WP5 challenges you!

TL;DR: Join our dedicated facebook group and start posting whatever you think is an ugly nature selfie! We would like the aggregated results for our research, but won’t publish or reproduce individual pictures without explicit permission. The same text as below is also reproduced in the facebook group.

How to participate?

1. Take ugly nature selfies!

When you are out on your next walk, hike, bike ride, swim, camping trip, or similar, think about how you would share this experience with your friends and family. But what was not so good or ‘beautiful’ about your experience in nature? Capture what you would normally not share or what you did not like about your outdoor experience in a selfie! After all, it was part of your trip!

2. Share your pictures

Share your pictures in this Facebook group. It is set up specifically for participants of the programme days. If you don’t have a Facebook account or don’t want to use it for this workshop, please share your selfies by emailing to malte.rodl@slu.se. In this case, please indicate clearly if you are happy for us to share your picture with others in the Facebook group and/or look at it during the programme days.

3. Share your selfies [optional]

If you feel up for it, you may also want to share your selfies on a social media stream of your choice. We suggest the hashtags #faceit #friluftsliv #friluftslivnofilter.
If you like, feel free to take the challenge one step further and nominate others to take the ugly nature selfies challenge. However, please do not invite others to the programme-specific Facebook group.

4. Reflect

Reflect on how you described/tagged the picture when sharing it on social media, or think about how you would do that if you were to share it. How would you expect your network to react? What would it mean to leave this selfie uncommented?

5. Join our reflection session

Join our reflection session on October 21 during the Mistra Programme Days. You are invited to join even if you have not taken or shared ugly nature selfies, of course. 

Background

Why ugly nature selfies?

Both selfies and nature photography are excessively beautiful. Even when they are not, we try to interpret them as such. Based on our research, we believe that basically all nature selfies on social media highlight ‘beauty’ whilst silencing human impact on the environment, both everyday and commercial Inspired by Harold Garfinkel’s famous breaching experiments, with this challenge we want to, first, explore social norms and habits involved in the making and sharing of nature selfies, and second, see what it takes for ugly nature selfies to break this unrealistic — and potentially harmful —  perpetuation of the only-ever-beautiful outdoors.

Why do we do this?

Instructions on how to produce the perfectly beautiful nature selfie abound, but there are no guidelines on how to make an ugly nature selfie. One of the outcomes of this workshop will be to come up with a better understanding of how to go about, what to expect and aim for. Another outcome will be to engage with the norms of social media and the anxieties involved in breaching them.

The prize?

Everyone wins! We hope that you will deeply engage with our own insecurities and anxieties about how we and others on social media perceive ourselves, nature, and our valuable #friluftsliv time.

The small print:

With this challenge we hope to inform our research. By participating you agree that WP5 may use your input—images, posts, comments, participation in the workshop—as part of ongoing research which may include sharing your contributions during the workshop. After the workshop, we will anonymise the generated data (screenshots, selfies, text, workshop recording) and will discuss the selfies only on an aggregate level. Please indicate clearly if you don’t want this to happen with your contribution. Furthermore, if your imagery includes faces of others, either make them unidentifiable or ask these people for permission. We will not share personally identifiable data outside our small research project and we will ask for additional permission should we intend to reproduce any imagery you have uploaded.