Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India

The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India. It looks at how the selfie, unlike the photograph, which was a gesture towards an external reality, remains intimately self-referential, yet reconfigures social ordering, identity formation, agency, and spaces in curious ways.

This volume approaches questions about the construction and performance of the self through the digital selfie and uses this situated, contextualized, and culturally specific phenomenon as a site to explore the themes of self-making, place-making, gender, subjectivity, and power. Highlighting the specific contexts of production, the authors examine the array of self-expressive capabilities realized in a multitude of uses of the selfie that simultaneously reconfigure the self, the space, and the world.

An important study of visual social media culture, the volume will be useful for interpreting everyday media experiences and will be of interest to students and researchers of image studies, visual studies, photography studies, visual culture, media studies, culture studies, cultural anthropology, digital humanities, popular culture, sociology of technology, and South Asian studies.

Avishek Ray is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the National Institute of Technology Silchar.

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at NYU.

Usha Raman is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad, India.

Martin Webb is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths.

Neha Gupta is a postdoctoral researcher at TISS Mumbai.

Sai Amulya Komarraju is Assistant Professor in the Communications area at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, India.

Anuja Premika is a PhD research scholar at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, India.

Riad Azam works as a Counseling Manager at Athena Education.

Farhat Salim works as Community Engagement Manager at Doctors Without Borders/ Medecins Sans Frontier India.

Pranavesh Subramanian is a writer, comedian and filmmaker based in Delhi.