Conference Agenda

Social media has reshaped digital portrayals of motherhood, often reinforcing idealised and aspirational maternal archetypes. While early platforms promoted curated self-representations, TikTok’s memefication culture disrupts these conventions through participatory humour and satire. This study examines how #TypesOfMoms deconstructs parenting idealisation by employing meme formats that enable users to reframe motherhood beyond perfectionist narratives. Through qualitative content analysis, the research identifies key strategies shaping maternal portrayals, including recurring meme templates, structured content formats, and emerging discursive narratives. Challenges, POVs, skits, remixes, and lip-syncs allow creators to perform maternal identities dynamically, transforming traditional stereotypes into fluid, interactive, and often self-deprecating representations. Memefied content highlights the contrast between idealised and realistic motherhood, reframing it as a collective, imperfect, and socially negotiated experience. By embedding maternal narratives within platform-native aesthetics, TikTok fosters a shift from self-branding towards communal meaning-making, using irony and satire to challenge rigid maternal expectations.

Digital disconnection studies conceptualize disconnection as a deliberate strategy to balance the benefits and drawbacks of digital engagement to improve well-being. However, this field has been criticized for focusing on privileged subjects while overlooking how structural inequalities shape minoritized youths’ (dis)connection practices. Our 15-month ethnographic study addresses this gap by examining how ethno-racial minoritized young women navigate digital disconnection within intersecting gendered and racialized constraints. Overall, our findings challenge binary understandings of digital disconnection as either voluntary or enforced. First, participants strategically engage in disconnection to sustain digital connection, such as deleting social media apps before returning home to avoid parental surveillance. Second, disconnection emerges as a response to racialized and gendered online harassment, forcing participants to withdraw from digital spaces despite their desire to remain connected. Finally, smartphones simultaneously enable and constrain autonomy, as parental surveillance reinforces expectations of constant availability while affording greater mobility. By foregrounding digital disconnection as a negotiated and context-dependent practice, this study highlights the need for intersectional, context-aware approaches to digital media use and challenges dominant narratives of disconnection as an individualized response to digital overuse.

This study examines the emotional complexities of digital dating for single parents, focusing on interviews with 22 Norwegian single parents’ about their experiences with dating apps. Balancing the desire for companionship with family obligations, many participants sought long-term relationships. However, dating apps, while offering convenience and broader options, often emphasize instant attraction over deeper compatibility. Coupled with past experiences of ruptured relationships, this led many to question whether the “happily-ever-after” was attainable, creating a conflict between fast-paced, image-driven interactions and their more deliberate, future-oriented relationship goals.

While some embraced the apps enthusiastically, others were more skeptical due to past ruptures and parental concerns. Men often described their first encounters as “a kid in a candy store,” while women felt overwhelmed. Over time, both genders refined their approach to dating, learning to filter potential partners and set clearer boundaries.

Participants highlighted the importance of shared life circumstances, often preferring partners who were also single parents. They felt that others would struggle to understand the ongoing emotional and practical implications of their ruptured families, including co-parenting dynamics. Additionally, factors such as proximity and shared parental experiences played a key role in shaping their dating preferences. Despite dating apps’ flaws, participants recognized their role in reshaping romantic possibilities, providing a space for new connections after family ruptures.

This paper proposes an update to the framework of ‘realignment’ for understanding changes taking place on digital platforms. Expanding on previous work on envelopment (Partin, 2020), and realignment (Garvey & Flonk, 2024), this updated framework differentiates between three distinct external actors - users, sponsors, and governments - who all exert pressure on platforms to make changes to their features. To illustrate the framework, we examine three case studies related to the platform Twitch: user-based pressure to expand ‘tags’ for creators, sponsor-based pressure to limit political content from live streamers, and government pressure to prevent the broadcast of terrorist acts on the platform. In all three cases, Twitch made significant changes to their platform architecture in direct response to outside pressure.

By examining three sources of pressure, we bring together literature on collective action (Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998; Niebler, 2020), platforms’ business strategies (Klonick, 2017; Griffin, 2023), and government regulation of the internet (Naughten, 2018; Ahn, et al., 2023) into a streamlined approach to understanding platform changes as motivated by powerful external actors. In addition to offering a clear framework, this model also illustrates how platforms - in limiting or censoring speech - can and do act as publishers when pressured by other actors.