Travel Scholarship Recipient – Pruchniewska

by | Sep 22, 2016 | Awards, Conferences

Each year, through the generous donations of AoIR conference attendees, we are able to fund several 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 interests.

PruchniewskaHeadshotUrszula Pruchniewska

Who are you?

Urszula Pruchniewska (@urszie on twitter)

Where are you from?

I currently live in Philadelphia, USA, but I’m Polish by birth and grew up in South Africa and New Zealand.

What is your current area of study?

Gender, digital media, cultural production/labor.

Describe the research you will present at AoIR 2016.

At AoIR 2016, I will be presenting “Production Politics: Gender, Feminism, and Social Media Labor,” a paper I collaborated on with Dr. Brooke Erin Duffy (Cornell University). For this project, we interviewed female entrepreneurs and cultural producers about their experiences using social media for career promotion. We identify a series of tensions that structure how women working online articulate their experiences.  Our findings map onto a tension between feminist politics and post-feminist sentiment—one that has been rendered all the more salient by social media’s injunction to “put yourself out there.”

Have you presented at AoIR in the past? If yes, what has been your experience? If #AoIR2016 Berlin is your first AoIR conference, what made you choose this conference?

I have not presented at AoIR in the past, but I am very excited to take part in AoIR2016 Berlin. Mentors and peers have repeatedly recommended this conference to me, describing it as an event that boasts a supportive community of international scholars and that showcases innovative research in the fields in which I am interested.