Single Review on past events

Özlem Savas is a Bridge Fellow of the Zukunftskolleg affiliated with the Department of Literature.

What do ordinary people do on social media? Is social media trivial? Is trivial political? Özlem has recently completed her ethnographic research on Facebook, which focuses on practices of self and lifestyle. Currently, she is starting on a new ethnographic research on digital networks of affective and cosmopolitan politics within the context of recent migration from Turkey. Her research on both social media and digital networks revolves around one central question: How do individual, private and emotional domains of the everyday intertwine with the collective, public and political spheres? 

In her talk, Özlem addressed this question, mainly by focusing on self- reflexive imaginations and practices of ‘good life’ on social media. By drawing on her ethnographic research, she discussed how a lifestyle repertoire on Facebook is collectively and collaboratively created by individuals, as well as lifestyle experts, markets and industries, and utilized in the everyday to understand, constitute and transform both individual and collective ways of being and living. Furthermore, she presented her current research project that aims to explore how new migrants from Turkey use digital media to create emotional and cosmopolitan forms and spaces of solidarity and politics.