Impression Management, Popular Culture, and Social Media Practices: Canadian Adolescents' Visual and Cultural Identity Constructions

• In Event: 47.098 - Sheraton Roundtable Session Eight - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 47.098-1 - Culture, Identity, and Reflective Artistic Practice in Education

Abstract

Adolescents’ visual and cultural identities are shaped by popular and material culture, social-media and western beauty ideals, offering limited expressions. The oppressive pressure on adolescents to comply with beauty ideals and dress curricula shapes their identities through corporatization of gender, culture and class. Exploration of adolescents’ impression management strategies in grade-eleven studio-art classrooms included ethnographic case-studies, documentary inquiry-based multi-modal art projects, critical reflection on popular and material culture and their social-media practices. Adolescents engaged in and resisted heteronormative neoliberal beauty ideals, developing growing critical awareness of impression management as prejudiced, corporatized, ontological, gendered, classed, raced, enculturated and evolving, situated in our need as humans to perform, bear witness, name and judge others and ourselves without neutrality.

Author

• Fiona Blaikie, Brock University