AMANDA K.GREENE

ABOUT ME

INTERDISCIPLINARY WRITER & SCHOLAR

ANDREW W. MELLON POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE

@ Lehigh University

PhD in English + Science, Technology, & Society

expertise in:

DIGITAL CULTURE | VISUAL MEDIA | HEALTH & ILLNESS | FEMINISM | NARRATIVE

As a researcher I am preoccupied with the interaction between bodies and media, and with generating new methods to engage critically with media history and with the digital present. My current book project Glitchy Vision: Feminist Media History and the Modern Body forwards a feminist approach to media history that illuminates how quotidian habits of media readership impact bodies in the “real world.” While many accounts of visual media effects in the interwar era focus on how new media spectacularly shock and numb human bodies, this project shows how seemingly trivial and feminized media objects like tabloids or fashion magazines subtly shape embodied experience on an everyday basis.Instead of focusing on particular devices, Glitchy Vision’s feminist media history centers practices of readership and the relational circuits the bind media to bodies. These evolving forms of media readership condition the links between human bodies in ethically consequential ways, especially in the face of personal and political violence. Although understandings of the past are inevitably filtered through the warped lens of the present, I draw on feminist standpoint theory to claim these optical glitches as tools instead of obstacles in the way of objectivity. Concretely, the project mobilizes these distortions into a critical strategy by anachronistically tracing terms and concepts from my own digital era (real-time, algorithmic filters, and sousveillance) into 1930s Britain’s rapidly evolving picture press ecosystem. Through its account Glitchy Vision proposes a new way of considering media effects in the 1930s as well as a method that can enrich critical understandings of visual media readership in contemporary digital culture.

In this work and through several cross-disciplinary research collaborations I am committed to bringing humanist expertise into dialogue with other analytic approaches from social and data science in order to address pressing questions in digital culture surrounding mental health, disability, gender equity, disinformation, and media literacy.

See my article in REAL LIFE magazine, "Data Sweat," for some of my recent thoughts on digital media and feeling bodies .

RESEARCH

FLAWS IN THE HIGHLIGHT REAL:

Fitstagram Diptychs, and the Enactment of Cyborg Embodiment

Feminist Theory, August 2020 10.1177/1464700120944794

This article inverts Donna Haraway’s proposition that “the ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image”by instead exploiting everyday experience to approach the contemporary cyborg. It utilizes digital tools to compile a corpus of Instagram posts that foreground corporeal hybridity and examines this social media data through the lenses of feminist STS, affect theory, and digital studies. This strategy offers a new vantage on the cyborg by connecting it to concrete, ongoing user practices. To make these interventions, the article focuses specifically on a genre of post popularized by Instagram fitness (or fitstagram) influencers – diptych photographic montages that draw on the opposition between imperfectly real material bodies and unrealistically perfect media bodies. Although they formally rely on binary logics (real v. perfect, offline v. online), the posts simultaneously deconstruct them in a number of ways. These repeated boundary transgressions reflect users’ lived experiences of hybrid online/offline corporeality and help forward a theory of cyborg embodiment that relies on everyday practices as opposed to fixed products or identities. Moreover, close engagement with a final data set of 89 posts illuminates three particular modes of enacting the cyborg corpus on Instagram: occupation of multiple bodies, awareness of the analog body, and anxious boundary-work. This research extends the cyborg as a critical figure by situating it within a social media context, attending to its imbrication in ongoing everyday practices, and affirming female social media users as theorists of their cyborg selves.

Biomarkers Can't Bypass the Mouth of a Wound

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

(forthcoming Fall 2020)

This article critiques the idealization of a biomarker-based “objective pain scale” in order to argue for increased investment in communication-centric approaches to chronic pain diagnosis and treatment. Although new technological advances and the rise of big data have revived old fantasies of objective pain measures, scholars have long affirmed the dangers of converting human experience into numbers, as well as the fundamental impossibility of reducing pain to physiology. Biomarkers can certainly be useful tools, but investments must also be made in fostering the “strong objectivity” that feminist scholars have advocated for and that the incorporation of narrative-driven initiatives can provide. Because expressing pain is notoriously difficult, doing this creative, communication-driven work well requires substantial effort, time, and training. Engaging with chronic pain from a feminist standpoint—one that affirms individuals’ situated experiences as valuable data and that attends to the rich multimodal vocabularies emerging on social media—can pave the way to a more equitable, ethical, and effective future of pain care.

Visual cross-platform analysis: digital methods to research social media images

Warren Pearce, Suay M. Özkula, Amanda K. Greene, Lauren Teeling, Jennifer S. Bansard, Janna Joceli Omena and Elaine Teixeira Rabello

Information, Communication, & Society (June 2018)

Analysis of social media using digital methods is a flourishing approach. However, the relatively easy availability of data collected via platform application programming interfaces has arguably led to the predominance of single-platform research of social media. Such research has also privileged the role of text in social media analysis, as a form of data that is more readily gathered and searchable than images. In this paper, we challenge both of these prevailing forms of social media research by outlining a methodology for visual cross-platform analysis (VCPA), defined as the study of still and moving images across two or more social media platforms. Our argument contains three steps. First, we argue that cross-platform analysis addresses a gap in research methods in that it acknowledges the interplay between a social phenomenon under investigation and the medium within which it is being researched, thus illuminating the different affordances and cultures of web platforms. Second, we build on the literature on multimodal communication and platform vernacular to provide a rationale for incorporating the visual into cross-platform analysis. Third, we reflect on an experimental cross-platform analysis of images within social media posts (n = 471,033) used to communicate climate change to advance different modes of macro- and meso-levels of analysis that are natively visual: image-text networks, image plots and composite images. We conclude by assessing the research pathways opened up by VCPA, delineating potential contributions to empirical research and theory and the potential impact on practitioners of social media communication.

DISMEMBERING REMEMBERING:

MOURNING WITH DISGUST IN DELBO’S AUSCHWITZ AND AFTER

Twentieth Century Literature 64.4 (December 2018)

This essay argues that Charlotte Delbo’s deployment of disgust in her memoir Auschwitz and After challenges the ethics and possibilities of trauma representation. As opposed to beautifying concentration camp victims through elegiac memorialization or by claiming the sublime unspeakability of the events, Delbo’s text dialogically oscillates between self-consciously aestheticized language and graphic physical representations of abject bodies. The irruptive visceral descriptions confront the reader with automatic, embodied repulsion in order to highlight the gaps in symbolization and the difficulties of witnessing. Yet as opposed to merely marking the limits of what can be witnessed, disgust offers an alternative, affective way of encountering the pain of others that still challenges the more soothing logic of mourning and meaning-making. It has a particular countermemorial capacity to preserve and communicate the embodied realities of the victims, if only through shudders of revulsion.

MODERN FEELS:

Interwar Britain and the Bodily Politics of Visual Social Media

My dissertation examines how habitual engagement with visual social media shapes subjects’ embodied encounters with vulnerability in everyday life. While a long tradition of scholarship has focused on the mediated spectatorship of pain in the face of punctual, graphic imagery, my work looks instead at how mediated environments more expansively condition individuals’ quotidian capacities for feeling and sense-making even outside of explicit media consumption. While addressing these questions, this project simultaneously maps new methodologies for media studies scholarship. By shifting between a diverse multimedia archive of interwar and contemporary visual media phenomena, my research teases out human habits and affect from the constraints of technological and digital determinism without dismissing their historical, cultural specificity.

TEACHING

LEHIGH UNIVERSITY

Mechanical Engineering 325

Mechanics, Media, and The Martian

Health, Medicine, & Society/ Biological Sciences 097

Science and Society during COVID-19

1Creative Inquiry 389

Inquiry to Impact: The Digital Lives of Vaping

Health, Medicine, & Society/ Biological Sciences 095

Social Immunity

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

English 298 Introduction to Literary Studies

English 124 Academic Writing and Literature

“Thinking, Writing, Speaking Machines”

English 125 Writing and Academic Inquiry:

Media, Celebrity and Identity

English 313.001 Topics in Literary Studies:

Yeats, Eliot, Pound

ADDITIONAL TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Auxiliar de Conversación: I.E.S Lucía de Medrano

(Middle/High School ESL Instructor)

Salamanca, Spain

Private English Tutor

Salamanca, Spain

Creative Writing Instructor: Duke Talent Identification Program

University of Kansas, Lawrence

Southside Scribblers

(Creative writing courses at inner-city elementary schools and a women’s shelter)

Chicago, IL