Nordic Journal of Media Studies, Vol. 7 (2025)
Deadline: April 3, 2024
Editors:
- Anne Jerslev (University of Copenhagen): jerslev@hum.ku.dk
- Mette Mortensen (University of Copenhagen): metmort@hum.ku.dk
Important dates:
- Deadline for extended abstracts: 3 April 2024
- Deadline for full submissions: 1 September 2024
- Peer review: October 2023–December 2024
- Expected publication: Spring 2025
Background and aim
Influencers wield significant social, political, and economic influence, as they have transformed from micro celebrities (Senft, 2008; Jerslev, 2016) and other Internet celebrities from the 2000s, operating at the intersections of authenticity and performance, creativity and commerce. Influencers navigate the realms of everyday life, entertainment, and politics, cutting across mainstream cultures and subcultures, the national, the Nordic, and the international (see, e.g., Abidin et al., 2020). Over the past decade, influencers have taken a central stage on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media, on which they “make a living from being celebrities native to and on the Internet” (Abidin, 2018: 1). In their pursuit of sustained visibility, influencers construct relatable narratives and project identities and sets of values that are recognisable and desirable to followers. Most influencers adopt commercial marketing strategies; they are managed by influencer agencies and create themselves as brands by performing scenes from their relatably ordinary or (more or less) admirably extraordinary lives. Some influencers promote commodity goods to monetise on these self-branding strategies (Jerslev & Mortensen, 2023: 336), or they receive compensation from social media networks such as YouTube relative to the number of likes and followers they generate. Meanwhile, other influencers are driven by political objectives, functioning primarily as content creators and using their platform visibility to gain political impact (Lewis, 2020; Riedl et al., 2023). Influencers strategically appeal to specific target audiences defined by demographics such as age, life phase, gender, race, nationality, and more, or by shared interests in areas like gaming, fashion, financial investments, lifestyle, health, beauty, environment, sports, home handicraft, family life, food, pets, religion, and so forth.
Influencers cover a great span: Far-right female influencers project traditional family values as a form of empowerment and agency (Askanius, 2022) or advocate anti-establishment in the context of the Nordic welfare state (Mortensen & Kristensen, 2023). Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, feminist influencers advocate pro-choice and other women’s rights. Some influencers actively contribute to shaping narratives and discourses on wars by reporting from their daily life in conflict zones or propagate political opinions and calls for action. Others, like migrants, document their fearful journey towards a distant goal (Turkewitz, 2023). Others again use their popular cultural persona to promote issues related to the environment and sustainability (Schmuck, 2021). And many influencers perform catchy dances or dead-pan, comical scenes for younger audiences, who consume entertainment and information largely driven by promotional and commercial interests, but are, perhaps, also able to seek out role models fine-tuned to the formation of their own identities.
With this issue of Nordic Journal of Media Studies, we invite scholars to explore the following questions: How can we understand and measure the social, cultural, economical, and political power and impact exerted on and by followers? What does it mean to “follow” an influencer? What do online relationships and personal affective attachments to influencers mean to people in their everyday lives? Is it possible to be an influencer and, for example, an activist simultaneously in a digital economy guided by algorithmic logics (cf. Scharff 2023)? Which narratives of self are constructed by different influencer profiles?
Themes include but are not limited to the following:
- Influencers and performance of values in relation to, e.g., gender, politics, culture, etc.
- Influencer economies and digital labor
- Influencers and marketing – business models, influencer agencies, self-branding strategies
- Influencers and regulation, e.g., in a Nordic context
- Influencer culture and gender
- Children and TikTok – patterns of consumption, influencers as role models
- Influencers as sources of news and information, e.g., in the context of Nordic public service media
- Influencers and religion, e.g., in relation to worship and authority
- Influencers, politics, and politicians
- Influencers and cross-media communication (media, channels, genres)
- Influencers and followers – forms of communication, parasocial interaction, and affect
- Influencers, celebrity, and fandom
- Influencers and the construction and commodification of authenticity
- Influencer engagement and engagement measurement
- Methodological approaches to the analysis of influencer accounts and following
We welcome theoretical, empirical, analytical contributions, and so on, just as we encourage interdisciplinary work and collaborative research produced with non-academic partners.
Literature
Abidin, C. (2018). Internet celebrity: Understanding fame online. Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/9781787560765
Abidin, C., Steenbjerg Hansen, K, Hogsnes, M., Newlands, G., Nielsen, M. L., Nielsen, L. Y., & Sihvonen, T. (2020). A review of formal and informal regulations in the Nordic influencer industry. Nordic Journal of Media Studies, 2(1), 71–83. https://doi.org/10.2478/njms-2020-0007
Askanius, T. (2022). Women in the Nordic resistance movement and their online media practices: Between internalised misogyny and embedded feminism. Feminist Media Studies, 22(7), 1763–1780. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1916772
Jerslev, A. (2016). In the time of the microcelebrity: Celebrification and the YouTuber Zoella. International Journal of Communication, 10, 5233–5251. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/5078
Jerslev, A., & Mortensen, M. (2023). Celebrity news online: Changing media, actors, and stories. In S. Alle (Ed.), The Routledge companion to news and journalism (pp. 334–342). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003174790
Lewis, R. (2020). “This is what the news won’t show you”: YouTube creators and the reactionary politics of micro celebrity. Television & New Media, 21(2), 201–217. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419879919
Mortensen, M., & Kristensen, N. N. (2023). At the boundaries of authority and authoritarianism in the welfare state: News coverage of alt. health influencers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Javnost – The Public, 30(1), 35–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2023.2168442
Riedl, M. J., Lukito, J., & Woolley, S. C. (2023). Political influencers on social media: An introduction. Social Media + Society, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231177938
Scharff, C. (2023). Are we all influencers now? Feminist activists discuss the distinction between being an activist and an influencer. Feminist Theory. OnlineFirst. https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001231201062
Schmuck, D. (2021). Social media influencers and environmental communication. In B. Takahashi, J. Metag, J. Thaker, & S. E. Comfort (Eds.), The handbook of international trends in environmental communication (pp. 373–387). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367275204
Senft, T. (2008). Camgirls: Celebrity and community in the age of social networks. Peter Lang.
Turkewitz, J. (2023, December 20). Live from the jungle: Migrants become influencers on social media. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/20/world/americas/migrants-tiktok-darien-gap.html#
Procedure
Those with an interest in contributing should write an extended abstract (max. 750 words) where the main theme (or argument) of the intended article is described. The abstract should contain the preliminary title, five keywords, and a rationale for how the article fits within the overall aim of the issue.
Send your extended abstract to Mette Mortensen (metmort@hum.ku.dk) and Anne Jerslev (jerslev@hum.ku.dk) by 3 April 2024.
Scholars invited to submit a full manuscript (6,000–8,000 words) will be notified by e-mail after the extended abstracts have been assessed. All submissions should be original works and must not be under consideration by other publishers. All submissions are submitted to Similarity Check – a Crossref service utilising iThenticate text comparison software to detect text-recycling or plagiarism.
After the initial submission and review process, manuscripts that are accepted for publication must adhere to our guidelines upon final manuscript delivery. You may choose to use our templates to assist you in correctly formatting your manuscript.
About Nordic Journal of Media Studies
Nordic Journal of Media Studies is a peer-reviewed international publication dedicated to media research. The journal is a meeting place for Nordic, European, and global perspectives on media studies. It is is a thematic digital-only journal published once a year. The editors stress the importance of innovative and interdisciplinary research, and welcome contributions on both contemporary developments and historical topics.
About the publisher
Nordicom is a centre for Nordic media research at the University of Gothenburg, supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers. Nordicom publishes all works under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence, which allows for non-commercial, non-derivative types of reuse and sharing with proper attribution. All works are published Open Access and are available to read free of charge and without requirement for registration. There are no article processing charges for authors, and authors retain copyright.
Link to the call on Nordicom’s website: https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/latest/news/call-papers-influencers-entertainment-politics-and-strategic-online-culture
