Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition

This event will launch Zoe Hurley's new book Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition.

Dubai’s audacious architecture and photographic locations attract social media ‘influencers’ from around the world. How has Dubai, once a small fishing village on the edge of a desert, morphed into a hyper-modern backdrop for this global phenomenon? How can we understand these interactions as our relationships with digital technologies undergo radical change?

This research-based study reveals how micro-celebrities and Dubai’s visible economies influence the evolution of the Emirate. Taking a post-digital approach, underpinned by cultural studies and social media theory, Social Media Influencing in The City of Likes presents a series of unique case studies and demonstrates how Dubai is considered not only an illusion of unlimited indulgence but also a city dependent on the emerging infrastructure of visible economies, visual attractions, and ‘Instagrammable’ locations.

Evaluating the cases of multiple influencers, from local to transnational content creators, Hurley reveals how residents, non-citizens and migrant workers survive as influencers in the city of ‘likes.’ Providing de-Westernising perspectives of Dubai’s social media influencing industry within the broader context of global platform capitalism, the book offers an important contribution to the field of social media through illustrating visible economies in a city circuited by social media influencing.

To receive a discount on purchasing this book please find more details here.

Meet the speakers

Zoe Hurley is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and Assistant Professor in the College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Her research focuses on postdigital cultures, feminist-semiotics and social media in the Arabian Gulf. She is the President of the Gulf Association of Semiotic Studies. With over two decades of experience in the GCC and South East Asia, she has been a Visiting Professor at the Socotra Archipelago University, Yemen and works with colleagues in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. She has published articles in leading academic journals, including Feminist Media Studies, Visual Communication, New Media + Society, Social Media & Society, Information Communication & Society, Postdigital Science and Education. Her monograph, Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition, advances decolonial semiotic theorising.

Tariq Elyas is Professor of Applied Linguistics at King Abdulaziz University, KAU (Saudi Arabia). His areas of interest include global English, teacher identity, policy reform, the media, and women's studies in the Middle East. Elyas is the co-editor of Research-Based Trends in Language Teaching and Learning in Saudi Arabia with Connie Mitchell and Ali Al-Hoorie (Springer). He has guest edited four special issues: ‘World Englishes in MENA’ with Ahmar Mahboob in World Englishes; ‘Gender in Language Education’ with Handoyo Puji Widodo in Sexuality & Culture; ‘English Language Education: A Critical Global Englishes Perspective’ with Fan Fang and Handoyo Puji Widodo in Asian Englishes and ‘Language Capital and the Medium of Instruction: Issues of Pedagogy, Economics and Political Feasibility’ with Donia Bouhlila in International Journal of Educational Development. His research papers have appeared in journals such as the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Digest of Middle East Studies, Contemporary Review of the Middle East, Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research, Semiotica and more.

Sarah Hopkyns is an Assistant Professor/Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, UK. She has previously worked in higher education in the United Arab Emirates, Canada, and Japan. Her research interests include world Englishes, language and identity, language policy, translingual practice, linguistic ethnography, linguistic landscapes and English-medium instruction (EMI). She has published widely in journals such as Asian Englishes, Language and Intercultural Communication, Linguistics and Education, Multilingua, and World Englishes, and has contributed numerous chapters to edited volumes. Sarah is the author of The Impact of Global English on Cultural Identities in the United Arab Emirates (Routledge, 2020) and the co-editor of Linguistic Identities in the Arab Gulf States (Routledge, 2022). 

Polly Withers is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre, where she leads the project “Neoliberal Visions: Gendering Consumer Culture and its Resistances in the Levant”. Polly’s interdisciplinary work questions and explores how gender, sexuality, race, and class intersect in popular culture and commercial media in the global south.

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