Each year a small portion of AoIR conference fees go toward several Kelly Quinn Travel Scholarships for junior scholars to attend the conference. We want to recognize our scholarship recipients and share with you a little bit about them and their research interests.
Who are you?
I’m Anuja Premika, a PhD Candidate from the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, India.
Where are you from?
I’m from Hyderabad, India.
What is your current area of study?
In my PhD research, I study the beauty media ecosystem in India today, through the disciplinary lenses of feminist media studies, and digital cultures. The space is characterised by the practices and labours of what we now understand as creator culture, even as different actors within this space — ranging from influencers, to journalists and editors, to public relations personnel — varyingly interpret what a “creator” is, and who gets to call themselves that. The highly visual, gendered, and identity-centric nature of beauty culture complicates the broader neoliberal trends of the individualisation and precaritisation of work. Beauty media today, particularly in online spaces, dismantles some old, often homogenous images of beauty, while simultaneously producing new aesthetic, professional, and social hierarchies.
Describe the research you will present at AoIR2024
I will be presenting two papers at AoIR 2024, both drawing from my doctoral work. The first is titled “Beauty brands online: Visuality, labour, and representation” and it maps the practices of beauty brands online by analysing 545 Instagram posts made by the five most followed beauty brands in India to examine whom they represent and how, but also how these images are produced at the intersection of techno-aesthetic choices, platform affordances, market considerations, and the modes of gendered identity privileged by a culture at a given point in time.
My second paper, part of a panel proposal we submitted as the organising team of the AoIR Flashpoint Symposium conducted in April, 2024 in Hyderabad, India, is titled “Converging labours: Creating the new beauty media ecology in online spaces.” In this paper, I explore the forms of labour that have increasingly become the inescapable norm in beauty media production today, and suggest that the labours of journalists, brand copywriters/creatives, and influencers overlap and morph into one another. Building on scholarship that makes the case that the features and labours of influencer culture have become commonplace in other realms of work, I argue that the tensions inherent in beauty media that have continued on since its print media-first days — its commercial logic and the inalienability of media-industry relationships — further complicate this trend, and demand new, often unachievable labours of these actors.
Have you presented at AoIR in the past? If so, what was your experience? If #AoIR2024 in Sheffield is your first AoIR conference, what made you choose this conference? What do you expect from it?
I have not presented at an AoIR conference before but have had the opportunity to engage with AoIR events in other capacities. I attended an online satellite event organised by my university in 2021, and also participated in the online Doctoral Colloquium in 2023. Earlier this year, I was part of the core organising team of the AoIR Flashpoint Symposium held in Hyderabad, India. I have had great learning experiences in all my previous engagements with AoIR, and I’m looking forward to presenting my work at AoIR Sheffield, and interacting with the global internet research community.
