehensive and wide-ranging. The project will build on practice theories to conduct a comparative study of the consequences of remote work on people's everyday lives in six countries with an advanced knowledge economy: China, India, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands and Turkey. It will provide rich and compelling ethnographic evidence of everyday practices to generate theories of social institutions and a broader theory of remote work and social change. The PI has extensively explored family life, kinship, love, romances, gendered relations, home and homeland as mediated practices, in Lebanon, Turkey, Italy and the Netherlands. Additionally, she has previously worked towards the conceptualisation of digital media and social change. She is, hence, the ideal candidate to achieve the ambitious goal of exploring and theorising the impact and implications global processes of digitalisation and transformations of work have on cultures and societies worldwide.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Costa Elisabetta
• Fellow: Costa Elisabetta

Research team(s)

• Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi)

Project website

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

In large European cities, young people with a migration background are now the majority. Classical theories of assimilation predict that the engagement of the second generation with their 'homeland' would reduce compared to first generation migrants. However, current research points to a different direction. As 'digital natives', migrant-background youth cultivate socio-cultural connections with the country of 'origin' online and travel 'home' regularly. These visits do not diminish over the generations and have a significant impact on how youth are faring in their countries of residence in terms of their education and well-being. Scholars have studied digital connections with and physical mobilities to the 'homeland' separately thus far, concealing how they might shape each other. This project investigates the fundamental role of digital media in the changing character of young people's transnational engagements and mobilities by focusing on the specific case of mobile youth of Ghanaian background in Germany. Combining multi-sited ethnography with creative collaborative methods, this study will provide an innovative framework to understand 1) how digital media change the ways in which migrant-background youth relate to the 'homeland' compared to other generations (both older and previous movers); 2) how digital connections and physical mobilities between countries are interconnected and feed into each other; 3) how a sustained transnational life across generations benefits youth in the country of residence.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Belloni Milena
• Co-promoter: Costa Elisabetta
• Fellow: Anschütz Sarah

Research team(s)

• Centre for Research on Environmental and Social Change

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The presence of home-based work has experienced a significant rise in recent years thanks to the developments in digital technologies that allow the disconnection of office work from physical locations. What are the consequences of home-based work on women's everyday lives? How do these affect social institutions such as the home, family, and friendship? The project will study home-based work among women knowledge workers and its consequences on their everyday life. The study will be situated in Turkey, a country that is experiencing an important transition toward a knowledge-based economy and is characterized by a growing population of young online freelancers (Dedeoğlu 2020). This shift takes place within a longstanding tradition of women's piecework in the garment and textile industries that has characterized Turkey's formal and informal economy for several decades. The research will contribute to a better understanding of how global processes of digitalization in the sphere of work intersect and are entangled with local processes, histories, and local social formations. It will also contribute to de-westernizing the conversations around the future of work in digital societies.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Costa Elisabetta
• Fellow: Küçüker Iraz

Research team(s)

• Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi)

Project type(s)

• Research Project