Public/private negotiations in the media uses of young Muslim women in Copenhagen

Abstract

Building on a participatory media project and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in the Danish social housing area Blågården in Copenhagen, this article explores how technologically mediated places in the city are created through the uses of portable devices and everyday practices of web-based social media by a group of young Muslim women in the area. These second-generation female immigrants partake in self-presentation and interpersonal audiencing through mobile technologies on an unprecedented scale, impacting in the process on the understandings and appropriations of the city, where physical places and virtual space become profoundly entangled. It is argued in the article that distinct public spaces of appearance are enacted by these young women’s technology- and media-related activities. New spaces of potentiality emerge as a form of ‘moral laboratories’, where religion-, gender- and age-related (in)visibility, locality and morality are negotiated in novel ways. Traditional ethnographic fieldwork is combined with participatory and visual methods, interaction with media and technological tools both forming part of the object of study and being integral to the applied methodology.