Emilie Owens
Doctoral research fellow, University of Oslo
Owens is a doctoral research fellow at the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Oslo. She is Canadian, but have lived and worked in Malaysia, Scotland, Denmark and now Norway. Owens completed her undergrad degree in Communication Studies and English Literature, and received an Erasmus Mundus scholarship to study Children's Literature, Media, and Culture internationally. Her interest in the field of children's media comes from my time working in education and childcare with children and adolescents of all ages, as well as a lifelong interest in understanding how social reality is shaped by a media-saturated present.
Tell us about your project!
The main aim of this project is to understand how the social realities of young people are mediatized in a digitally saturated world. This is undertaken through a study of TikTok, the shot-video creating and sharing app, and the role that it plays in the day to day lives of teenagers from both a social and individual perspective. The emphasis will be placed on the relationship between mediatization and the social reality of teenagers, meaning that the inquiry will move from questions about how to study teens on TikTok and where the app fits within a broader mediatization research trajectory and into empirical questions about the teenagers themselves – how they are enacting their identities with these media, and how that relates to their feelings/understandings about the social world more broadly.
“The main aim of this project is to understand how the social realities of young people are mediatized in a digitally saturated world.”
— Emilie Owens on her research project “Teens on TikTok: Exploring the mediated social realities of young people”