Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Entrepreneurship for stay-at-home mums"

The level of self-employment among immigrants is often higher than among natives. The purpose of this paper was to test empirically whether selective migration with respect to entrepreneurial characteristics may explain this difference. The relevant hypotheses were tested comparing representative samples of Russian immigrants in Norway and their stay-at-home counterparts. Data from the Russian population came from the 2008 GEM study, while data on Russian immigrants in Norway were collected through a specially designed postal survey. The analysis revealed some demographic dissimilarity between the two groups, as well as a presence of selective migration with respect to entrepreneurial characteristics. This study demonstrates that immigrants (as compared to non-migrants) are more likely to report intentions to start a business. Moreover, they possess relatively large amount of specific human capital, social capital and self-confidence relevant for entrepreneurship. The paper concludes with proposed practical implications and suggestions for further research.

PurposeWomen and disadvantaged minorities within emerging and developing economies often resort to business activity within the informal economy as a way to overcome various barriers and challenges to formal workforce participation. This paper aims to explore the characteristics, motives, barriers and challenges of female engagement in informal business activities in Jordan.Design/methodology/approachThe qualitative analysis used in this paper is based upon empirical findings from semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 14 female informal entrepreneurs in Amman, Jordan.FindingsThe study revealed that informal female entrepreneurs tend to be both opportunity- and necessity-driven. Generating profit and contributing to the household income seems to be their main motive. Their businesses were funded either through personal savings or from their social network (e.g. husband, family and friends). Promotion of the business relied mostly on word-of-mouth or social media. High inflation, high competition, time pressures and lack of business skills were cited as the biggest challenges. Besides being content with the status quo, lack of knowledge about the procedures for registering a business and fear of bureaucracy were among the main reasons for not legalizing their activities.Originality/valueThere are very few studies that analyse informal micro-entrepreneurship in the Arab world, particularly in the Jordanian context, which is of growing interest due to low number of women in the workforce and the growing number of refugees in the country. This study therefore presents new knowledge around women’s informal micro-entrepreneurship in Jordan and provides recommendations for further research and policy-making.

The unprecedented crisis humanity has been facing for almost two years now has had tremendous impact on the entire tourism ecosystem. The dramatic decline in the international tourism economy must be addressed both at an international and national level, with recovery strategies that can provide solutions for structural transformation. Particularly convenient for the Romanian landscape is the development of sustainable domestic tourism, which could quickly prove profitable for the entire HoReCa sector. The current paper focuses on The Ministry of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Tourism, the measures taken to encourage domestic tourism and its communication efforts, as seen online by the stay-at-home Romanians.

The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in many businesses experiencing a slump. The decline occurred because businesses were not ready to adapt to changing consumer preferences. Shops and supermarkets, which are usually crowded with consumers, are now suddenly deserted because consumers prefer to stay at home. Business owners must innovate, especially in terms of marketing to maintain their existence during the pandemic. This activity aims to improve the entrepreneurial skills of students and alumni to survive during the pandemic. The method of implementing this entrepreneurship development program is carried out in the form of a webinar with the theme Branding and Marketing Innovation During the Covid-19 Pandemic. The total number of participants is approximately 80 students and alumni. The results of the activity showed that the webinar activity really helped the participant's business to be able to grow and survive the pandemic. It is hoped that this webinar can increase creativity and bring up participant innovation to become strong entrepreneurs in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Governments’ coronavirus disease (COVID-19) measures have forced the community to stay at home. During this period, youths have had time to think about their career paths. For some, a conventional eight-hour job in a private company is undesirable; meanwhile, entrepreneurship can mitigate the adverse effects of the crisis, such as unemployment. Accordingly, this study investigates the intention of Greek youths that study in a higher education institution (HEI) to engage in entrepreneurship in times of crisis, and highlights the factors that drive them to enter the business arena. This study designed and distributed a questionnaire to 369 Greek youths who were studying at the University of Thessaly. The data from the empirical research were used to develop a multinomial logistic regression model to investigate youths’ entrepreneurial intention and reveal the driving factors. The results showed that during times of crisis, youths appeared hesitant to enter the business arena. However, those who were more confident indicated that entrepreneurship could provide them with greater satisfaction. Driving factors for engaging in entrepreneurship were family and friends. Inhibiting factors for establishing a new business were having previous work experience in a family business and lack of educational knowledge. This study contributes to the understanding of youths’ entrepreneurial intention and the driving factors that play a key role in shaping this intention in Greece during a crisis period, since there are few studies on this topic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the entire world. The industry experienced a significant downturn. Unprecedented global travel restrictions and government instructions to stay at home are causing the most significant disruption to the global economy. Many hotel employees have been laid off both formally and informally in the current pandemic situation. It results in people losing their income. This study aims to analyze the strategies used by human resources in the tourism sector, especially hospitality, which has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic to survive in the middle. This study uses an approach using descriptive analysis. Informants who previously worked in the tourism sector and made Covid-19 adapt and implement various strategies simultaneously to survive and be resilient during the pandemic. The methods used to collect data are questionnaires and interviews. The analysis in this study was conducted using a qualitative descriptive method. The research findings reveal the dominance of the strategies adopted by key informants. Entrepreneurial orientation, motivation and effort are the most prominent approaches in an active strategy to solve problems. Former hoteliers gain resilience to survive during the pandemic by empowering skills from past work experience in star hotels and conducting retraining programs through government policies. Human resources in the tourism sector are expected to foster social-based entrepreneurship or opportunities and needs-based entrepreneurship so that businesses remain stable in the future.

It is not wrong to say that entrepreneurship is one of the toughest jobs on the planet. This is because, this job required a person to be creative, proactive and resilient in order to expand and sustain their business, especially during uncertain situations like the Covid 19 pandemic. Additionally, up till now, the world has been shocked by the virus name Covid-19. It is not only severely impacted human health but also has far-reaching economic impacts around the world. The paralysis of productive operations is one of the collateral consequences of the virus's war, with major economic and social consequences around the world (Bapuji et al., 2020). Many well-known brands in a variety of industries are likely to go bankrupt as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak, as consumers stay at home and economies shut down. Besides that, the small business's survival was jeopardized in this tough situation. The crisis is radically altering the world and the worst in the entire history (Afshan et al., 2021). Keywords: Entrepreneur, Psychological characteristics, Proactive and Creative

Background: Uganda has one of the highest maternal deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, with a mortality ratio of 336 per 100 000 live births. Early regular antenatal care (ANC) helps prevent adverse outcomes, including deaths, through prevention, identification, treatment, and/or referral of at-risk women. We explored ANC practices and associated factors among women from hard-to-reach Lake Victoria islands fishing communities in Kalangala district, Uganda. Methods: A cross-sectional survey among 486 consenting women aged 15 to 49 years, who were pregnant or had a birth or abortion in the past 6 months was conducted in 6 island fishing communities of Kalangala district, Uganda, during January to May 2018. ODK software interviewer-administered questionnaires were used to collect data on sociodemographics and ANC practices. Regression modeling using STATA version 15 was used to determine factors associated with ANC visits. Results: Women’s median (range) age was 26 (15-45) years, 63% (304/486) had up to primary level education, 45% (219/486) were housewives (stay home mums), 87% (423/486) were married. ANC visits ranged from 0 to 10, with over three-fifths of women having their first visit late after 3 months of being pregnant (63%, 198/316). Women without a history of pregnancy loss (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 1.8, 95% CI 1.1-3.0), those not staying with their partners (AOR = 2.5, 95% CI 1.1-6.0), and those whose partners were working in fishing-related activities (AOR = 1.8, 95% CI 1.0-3.0) were likely to have started care late. Women from communities with a public health facility and those with partners working in none fishing-related activities had the highest predicted number of visits. Conclusion: Antenatal practices among these communities are characterized by late start of care. Community-led early ANC awareness interventions are needed. Targeted health policies need to consider public ANC facilities for each island for improved antenatal outcomes and maternal health.

On 2016 the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda officially came into force proposing that Governments can work to promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all. This study aims to analyze the contribution of Residential Elderly Care Center – RECC to promote SD along with social support in urban centers of megacities. Considering that the current scenario presents: longer life expectancy and increasing numbers of older people; the growing presence of women in the market and the hierarchy of companies making more and more difficult for them to stay at home as well as the failure of public care structure to respond adequately to citizens’ demands new business models are welcome. While the families are getting smaller which removes potential caregivers within them, conversely mobility issues among peripheral areas and public institutions are increasing. Large arrangements for caring can be useful in some contexts, but generally, require commuting from home to the support structure and new public and private investments. The potential reduction of human daily dislocations could improve the environment and life quality in megacities in many aspects: decreasing vehicles CO2 emissions, pollution and the volume of traffic; giving practicality to everyday life of families with dependent members of care and generating new opportunities of small business. In addition, this new residential structures employment might reduce the need to shift the caregivers themselves to their work place, strengthen community bounds and not require immobilization of new properties of the exclusive use for Care centers in highly urbanized areas. The methodology used in this paper is based in the exploratory-descriptive and bibliographical-documentary method. Results of the study are corroborated by a series of complementary research of the authors. Conceptual step-by-step flowchart to assist an entrepreneur to open a RECC is described.

Abstract: In the middle of the development of UMKMs that were not too good in early 2020, UMKMs in Indonesia were again tested with the Covid-19 outbreak in the middle of the Indonesian people. The spread of the Covid-19 virus has a direct impact on the drastic decline in the economy of UMKMs, because every citizen, even school students, has a day off to stay at home, as a result, UMKM companies are hampered in sales and production. This article intends to analyze how the preparation of a Islamic marketing strategy that can be done during the Covid-19 pandemic and supporting factors in entrepreneurship in the creative economy sector during the Covid-19 pandemic. Using qualitative research methods with a library research approach. The results of this study prove that the preparation of a Islamic marketing strategy in entrepreneurship in the creative economy sector can be planned through STP (Segmenting, Targetting and Positioning) to attract consumers with the concept of halal market, namely halal activist, active customers, and passive customers. While the supporting factors in entrepreneurship in the creative economy sector during the Covid-19 pandemic to run effectively and efficiently include the concept of promotion, service excellet customer rewards, affiliations or partnerships and social capital. Keywords: Islamic Marketing Strategy, Business, Creative Economy. Abstrak: Di tengah perkembangan Usaha Mikro Kecil Menengah (UMKM) yang belum terlalu baik di awal tahun 2020, UMKM di Indonesia kembali diuji dengan wabah Covid-19 ditengah masyarakat Indonesia. Penyebaran virus Covid-19 memberikan dampak yang berimbas langsung terhadap penurunan secara drastis ekonomi UMKM, karena setiap warga bahkan murid sekolah pun diliburkan agar tetap berada didalam rumah, akibatnya perusahaan UMKM terhambat dalam penjualan dan juga produksi. Artikel ini bermaksud ingin menganalisis bagaimana penyusunan strategi pemasaran Islam yang dapat dilakukan pada masa pandemi Covid-19 dan faktor pendukung dalam berwirausaha di sektor ekonomi kreatif pada masa pandemi Covid-19. Menggunakan metode penelitian kualitatif dengan pendekatan library research. Hasil penelitian ini membuktikan bahwa penyusunan strategi pemasaran dalam berwirausaha pada sektor ekonomi kreatif dapat direncanakan melalui STP (Segmenting, Targetting dan Positioning) untuk menarik konsumen dengan konsep halal market, yaitu halal activist, active customers, dan passive customers. Sedangkan faktor pendukung dalam berwirausaha di sektor ekonomi kreatif pada masa pandemi Covid-19 agar berjalan secara efektif dan efisien diantaranya adalah konsep promotion, service excellet customers rewards, afiliasi atau kemitraan dan modal sosial. Kata Kunci: Strategi Pemasaran Islam, Bisnis, Ekonomi Kreatif

BackgroundInternet use among the elderly is influenced by various demographic backgrounds, social life and health factors.ObjectiveThis study aims to identify the impact of several demographic features on 60- to 79-year-old individuals’ intention to use the Internet.MethodFinland population data (N = 2508) from the 2012 IKIPOSA project was used with two cohorts: 60s group (n = 1515) and 70s group (n = 990). Descriptive statistic and two binomial logistic regressions have been used with the unadjusted effect and Forward LR method to measure each predictor’s contribution to the model. In addition, a preliminary analysis to measure the multicollinearity was performed.ResultOf the 18 independent variables, only nine predictors, namely, age, education, financial situation, having children, entrepreneurship, a leadership position, a higher level white-collar worker and a lower level white-collar worker, were significant factors in predicting the Internet use. Meanwhile, gender, having grandchildren, living alone, marital status, house location and type, stay-at-home mother or father, blue-collar worker, agricultural entrepreneur and social relations satisfaction were not significant predictors. The most significant predictors were education and age, which contributed 19% and 10%, respectively, to the model. Other significant predictors, lower level white-collar worker, higher level white-collar worker and financial situation, had less impact with only around 6%.ConclusionEducation and age were influential factors among elderly to use the Internet in their later life. Certain work experiences affect elderly people’s engagement with the Internet after retirement.

The economy in Indonesia is currently declining, due to a worldwide pandemic causing the Indonesian economy to experience a recession, as well as the global economy which is also experiencing a recession. Indonesia's economic growth was minus 5.32 percent in the second quarter of 2020. The figure had improved, although it was still in the minus category, namely 3.49 percent. The impact of this minus economic growth. The Industrial Revolution 4.0 has a positive impact that can help human activities, which were originally carried out traditionally, can be carried out by utilizing technology. During the pandemic that we have experienced, there is no reason not to be productive as long as we stay at home, with this technology it can help with daily life activities. One form of technology utilization carried out by the Faletehan University Management Study Program is to hold community service in the field of entrepreneurship with the theme Digitalization Business Development Program to Increase Family Income. spare time in business practices in various businesses to be able to become a business person at least for the welfare of his family. Even this activity is based on the problem that arises from the lack of a ratio between the number of entrepreneurs and the population of its citizens because the requirement for a developed country is to have a ratio of 14%. According to Law no. 12 of 2012 Higher Education is an institution that has an important role in creating creative and innovative resources so that they can produce various works or products that can encourage the growth of the Indonesian economy. Therefore, higher education has the potential to create entrepreneurs who can utilize technology or are called technopreneurs. The objectives of this PKM activity for Posyandu Mekarsari kramatwatu mothers are 1). Society is expected to maximize the use of technology as a means of business 2). Producing New Products 3). Adding to the Economy in the Family 4). Confident and skilled.

ABSTRACT This teaching case describes the trajectory of the entrepreneur Raphael Vidal. The information presented makes it possible to link the history and beliefs of the subject-entrepreneur Raphael to the decisions regarding Casa Porto project in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Aspects of his entrepreneurial attitude as a basis for the way he has been conducting Casa Porto are exposed. In addition, elements related to the decision to open, conduct, and maintain a business in situations of crisis are displayed. And more importantly, nuances related to other spheres involved in the understanding of the entrepreneur as a social being are addressed.

The Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis management strategies adopted by world leaders across the globe in 2020 impacted the work-life balance of billions of people. Entire populations were forced to stay at home and maintain a safe distance from family members, friends, colleagues, and customers. Occupational devotion is defined as a feeling of strong, positive attachment to a form of self-enhancing employment, where achievement and fulfillment are high, and the core activity has such intense appeal that the line between this work and leisure is virtually erased. Although it is not a new concept, this area of the serious leisure perspective has been largely overlooked by scholars observing the world of sport events and entrepreneurship. Using Creative Analytical Practice (CAP), a post-qualitative methodology, we present the personal narrative of a New Zealand-based active lifestyle entrepreneur who, as a result of a nationwide COVID19 lockdown, was forced to re-assess his long-established occupational devotion. Our co-constructed story offers an emotive insight into the personal cost and consequences of finding yourself living in a lockdown.

Abstract The COVID-19 crisis presents manifest threats for entrepreneurs since their business survival is often directly at stake given the alarming economic downturn. This existential threat, together with their crucial role in the economy, is the reason for the plethora of public financial support schemes being implemented throughout the entire world. However, support schemes for mental health are lacking. We aim to investigate, first, whether burnout levels have increased during the crisis and, second, whether burnout levels during the COVID-19 crisis depend on the threat of becoming ill, having to stay at home due to the lockdown, and/or having to file for bankruptcy due to the economic downturn. We do so using seven data sets of French entrepreneurs with a temporal comparison of averages and two data sets of French entrepreneurs with a cross-sectional analysis of individuals. Our findings show that indeed, the risks of burnout have increased during the pandemic and that the threat of bankruptcy is the dominant threat. As an increasing number of studies in the entrepreneurship literature indicate that entrepreneurs’ mental health influences their activities, as well as the growth and sustainability of their ventures, our study is important and timely in its contribution, as it takes a close look at the perception of burnout in general and more specifically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Plain English Summary The risk of burnout in French entrepreneurs has increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, which calls for not only financial support but also other forms of support. The COVID-19 pandemic presents many threats for entrepreneurs since their business survival is often directly at stake. These threats are not just financial but also related to health, such as the threat of burnout. The findings of our study show that for French entrepreneurs, the threat of burnout increased after the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. This finding raises the question whether this outcome is due to the threat to health, the effects of the lockdown, or the threat of bankruptcy. It appears that all three factors play important roles, although the financial threat is the dominant threat. These findings call for the extension of entrepreneurial support systems beyond the financial area by also involving an “entrepreneurship care” aspect, which includes telephone support, webinars, and mental help facilities.

ABSTRACT This teaching case describes the trajectory of the entrepreneur Raphael Vidal. The information presented makes it possible to link the history and beliefs of the subject-entrepreneur Raphael to the decisions regarding Casa Porto project in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Aspects of his entrepreneurial attitude as a basis for the way he has been conducting Casa Porto are exposed. In addition, elements related to the decision to open, conduct, and maintain a business in situations of crisis are displayed. And more importantly, nuances related to other spheres involved in the understanding of the entrepreneur as a social being are addressed.

Study level/applicability The case is suitable for all post-graduate students and executives doing a course in human resource management (HRM). The case will enable these students to apply concepts such as inclusion, empowerment, glass ceiling, in business situations involving women. It will help them to trace the evolution path for women employees who have the traits to lead a department or organisation and assume entrepreneurial roles. Subject Area The case study is particularly beneficial for MBA students specialising in HRM focussed on leadership and training. It can be used in courses such as gender and entrepreneurship for students of MBA entrepreneurship and MBA family business management. As the case is written in India, it can explore the gender issues in emerging markets surreptitiously. Most importantly, the case addresses COVID-19 perspective adequately, to teach modules embedded in main courses of any MBA program. Case overview PRISM World Pvt Ltd is a leading training and consultancy firm in Delhi, India. The firm is owned and managed by a young woman Dr Anubha Walia. She started her career as a human resource manager in leading Indian companies, but somewhere down the line, she felt the job was not allowing her to realise the fullest potential. The Indian corporate training industry was male dominated with self-serving men, supporting the “glass ceiling”. To break the barrier, Anubha opened her training firm founded on the basis of a new philosophy, which should serve the ideals of helping and promoting women in workplace. This new philosophy was called PRISM. Anubha provided an inclusive environment which allowed her trainers to grow and feel empowered in a gender-biased industry.Very recently, when COVID-19 pandemic happened, female trainers were under tremendous strain as training requirements completely dried up, and they were rendered jobless. Most of these educated young women had small kids and paid monthly installments for their home loans, sharing the financial burden with their husbands. Some mature trainers were single women who had to support themselves through savings in these difficult times. But Anubha’s sense of empowerment at PRISM helped these women to do things which made their livelihoods turnaround even in uncertain circumstances. PRISM philosophy made a turnaround too. While employees were thinking of abandoning their companies and vice-versa, trainers at PRISM went for free webinars to draw clients to their firms and changed the concept of training and delivery in corona times.PRISM acquired a new meaning of wellness and spirituality in these difficult times and soared ahead successfully. Expected learning outcomes The case study hopes to achieve the following pedagogical objectives: 1. To educate students on manners and traits of women entrepreneurs. Besides, the usual difficulties of financing and running a business, women face adversities at home in the form of lack of access to working capital, trust deficit amongst family and friends. Basically, lack of support system to propels women into the tougher role of an entrepreneur graduating from a regular employee. Gender becomes a disability, which women had to fight in the workplace. The case introduces the PRISM philosophy as a unique methodology to inculcate inclusivity in work environment leading to women empowerment. 2. To outline all issues related to ‘glass ceiling” – the barrier which existed in the corporate world for businesswomen. Students need to know about problems women faced in the business environment as well as shortcomings within themselves, which can make them unproductive. 3. To align students first hand with the challenges of COVID-19 pandemic, specific to women. The case talks about educated young and mature women in Anubha’s firm PRISM, fighting for lost livelihood owing to reduced levels of business. But women are known to be highly resilient and empowered in the right direction will turnaround the situation in their favour. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Social implications The case has tremendous social implication for educated working women in traditional patriarchal Indian societies. Though a sizeable percentage of women have achieved higher education and started working in a male-dominated corporate world, only a small number of them are visible as entrepreneurs and/or leaders. Every woman needs to trace her journey from an employee to an entrepreneur or a CEO to assume a position of leadership. This case can be an eye opener for many such ambitious women who can build small- to mid-size businesses in a short span of time. Digital intervention is very important in COVID times to stay afloat. The author has shared links for many videos which can disseminate ideas for digital transformation in businesses. The case tries to showcase an ideal inclusive environment which will propel women to achieve their latent goals and desires breaking the 'glass ceiling.' Subject code CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

Introduction. Covid-19 outbreak has changed human life and activity [1], Especially In urban areas forcing citizens to stay for large periods of time in lockdowns. Protective measures (social distancing and isolation) that have been globally implemented has caused the isolation of millions. Preliminary findings (Moreno et al, 2021) suggest adverse mental health effects in previously healthy people and especially in people with pre-existing mental health disorders. Extended lockdowns come at the expense of mental health, psycho-physical conditions, wellbeing, and social relations within societies (Campion et al., 2020). Before COVID-19 outbreak, city centers offered a high-quality life with a wide range of services, utilities, public and green spaces, as well as city parks (Sharifi & Khavarian-Garmsird, 2020). Living in a small apartment with a minimal private space in the city center was balanced by the high level of socialization in public spaces, outdoor activities and events, intense interactions among inhabitants, allowing them to maintain relations (Portegijs et al., 2021). With COVID-19 outbreak, this modern urban standard of living was challenged. Social distancing took place at several levels: at home and at work, and, in the city, in the street and on public transport. Everything created for urban life changed and became uncertain. Societies got used to sharing common spaces, often crowded, and everyone was cut off from everyday socialisation. The isolation forced millions of individuals and families to remain at home, causing them to change their routines, rituals, and habits (McCay, 2020). In dense urban areas, this mostly meant locking people in cramped apartments, cut off from everyday physical activity outside the home (Portegijs et al, 2021; Bil et al, 2021). Smart cities are instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent urban areas (Harrison et al., 2010) that pursue shared growth through an integrated set of technologies that shape interactions between actors (Nam & Pardo, 2011). A smart city can be defined as complex set of technology (infrastructures of hardware and software), people (creativity, diversity, and education), and institutions (governance and policy) (Nam & Pardo, 2011). Smart cities aim is to create an environment that drives innovation from a technological, managerial, and organizational point of view by fostering environmental and social wellbeing (Karvonen et al., 2018; Polese et al., 2021]. The aim of this study is the literature review of the role of technology for citizens mental health during Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns in Smart Cities and to investigate if there is a relation between digital tools provided to the citizens of Pafos Municipality to use during quarantine, and their mental health status. Methodology\design\approach. A review of the literature and an additional critical review were conducted in the fields of smart cities and mental health with a focus on the latest research concerning COVID-19 influence on ICT, mental health and wellbeing. For the purposes of this article, a thorough database search has been made. The database used was mostly Google Scholar and Science Direct. Selection criteria included full-text publications and consisted of the following keywords: COVID-19, post-COVID-19, mental health, wellbeing, lockdown, isolation, anxiety, infection rates, density, smart city, digital technology, ICT and Virtual Reality. Author focused on qualitative research available until April 2022. Further than this, field research was conducted through a qualitative method in the particular case of Paphos Municipality in Cyprus, the introduction of various ICT technology solutions during the pandemic lockdowns and their impact on citizens mental health. ICT tools were briefly analyzed and their contributions towards citizens mental health was evaluated based on questionnaires distributed to the citizens before and after the use of these tools. Now the key question that needs an answer is “Did smart cities impact on citizens mental health during the pandemic?” During the pandemic, Pafos Municipality introduced to its citizens various ICT solutions that despite initially they were targeting foreign tourists visiting the district, they ended up as entertainment tools that ease the lockdown period during the quarantine phase. As part of the E.U. co-funded by European Union program “Smart Cities – Interreg: Greece – Cyprus” the municipality implemented the “Collection, Documentation and Digitization of Cultural and Tourist material, Development of Digital Tourism / Culture and Entrepreneurship Platform and Development of digital applications of e-democracy and participation in the Municipality of Pafos” project. The result of this project was the creation of 3 websites: 1. Explore Pafos https://www.explorepafos.org/ with multimedia information (text, photos, videos, 360-pictures, interactive map with points of interest etc.) about the province's major points of interest sorted by category: Culture, Environment, Tourism and Services. 2. Historical Timeline https://xronologio.explorepafos.org/ with information about the history of the city in a chronological order. 3. Electronic Participation https://diavouleusi.explorepafos.org/ offering User Registration, Consultation, Online Citizens Community (forum), Civil Council Decisions, Online Polls, News and Announcements. Further than these 2 mobile applications for iOS and Android devices were developed, Explore Pafos with various important information about the city of Pafos and Pafos AR which contain Augmented Reality representation of various significant cultural and historical sightseeing in the district. The websites and mobile applications were available in 5 languages (Greek, English, Russian, Hebrew and German). These platforms were presented to the citizens of Pafos Municipality on the 27th of February 2020, slightly earlier than the first lockdown. After the first strict lockdown, the administrators of the website reported a significant increase in the traffic of the website among local citizens compared to pre-pandemic. This led the creators of the platforms among which is the author of this article to provide online questionnaires to people using the digital platforms on their leisure time during COVID-19 lockdowns to answer various questions regarding the impact of these digital tools in their mental health status during COVID-19 lockdown. A questionnaire containing 5-point Likert scale questions and questions about qualitative and quantitative use of the ICT tools and their mental health during COVID-19 lockdowns was completed by citizens of Pafos Municipality. Due to this study objective, two main criteria were established for sample selection. First, respondents should be citizens of Pafos Municipality from various areas over at least the past 5 years. Additionally, respondents must have been present during COVID-19 outbreak and lockdowns in the city. To verify this criterion, an initial survey question asked whether respondents were staying in the city during the COVID-19 outbreak. The questionnaire was constructed in three parts. Its first one aimed at collecting descriptive variables (demographic information) of respondents’ location, and professional profile. The second part asked citizens about their mental health status before and after COVID-19 outbreak and lockdowns. Each question was assessed according to a 5-point Likert scale (1 referred to ‘not used’ and 5 denoted ‘fully used’). The last section of the questionnaire examined the adoption level of the ICT tools introduced by the Municipality as supporting tools for their mental status during the COVID-19 outbreak. For that, all 6 ICT tools were listed and evaluated based upon a similar Likert scale that ranged from 1 (not used) to 5 (fully used). Results. The online questionnaire had its link firstly sent by e-mail to 480 citizens that registered in the platform in December 2020. A follow-up message was sent two weeks later. 215 responses returned but only 206 of them were actually from citizens that met our selection criteria, which resulted in 42.9% valid response rate, For analyzing data, two distinctive procedures were carried out using the SPSS® Statistics 23 software to identify differences in levels of each characteristic related to ICT tools, device available (PC, mobile phone, tablet), and content (Cultural, Environmental, Social, Multimedia Content) when considering the degree of how they impact their mental health during COVID-19 lockdowns. Our respondents were half men and half women. Moreover, 10% are aged between 20 and 25, 34% between 26 and 35, 36% between 36 and 45, 14% in the interval of 46 till 55 and only 6% are older than 55. 36% are single, 59% being married and almost 5% under another non-defined situation. Most respondents were living in a house (56%), with their family (54%), and had 1 or more kids (44%). 75% of the respondents mentioned that they use more often their mobile/laptops to access the internet compared to before. The majority of respondents (62%) mentioned that they used ICT tools provide 1 or more times per week to remind them of their daily habits while 56% mentioned that they used the platforms to navigate at their favorite place at least once. The largest majority (82%) accessed the services from their mobile phone while the smallest percent (12% accessed the services from their PC/Laptop. Regarding COVID-19 lockdowns, 86% stated that it is very stressful to stay at home in another lockdown while 36% said they wouldn’t comply if they were forced to stay at home in another lockdown. 65% mentioned that they found the ICT tools useful to keep them mentally active and 72% mentioned that they wouldn’t be able to stay in quarantine without access to internet. 68% of the people using the platforms declared that using the platforms helped to remain mentally active during the quarantine and 70% said they would use the platforms again in case there is a new lockdown. Discussion. The present work was done having as basis 206 questionnaires applied to citizens of a Municipality in Cyprus, namely Pafos Municipality, in order to assess citizens mental health during lockdowns, and the impact of the use of ICT tools for their mental health. The survey collected data from 3 sections, namely demographics, mental health status before and after the COVID-19 pandemic and ICT tools usage during the lockdowns. The average respondents’ sample shows that our interviewees are aged between 26 and 45 years old, half are men and the other women, married, qualified with college education. Citizens living in smaller apartments accessed the platforms more times per week compared to people living in the rural areas in houses and their conceived percentage of ICT tools contribution towards their mental health was higher compared to people leaving in rural areas. Citizens' inclusion and digital literacy are relevant issues that were affecting the use of ICT tools that do not apply only to urban contexts and should be addressed to solve societal, economic, technological, and political problems worldwide. COVID-19 restrictions and lockdown increased people’s acceptance and use of ICT solutions. Other studies are in line with the above findings (Troisi et al., 2022) where their key theoretical contribution of their study is the building of a framework that detects the main psychological, rational, social, and cultural determinants that can foster or prevent the acceptance of the changes forced by the pandemic, the adhesion to digitalization, and the transactional distance processes launched in the public sectors. These results are more evident in vulnerable groups (Dai et al., 2020; Ammar et al., 2021) which will require further development and usage of e-health solutions. Finally, two other studies targeting different populations investigated the effectiveness of interventions by considering, as primary outcomes, not mental illness indicators (e.g., depression and anxiety symptoms), but positive mental health indicators (positive affect and positive mental health). Vara et al. (2020) provided us with a secondary analysis of a randomized controlled trial that assessed the efficacy of a low-intensity internet intervention aimed to promote positive affect in depressive patients in primary care, as an adjunct therapy to improved treatment as usual (Fonseca & Osma, 2021). Scientific value / practical value. Another report (Fonseca & Osma, 2021) highlighted the urgent need for research to help improve our understanding of the pandemic’s mental health consequences on the general public (Mahase, 2020). In order to help characterize the psychosocial effects of the COVID19 crisis as well as the moderators of these effects, a research group launched a multi-language, multi-center anonymous online survey to assess the “Effects of home Confinement on psychosocial health status and multiple Lifestyle Behaviors” during the COVID-19 outbreak. Preliminary findings from this project revealed that the COVID-19 home confinement resulted in significant negative effects on mental wellbeing and emotional status, with more people experiencing psychosocial and emotional distress compared to before the pandemic (Ammar at al. 2020; Ammar et al, 2021a; Fonseca & Osma, 2021). This research results highlight the importance of introducing ICT tools to provide a virtual tour of citizens to their favorite city spots and remain mentally active during quarantine period. Conclusions. ICT tools offer citizens the opportunity to remember their pre COVID-19 lockdown habits as highlighted in this article and they contribute towards the improvement of their mental health during quarantine. This study aimed at (i) identifying wither ICT tools use increased during COVID-19 outbreak; (ii) investigating the effect of the tools use and the impact on mental health of their users; and (iii) examining the relationship between the adoption of ICT tools and the demographics of citizens using them most during COVID-19 outbreak. Our findings provided arguments to answer these three research questions raised from existing gaps in both theory and practice.

IntroductionThis article is about the transformation of coffee, from having no place in the everyday lives of the people of Bangladesh, to a new position as a harbinger of liberal values and Western culture. The context is a group of Australian photojournalism students who embarked on a month-long residency in Bangladesh; the content is a Nescafé advertisement encouraging the young, middle-class Bangladesh audience to consume coffee, in a marketing campaign that promotes “my first cup.” For the Australian students, the marketing positioning of this advertising campaign transformed instant coffee into a strange and unfamiliar commodity. At the same time, the historic association between Bangladesh and tea prompted one of the photographers to undertake her own journey to explore the hidden side of that other Western staple. This paper explores the tradition of tea culture in Bangladesh and the marketing campaign for instant coffee within this culture, combining the authors’ experiences and perspectives. The outline of the Photomedia unit in the Bachelor of Creative Industries degree that the students were working towards at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia states that:students will engage with practices, issues and practicalities of working as a photojournalist in an international, cross cultural context. Students will work in collaboration with students of Pathshala: South Asian Institute of Photography, Dhaka Bangladesh in the research, production and presentation of stories related to Bangladeshi society and culture for distribution to international audiences (ECU). The sixteen students from Perth, living and working in Bangladesh between 5 January and 7 February 2012, exhibited a diverse range of cultures, contexts, and motivations. Young Australians, along with a number of ECU’s international students, including some from Norway, China and Sweden, were required to learn first-hand about life in Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries. Danielle Fusco and ECU lecturer Duncan Barnes collaborated with staff and students of Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute (Pathshala). Their recollections and observations on tea production and the location are central to this article but it is the questions asked by the group about the marketing of instant coffee into this culture that provides its tensions. Fusco completed a week-long induction and then travelled in Bangladesh for a fortnight to research and photograph individual stories on rural and urban life. Barnes here sets the scene for the project, describing the expectations and what actually happened: When we travel to countries that are vastly different to our own it is often to seek out that difference; to go in search of the romanticised ideals that have been portrayed as paradise in films, books and photographs. “The West” has long been fascinated with “The East” (Said) and for the past half century, since the hippie treks to Marrakesh and Afghanistan, people have journeyed overland to the Indian sub-continent, both from Europe and from Australia, yearning for a cultural experience they cannot find at home. Living in Perth, Western Australia, sometimes called the most isolated capital city in the world, that pull to something “different” is like a magnet. Upon arrival in Dhaka, you find yourself deliciously overwhelmed by the heavy traffic, the crowded markets, the spicy foods and the milky lassie drinks. It only takes a few stomach upsets to make your Western appetite start kicking in and you begin craving things you have at home but that are hard to find in Bangladesh. Take coffee for example. I recently completed a month-long visit to Bangladesh, which, like India, is a nation of tea drinkers. Getting any kind of good coffee requires that you be in what expatriates call “the Golden Triangle” of Dhaka city—within the area contained by Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara. Here you find the embassies and a sizeable expatriate community that constitutes a Western bubble unrepresentative of Bangladesh beyond these districts. Coffee World is an example of a Western-style café chain that, as the name suggests, serves coffee beverages. It has trouble making a quality flat white. The baristas are poorly trained, the service is painfully slow, yet the prices are comparable to those in the West. Even with these disadvantages, it is frequented by Westerners who also make use of the free WiFi. In contrast, tea is available at every road junction for around 5 cents Australian. It’s ready in seconds: the kettle is always hot due to a constant turnover of local customers. It was the history of tea growing in Bangladesh, and a desire to know more about a commodity that people in the West take for granted, that most attracted Fusco’s interest. She chose to focus on Bangladesh’s oldest commercial tea garden (plantation) Sylhet, which has been in production since 1857 (Tea Board). As is the case with many tea farms in the Indian sub-continent, the workers at Sylhet are part of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. Fusco left Dhaka and travelled into the rural areas to investigate tea production: Venturing into these estates from the city is like entering an entirely different world. They are isolated places, and although they are close in distance, they are completely separate from the main city. Spending time in the Khadim tea estate amongst the plantations and the workers’ compounds made me very aware of the strong relationship that exists between them. The Hindu teaching of Samsara refers to the continuous cycle of repeated birth, life, death and rebirth [Hinduism], which became a metaphor for me, for this relationship I was experiencing. It is clear that neither farm [where the tea is grown] nor village [which houses the people] could live without each other. The success and maintenance of the tea farm relies on the workers just as much as the workers rely on the tea gardens for their livelihood and sustenance. Their life cycles are intertwined and in synch. There are many problems in the compounds. The people are extremely poor. Their education opportunities are limited, and they work incredibly hard for very little money for their entire lives. They are bound to stay and work here and as those generations before them, were born, worked and died here, living their whole lives in the community of the tea farm. By documenting the lives of the people, I realised I was documenting the process of the lives of the tea trees at the same time. This is how I met Lolita.Figure 1. Bangladeshi tea worker, Lolita, stands in a small section of the Khadim tea plantation in the early morning. Sylhet, Bangladesh (Danielle Fusco, Jan. 2012). This woman emulated everything I was seeing and feeling about the village and the garden. She spoke about the reliance on the trees, especially because of the money and, therefore, the food, they provide for her and her husband. I became aware of the injustice of this system because the workers are paid so little while this industry is booming. It was obvious that life here is far from perfect, but as Lolita explains, they make do. She has worked on the tea estate for decades. As her husband is no longer working, she is the primary income earner. They are able, however, to live in relative comfort now their children have all married and left and it is just the two of them. Lolita describes that money lies within these trees. Money for her means that she can eat that day. Money for the managers means industrial success. Either way, whether it is in the eyes of the individual or the industry, tea always comes down to Taka [the currency of Bangladesh]. Marketing Coffee in a Culture of Tea and Betel Nut With such a strong culture of tea production and consumption and a coffee culture just existing on the fringe, a campaign by Nescafé to encourage Bangladeshi consumers to have “my first cup” of Nescafé instant coffee at the time of this study captured the imagination of the students. How effective can the marketing of Nescafé instant coffee be in a society that is historically a producer and consumer of tea, and which also still embraces the generations-old use of the betel nut as an everyday stimulant? Although it only employs some 150,000 (Islam et al.) in a nation of 150 million people, tea makes an important contribution to the Bangladesh economy. Shortly after the 1971 civil war, in which East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) became independent from West Pakistan (now Pakistan), the then-Chairman of the Bangladesh Tea Board, writing in World Development, commented:In the highly competitive marketing environment of today it is extremely necessary for the tea industry of Bangladesh to increase production by raising the per acre yield, improve quality by adoption of finer plucking standards and modernization of factories and reduce per unit cost of production so as to be able to sell more of our teas to foreign markets and thereby earn higher amounts of much needed foreign exchange for the country as well as generate additional resources within the industry for ploughing back for further development (Ali 55). In Bangladesh, tea is a cash crop that, even in the 1970s following vicious conflicts, is more than capable of meeting local demand and producing an export dividend. Coffee is imported commodity that, historically, has had little place in Bangladeshi life or culture. However important tea is, it is not the traditional Bangladesh stimulant. Instead, over the years, when people in the West would have had a cup of tea or coffee and/or a cigarette, most Bangladeshis have turned to the betel nut. A 2005 study of 100 citizens from Araihazar, Bangladesh, conducted by researchers from Columbia University, found that coffee consumption is “very low in this population” (Hafeman et al. 567). The purpose of the study was to assess the impact of betel quids (the wad of masticated nut) and the chewing of betel nuts, upon tremor. For this reason, it was important to record the consumption of stimulants in the 98 participants who progressed to the next stage of the study and took a freehand spiral-drawing test. While “26 (27%) participants had chewed betel quids, 23 (23%) had smoked one or more cigarettes, [and] 14 (14%) drank tea; on that day, only 1 (1%) drank caffeinated soda, and none (0%) drank coffee” (Hafeman et al. 568). Given its addictive and carcinogenic properties (Sharma), the people who chewed betel quids were more likely to exhibit tremor in their spiral drawings than the people who did not. As this (albeit small) study suggests, the preferred Bangladeshi stimulant is more likely to be betel or tobacco rather than a beverage. Insofar as hot drinks are consumed, Bangladesh citizens drink tea. This poses a significant challenge for multinational advertisers who seek to promote the consumption of instant coffee as a means of growing the global market for Nescafé. Marketing Nescafé to Bangladesh In Dhaka, in January 2012, the television campaign slogan for Nescafé is “My first cup”, with the tagline, “Time you started.” This Nescafé television commercial (NTC) impressed itself upon the Australian visitors, both in terms of its frequency of broadcast and in its referencing of Western culture and values. (The advertisement can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E8mFX43oAM). The NTC’s three stars, Vir Das, Purab Kohli, and leading Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone, are highly-recognisable to young Bangladeshi audiences and the storyline is part of a developing series of advertisements which together form a mini-soap opera, like that used so successfully to advertise the Nescafé Gold Blend brand of instant coffee in the West in the 1980s to 1990s (O’Donohoe 242; Beale). The action takes place in Kohli’s affluent, Western-style apartment. The drama starts with Das challenging Kohli regarding whether he has successfully developed a relationship with his attractive neighbour, Padukone. Using a combination of local language with English words and sub-titles, the first sequence is captioned: “Any progress with Deepika, or are you still mixing coffee?” Suggesting incredulity, and that he could do better, Das asks Kohli, according to the next subtitle, “What are you doing dude?” The use of the word “dude” clearly refers to American youth culture, familiar in such movies as Dude, where’s my car? This is underlined by the immediate transition to the English words of “bikes … biceps … chest … explosion.” Of these four words only “chest” is pronounced in the local tongue, although all four words are included as captions in English. Kohli appears less and less impressed as Das becomes increasingly insistent, with Das going on to express frustration with Kohli through the exclamation “u don’t even have a plan.” The use of the text-speak English “u” here can be constructed as another way of persuading young Bangladeshi viewers that this advertisement is directed at them: the “u” in place of “you” is likely to annoy their English-speaking elders. Das continues speaking in his mother tongue, with the subtitle “Deepika padukone [sic] is your neighbour and you are only drinking coffee,” with the subsequent subtitle emphasising: “Deepika and only coffee.” At this point, Padukone enters the apartment through the open door without knocking and confidently says “Hi.” Kohli explains the situation by responding (in English, and subtitled) “my school friend, Das”. Padukone, in turn, responds in a friendly way to both men (in English, and subtitled) “You guys want to have coffee?” Instead of responding directly to this invitation, Das models to Kohli what it is to take the initiative in this situation: what it is to have a plan. “Hello” (he says, in English and subtitled) “I don’t have coffee but I have a plan. You and me, my bike, right now, hit the town, party!” Kohli looks down at the floor, embarrassed, while Padukone looks quizzically at him over Das’s shoulder. Kohli smiles, and points to himself and Padukone, clearly excluding Das: “I will have coffee” (in English, and subtitle). “Better plan”, exclaims Padukone, “You and me, my place, right now, coffee.” She looks challengingly at Das: “Right?,” a statement rather than a request, and exits, with Kohli following and Das left behind in the apartment. Cue voice-over (not a subtitle, but in-screen speech bubble) “[It’s] time you started” (spoken) “the new Nescafé” (shot change) “My first cup” (with an in-screen price promotion). This commercial associates coffee drinking with Western values of social and personal autonomy. For young women in the traditional Muslim culture of Bangladesh, it suggests a world in which they are at liberty to spend time with the suitors they choose, ignoring those whom they find pushy or inappropriate, and free to invite a man back to “my place, right now” for coffee. The scene setting in this advertisement and the use of English in both the spoken and written text suggests its target is the educated middle class, and indicates that sophisticated, affluent, trend-setters drink coffee as a part of getting to know their neighbours. In line with this, the still which ends the commercial promotes the Facebook page “Know your neighbours.” The flirtatious nature of the actors in the advertisement, the emphasis on each of the male characters spending time alone with the female character, and the female character having both power and choice in this situation is likely to be highly unacceptable to traditional Bangladeshi parental values and, therefore, proportionately more exciting to the target audience. The underlying suggestion of “my first cup” and “time you started” is that the social consumption of that first cup of coffee is the “first step” to becoming more Western. The statement also has overtones of sexual initiation. The advertisement aligns itself with the world portrayed in the Western media consumed in Bangladesh, and the implication is that—even if Western liberal values are not currently a possible choice for all—it is at least feasible to start on the journey towards these values through drinking that first cup of coffee. Unbeknownst to the Bangladesh audience, this Nescafé marketing strategy echoes, in almost all material particulars, the same approach that was so successful in persuading Australians to embrace instant coffee. Khamis, in her essay on Australia and the convenience of instant coffee, argues that, while in 1928 Australia had the highest per capita consumption of tea in the world, this had begun to change by the 1950s. The transformation in the market positioning of coffee was partly achieved through an association between tea and old-fashioned ‘Britishness’ and coffee and the United States: this discovery [of coffee] spoke to changes in Australia’s lifestyle options: the tea habit was tied to Australia’s development as a far-flung colonial outpost, a daily reminder that many still looked to London as the nation’s cultural capital: the growing appeal of instant coffee reflected a widening and more nuanced cultural palate. This was not just ‘another’ example of the United States postwar juggernaut; it marks the transitional phase in Australia’s history, as its cultural identity was informed less by the staid conservativism of Britain than the heady flux of New World glamour (219). Coffee was associated with the USA not simply through advertising but also through cultural exposure. By 1943, notes Khamis, there were 120,000 American service personnel stationed in Australia and she quotes Symons (168) as saying that “when an American got on a friendly footing with an Australian family he was usually found in the kitchen, teaching the Mrs how to make coffee, or washing the dishes” (168, cited in Khamis 220). The chances were that “the Mrs”—the Australian housewife—felt she needed the tuition: an Australian survey conducted by Gallup in March 1950 indicated that 55 per cent of respondents at that time had never tried coffee, while a further 24 per cent said they “seldom” consumed it (Walker and Roberts 133, cited in Khamis 222). In a newspaper article titled, “Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here”, Munro describes the impact of exposure to the first American troops based in Australia during this time, with a then seven year old recalling: “They were foreign, quite a different culture from us. They spoke more loudly than us. They had strange accents, cute expressions, they were really very exotic.” The American troops caused consternation for Australian fathers and boyfriends. Dulcie Wood was 18 when she was dating an American serviceman: They had more money to spend (than Australian troops). They seemed to have plenty of supplies, they were always bringing you presents—stockings and cartons of cigarettes […] Their uniforms were better. They took you to more places. They were quite good dancers, some of them. They always brought you flowers. They were more polite to women. They charmed the mums because they were very polite. Some dads were a bit more sceptical of them. They weren’t sure if all that charm was genuine (quoted in Munro). Darian-Smith argues that, at that time, Australian understanding of Americans was based on Hollywood films, which led to an impression of American technological superiority and cultural sophistication (215-16, 232). “Against the American-style combination of smart advertising, consumerism, self-expression and popular democracy, the British class system and its buttoned-up royals appeared dull and dour” writes Khamis (226, citing Grant 15)—almost as dull and dour as 1950s tea compared with the postwar sophistication of Nescafé instant coffee. Conclusion The approach Nestlé is using in Bangladesh to market instant coffee is tried and tested: coffee is associated with the new, radical cultural influence while tea and other traditional stimulants are relegated to the choice of an older, more staid generation. Younger consumers are targeted with a romantic story about the love of coffee, reflected in a mini-soap opera about two people becoming a couple over a cup of Nescafé. Hopefully, the Pathshala-Edith Cowan University collaboration is at least as strong. Some of the overseas visitors return to Bangladesh on a regular basis—the student presentations in 2012 were, for instance, attended by two visiting graduates from the 2008 program who were working in Bangladesh. For the Australian participants, the association with Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute, and Drik Photo Agency brings recognition, credibility and opportunity. It also offers a totally new perspective on what to order in the coffee queue once they are home again in Australia. Postscript The final week of the residency in Bangladesh was taken up with presentations and a public exhibition of the students’ work at Drik Picture Agency, Dhaka, 3–7 February 2012. Danielle Fusco’s photographs can be accessed at: http://public-files.apps.ecu.edu.au/SCA_Marketing/coffee/coffee.html References Ali, M. “Commodity Round-up: Problems and Prospects of Bangladesh Tea”, World Development 1.1–2 (1973): 55. Beale, Claire. “Should the Gold Blend Couple Get Back Together?” The Independent 29 Apr 2010. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/advertising/should-the-gold-blend-couple-get-back-together-1957196.html›. Darian-Smith, Kate. On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime 1939-1945. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2009. Dude, Where’s My Car? Dir. Danny Leiner. Twentieth Century Fox, 2000. Edith Cowan University (ECU). “Photomedia Summer School Bangladesh 2012.” 1 May 2012 .Grant, Bruce. The Australian Dilemma: A New Kind of Western Society. Sydney: Macdonald Futura, 1983. Hafeman, D., H. Ashan, T. Islam, and E. Louis. “Betel-quid: Its Tremor-producing Effects in Residents of Araihazar, Bangladesh.” Movement Disorders 21.4 (2006): 567-71. Hinduism. “Reincarnation and Samsara.” Heart of Hinduism. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://hinduism.iskcon.org/concepts/102.htm›. Islam, G., M. Iqbal, K. Quddus, and M. Ali. “Present Status and Future Needs of Tea Industry in Bangladesh (Review).” Proceedings of the Pakistan Academy of Science. 42.4 (2005): 305-14. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.paspk.org/downloads/proc42-4/42-4-p305-314.pdf›. Khamis, Susie. “It Only Takes a Jiffy to Make: Nestlé, Australia and the Convenience of Instant Coffee.” Food, Culture & Society 12.2 (2009): 217-33. Munro, Ian. “Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here.” The Age 27 Feb. 2002. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/02/26/1014704950716.html›. O’Donohoe, Stephanie. “Raiding the Postmodern Pantry: Advertising Intertextuality and the Young Adult Audience.” European Journal of Marketing 31.3/4 (1997): 234-53 Pathshala. Pathshala, South Asian Media Academy. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.pathshala.net/controller.php›. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Sharma, Dinesh. “Betel Quid and Areca Nut are Carcinogenic without Tobacco.” The Lancet Oncology 4.10 (2003): 587. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.lancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(03)01229-4/fulltext›. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1984. Tea Board. “History of Bangladesh Tea Industry.” Bangladesh Tea Board. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.teaboard.gov.bd/index.php?option=HistoryTeaIndustry›. Walker, Robin and Dave Roberts. From Scarcity to Surfeit: A History of Food and Nutrition in New South Wales. Sydney: NSW UP, 1988.

IntroductionIn Nancy Meyers’s 2015 film The Intern a particular kind of masculinity is celebrated through the material accoutrements of Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro). A retired 70-year-old manager, Ben takes up a position as a “senior” Intern in an online clothing distribution company run by Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway). Jules’s company, All About Fit, is the embodiment of the Gen Y creative workplace operating in an old Brooklyn warehouse. Ben’s presence in this environment is anachronistic and yet also stylishly retro in an industry where “vintage” is a mode of dress but also offers alternative ethical values (Veenstra and Kuipers). The alternative that Ben offers is figured through his sartorial style, which mobilises a specific kind of retro masculinity made available through his senior white male body. This paper investigates how and why retro masculinity is materialised and embodied as both a set of values and a set of objects in The Intern.Three particular objects are emblematic of this retro masculinity and come to stand in for a body of desirable masculine values: the business suit, the briefcase, and the handkerchief. In the midst of an indie e-commerce garment business, Ben’s old-fashioned wardrobe registers a regular middle class managerial masculinity from the past that is codified as solidly reliable and dependable. Sherry Turkle reminds us that “material culture carries emotions and ideas of startling intensity” (6), and these impact our thinking, our emotional life, and our memories. The suit, briefcase, and handkerchief are material reminders of this reliable masculine past. The values they evoke, as presented in this film, seem to offer sensible solutions to the fast pace of twenty-first century life and its reconfigurations of family and work prompted by feminism and technology.The film’s fetishisation of these objects of retro masculinity could be mistaken for nostalgia, in the way that vintage collections elide their political context, and yet it also registers social anxiety around gender and generation amid twenty-first century social change. Turner reminds us of the importance of film as a social practice through which “our culture makes sense of itself” (3), and which participates in the ongoing negotiation of the meanings of gender. While masculinity is often understood to have been in crisis since the advent of second-wave feminism and women’s mass entry into the labour force, theoretical scrutiny now understands masculinity to be socially constructed and changing, rather than elemental and stable; performative rather than innate; fundamentally political, and multiple through the intersection of class, race, sexuality, and age amongst other factors (Connell; Butler). While Connell coined the term “hegemonic masculinity,” to indicate “masculinity which occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations” (76), it is always intersectional and contestable. Ben’s hegemonic position in The Intern might be understood in relation to what Buchbinder identifies as “inadequate” or “incompetent” masculinities, which offer a “foil for another principal character” (232), but this movement between margin and hegemony is always in process and accords with the needs that structure the story, and its attendant social anxieties. This film’s fetishising of Ben’s sartorial style suggests a yearning for a stable and recognisable masculine identity, but in order to reinstall these meanings the film must ignore the political times from which they emerge.The construction of retro masculinity in this case is mapped onto Ben’s body as a “senior.” As Gilleard notes, ageing bodies are usually marked by a narrative of corporeal decline, and yet for men of hegemonic privilege, non-material values like seniority, integrity, wisdom, and longevity coalesce to embody “the accumulation of cultural or symbolic capital in the form of wisdom, maturity or experience” (1). Like masculinity, then, corporeality is understood to be a set of unstable signifiers produced through particular cultural discourses.The Business SuitThe business suit is Ben Whittaker’s habitual work attire, so when he comes out of retirement to be an intern at the e-commerce company he re-adopts this professional garb. The solid outline of a tailored and dark-coloured suit signals a professional body that is separate, autonomous and impervious to the outside world, according to Longhurst (99). It is a body that is “proper,” ready for business, and suit-ed to the professional corporate world, whose values it also embodies (Edwards 42). In contrast, the costuming code of the Google generation of online marketers in the film is defined as “super cas[ual].” This is a workplace where the boss rides her bicycle through the open-space office and in which the other 219 workers define their individuality through informal dress and decoration. In this environment Ben stands out, as Jules comments on his first day:Jules: Don’t feel like you have to dress up.Ben: I’m comfortable in a suit if it’s okay.Jules: No, it’s fine. [grins] Old school.Ben: At least I’ll stand out.Jules: I don’t think you’ll need a suit to do that.The anachronism of a 70-year-old being an intern is materialised through Ben’s dress code. The business suit comes to represent Ben not only as old school, however, but as a “proper” manager.As the embodiment of a successful working woman, entrepreneur Jules Ostin appears to be the antithesis of the business-suit model of a manager. Consciously not playing by the book, her company is both highly successful, meeting its five-year objectives in only nine months, and highly vulnerable to disasters like bedbugs, delivery crises, and even badly wrapped tissue. Shaped in her image, the company is often directly associated with Jules herself, as Ben continually notes, and this comes to include the mix of success, vulnerability, and disaster. In fact, the success of her company is the reason that she is urged to find a “seasoned” CEO to run the company, indicating the ambiguous, simultaneous guise of success and disaster.This relationship between individual corporeality and the corporate workforce is reinforced when it is revealed that Ben worked as a manager for 40 years in the very same warehouse, reinforcing his qualities of longevity, reliability, and dependability. He oversaw the printing of the physical telephone book, another quaint material artefact of the past akin to Ben, which is shown to have literally shaped the building where the floor dips over in the corner due to the heavy printers. The differences between Ben and Jules as successive generations of managers in this building operate as registers of social change inflected with just a little nostalgia. Indeed, the name of Jules’s company, All About Fit, seems to refer more to the beautifully tailored “fit” of Ben’s business suit than to any of the other clothed bodies in the company.Not only is the business suit fitted to business, but it comes to represent a properly managed body as well. This is particularly evident when contrasted with Jules’s management style. Over the course of the film, as she endures a humiliating series of meetings, sends a disastrous email to the wrong recipient, and juggles her strained marriage and her daughter’s school schedule, Jules is continuously shown to teeter on the brink of losing control. Her bodily needs are exaggerated in the movie: she does not sleep and apparently risks “getting fat” according to her mother’s research; then when she does sleep it is in inappropriate places and she snores loudly; she forgets to eat, she cries, gets drunk and vomits, gets nervous, and gets emotional. All of these outpourings are in situations that Ben remedies, in his solid reliable suited self. As Longhurst reminds us,The suit helps to create an illusion of a hard, or at least a firm and “proper,” body that is autonomous, in control, rational and masculine. It gives the impression that bodily boundaries continually remain intact and reduce potential embarrassment caused by any kind of leakage. (99)Ben is thus suited to manage situations in ways that contrast to Jules, whose bodily emissions and emotional dramas reinforce her as feminine, chaotic, and emotionally vulnerable. As Gatens notes of our epistemological inheritance, “women are most often understood to be less able to control the passions of the body and this failure is often located in the a priori disorder or anarchy of the female body itself” (50). Transitioning these philosophical principles to the 21st-century workplace, however, manifests some angst around gender and generation in this film.Despite the film’s apparent advocacy of successful working women, Jules too comes to prefer Ben’s model of corporeal control and masculinity. Ben is someone who makes Jules “feel calm, more centred or something. I could use that, obviously,” she quips. After he leads the almost undifferentiated younger employees Jason, Davis, and Lewis on a physical email rescue, Jules presents her theory of men amidst shots at a bar to celebrate their heist:Jules: So, we were always told that we could be anything, do anything, and I think guys got, maybe not left behind but not quite as nurtured, you know? I mean, like, we were the generation of You go, Girl. We had Oprah. And I wonder sometimes how guys fit in, you know they still seem to be trying to figure it out. They’re still dressing like little boys, they’re still playing video games …Lewis: Well they’ve gotten great.Davis: I love video games.Ben: Oh boy.Jules: How, in one generation, have men gone from guys like Jack Nicholson and Harrison Ford to … [Lewis, Davis, and Jason look down at themselves]Jules: Take Ben, here. A dying breed. Look and learn boys, because if you ask me, this is what cool is.Jules’s excessive drinking in this scene, which is followed by her vomiting into a rubbish bin, appears to reinforce Ben’s stable sobriety, alongside the culture of excess and rapid change associated with Jules through her gender and generation.Jules’s adoption of Ben as the model of masculinity is timely, given that she consistently encounters “sexism in business.” After every meeting with a potential CEO Jules complains of their patronising approach—calling her company a “chick site,” for example. And yet Ben echoes the sartorial style of the 1960s Mad Men era, which is suffused with sexism. The tension between Ben’s modelling of old-fashioned chivalry and those outdated sexist businessmen who never appear on-screen remains linked, however, through the iconography of the suit. In his book Mediated Nostalgia, Lizardi notes a similar tendency in contemporary media for what he calls “presentist versions of the past […] that represent a simpler time” (6) where viewers are constructed as ”uncritical citizens of our own culture” (1). By heroising Ben as a model of white middle-class managerial masculinity that is nostalgically enduring and endearing, this film betrays a yearning for such a “simpler time,” despite the complexities that hover just off-screen.Indeed, most of the other male characters in the film are found wanting in comparison to the retro masculinity of Ben. Jules’s husband Matt appears to be a perfect modern “stay-at-home-dad” who gives up his career for Jules’s business start-up. Yet he is found to be having an affair with one of the school mums. Lewis’s clothes are also condemned by Ben: “Why doesn’t anyone tuck anything in anymore?” he complains. Jason does not know how to speak to his love-interest Becky, expecting that texting and emailing sad emoticons will suffice, and Davis is unable to find a place to live. Luckily Ben can offer advice and tutelage to these men, going so far as to house Davis and give him one of his “vintage” ties to wear. Jules endorses this, saying she loves men in ties.The BriefcaseIf a feature of Ben’s experienced managerial style is longevity and stability, then these values are also attached to his briefcase. The association between Ben and his briefcase is established when the briefcase is personified during preparations for Ben’s first day: “Back in action,” Ben tells it. According to Atkinson, the briefcase is a “signifier of executive status […] entwined with a ‘macho mystique’ of concealed technology” (192). He ties this to the emergence of Cold War spy films like James Bond and traces it to the development of the laptop computer. This mix of mobility, concealment, glamour, and a touch of playboy adventurousness in a mass-produced material product manifested the values of the corporate world in latter 20th-century work culture and rendered the briefcase an important part of executive masculinity. Ben’s briefcase is initially indicative of his anachronistic position in All About Fit. While Davis opens his canvas messenger bag to reveal a smartphone, charger, USB drive, multi-cable connector, and book, Ben mirrors this by taking out his glasses case, set of pens, calculator, fliptop phone, and travel clock. Later in the film he places a print newspaper and leather bound book back into the case. Despite the association with a pre-digital age, the briefcase quickly becomes a product associated with Ben’s retro style. Lewis, at the next computer console, asks about its brand:Ben: It’s a 1973 Executive Ashburn Attaché. They don’t make it anymore.Lewis: I’m a little in love with it.Ben: It’s a classic Lewis. It’s unbeatable.The attaché case is left over from Ben’s past in executive management as VP for sales and advertising. This was a position he held for twenty years, during his past working life, which was spent with the same company for over 40 years. Ben’s long-serving employment record has the same values as his equally long-serving attaché case: it is dependable, reliable, ages well, and outlasts changes in fashion.The kind of nostalgia invested in Ben and his briefcase is reinforced extradiagetically through the musical soundtracks associated with him. Compared to the undifferentiated upbeat tracks at the workplace, Ben’s scenes feature a slower-paced sound from another era, including Ray Charles, Astrud Gilberto, Billie Holiday, and Benny Goodman. These classics are a point of connection with Jules, who declares that she loves Billie Holiday. Yet Jules is otherwise characterised by upbeat, even frantic, timing. She hates slow talkers, is always on the move, and is renowned for being late for meetings and operating on what is known as “Jules Standard Time.” In contrast, like his music, Ben is always on time: setting two alarm clocks each night, driving shorter and more efficient routes, seeing things at just the right time, and even staying at work until the boss leaves. He is reliable, steady, and orderly. He restores order both to the office junk desk and to the desk of Jules’s personal assistant Becky. These characteristics of order and timeliness are offered as an alternative to the chaos of 21st-century global flows of fashion marketing. Like his longevity, time is measured and managed around Ben. Even his name echoes that veritable keeper of time, Big Ben.The HandkerchiefThe handkerchief is another anachronistic object that Ben routinely carries, concealed inside his suit rather than flamboyantly worn on the outside pocket. A neatly ironed square of white hanky, it forms a notable part of Ben’s closet, as Davis notices and enquires about:Davis: Okay what’s the deal with the handkerchief? I don’t get that at all.Ben: It’s essential. That your generation doesn’t know that is criminal. The reason for carrying a handkerchief is to lend it. Ask Jason about this. Women cry Davis. We carry it for them. One of the last vestiges of the chivalrous gent.Indeed, when Jules’s personal assistant Becky bursts into tears because her skills and overtime go unrecognised, Ben is able to offer the hanky to Jason to give her as a kind of white flag, officially signaling a ceasefire between Becky and Jason. This scene is didactic: Ben is teaching Jason how to talk to a woman with the handkerchief as a material prop to prompt the occasion. He also offers advice to Becky to keep more regular hours, and go out and have fun (with Jason, obviously). Despite Becky declaring she “hates girls who cry at work,” this reaction to the pressures of a contemporary work culture that is irregular, chaotic, and never-ending is clearly marking gender, as the handkerchief also marks a gendered transaction of comfort.The handkerchief functions as a material marker of the “chivalrous gent” partly due to the number of times women are seen to cry in this film. In one of Ben’s first encounters with Jules she is crying in a boardroom, when it is suggested that she find a CEO to manage the company. Ben is clearly embarrassed, as is Jules, indicating the inappropriateness of such bodily emissions at work and reinforcing the emotional currency of women in the workplace. Jules again cries while discussing her marriage crisis with Ben, a scene in which Ben comments it is “the one time when he doesn’t have a hanky.” By the end of the film, when Jules and Matt are reconciling, she suggests: “It would be great if you were to carry a handkerchief.” The remaking of modern men into the retro style of Ben is more fully manifested in Davis who is depicted going to work on the last day in the film in a suit and tie. No doubt a handkerchief lurks hidden within.ConclusionThe yearning that emerges for a masculinity of yesteryear means that the intern in this film, Ben Whittaker, becomes an internal moral compass who reminds us of rapid social changes in gender and work, and of their discomfits. That this should be mapped onto an older, white, heterosexual, male body is unsurprising, given the authority traditionally invested in such bodies. Ben’s retro masculinity, however, is a fantasy from a fictional yesteryear, without the social or political forces that render those times problematic; instead, his material culture is fetishised and stripped of political analysis. Ben even becomes the voice of feminism, correcting Jules for taking the blame for Matt’s affair. Buchbinder argues that the more recent manifestations in film and television of “inadequate or incomplete” masculinity can be understood as “enacting a resistance to or even a refusal of the coercive pressure of the gender system” (235, italics in original), and yet The Intern’s yearning for a slow, orderly, mature, and knowing male hero refuses much space for alternative younger models. Despite this apparently unerring adulation of retro masculinity, however, we are reminded of the sexist social culture that suits, briefcases, and handkerchiefs materialise every time Jules encounters one of the seasoned CEOs jostling to replace her. The yearning for a stable masculinity in this film comes at the cost of politicising the past, and imagining alternative models for the future.ReferencesAtkinson, Paul. “Man in a Briefcase: The Social Construction of the Laptop Computer and the Emergence of a Type Form.” Journal of Design History 18.2 (2005): 191-205. Buchbinder, David. “Enter the Schlemiel: The Emergence of Inadequate of Incompetent Masculinities in Recent Film and Television.” Canadian Review of American Studies 38.2 (2008): 227-245.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.Connell, R.W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.Edwards, Tim. Fashion in Focus: Concepts, Practices and Politics. London: Routledge, 2010.Gatens, Moira. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. New York: Routledge, 1996.Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment. London: Anthem, 2014.Lizardi, Ryan. Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media. London: Lexington Books, 2015.Longhurst, Robyn. Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. London: Routledge, 2001.Meyers, Nancy, dir. The Intern. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2015.Turkle, Sherry. “The Things That Matter.” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Ed. Sherry Turkle. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007.Turner, Graeme. Film as Social Practice. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.Veenstra, Aleit, and Giselinde Kuipers. “It Is Not Old-Fashioned, It Is Vintage: Vintage Fashion and the Complexities of 21st Century Consumption Practices.” Sociology Compass 7.5 (2013): 355-365.

Embroidery: A Subversive History Embroidery has a long history as a woman’s craft. Traditionally, the gendered history of embroidery as domestic, practical (utilitarian), and relational has placed it firmly in the category of craft, resulting in its exclusion from the male-dominated arena of art in public space (Emery; Durham; Jefferies). This traditional view of embroidery, and textile work in general, has been thoroughly challenged over the last 60 years. The second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s brought women’s textile work, and its private, domestic, relational subjects and lives, into the public arena: into art galleries and public spaces, challenging traditional notions of what constitutes art, and highlighting the subversive act of women making (Emery; Jefferies; Parker). Women have been using “fancy work”, as embroidery was called, as overt acts of defiance, rebellion, social justice, care for self and others, and as a collective means of making sense of the world and changing it for good, for generations (Davidson; Minahan and Cox; Emery; Sawden and Etaati; Robertson and Vinebaum; Hackney; Vyas). The suffragettes famously used embroidery in their banners and sashes in their fight for the woman’s right to vote (Helland). In the 1970s, collectives such as the Sydney-based Women’s Domestic Needlework Group brought the work of everyday ordinary women into a public collection and exhibition of art (Emery). The exhibition highlighted the value of women making things together as a normal part of their everyday lives, and it positioned their domestic textile work as material artifacts of knowledge and significance worthy of observation, recognition, and analysis in public space. More recently, there has been a resurgence of young women engaging in textile crafts online signaling a “new energy” with radical potential (Hackney 170; Robertson and Vinebaum; Jefferies; Minahan and Cox). These women are socially engaged and tech-savvy, gathering online and in-person to use craft to explore and critique their everyday lives and experiences (Minahan and Cox; Hackney). Women are using the Internet to make space to gather, to create, to develop language, knowledge, and to generate change. From forums and threads to networked digital media (see Meikle and Young) such as Facebook and Instagram (see Leaver et al.), the material gallery is now online: a public space for collective voice and representation in progress. The international embroidery community on Instagram create art in dialogue with, and in reference to, each other. The art being created is collaborative as it was in the 1970s, relational, intimate and intentional, subversive, and confronting. It falls in a category known as “craftivism” (Greer; Corbett; Jefferies; Emery; Hackney). Stitchers of Instagram reflect what Fiona Hackney refers to as a new “super-connected (informed, skilled, reflexive) amateur” (170) who engages in “the quiet activism of everyday making” (169). In this article, I focus on my experience participating in the embroidery community on Instagram. Uniquely situated at a time of deep global and personal anxiety, I explore my experience of using embroidery as a form of self-care, to process multiple lockdowns with small children and the death of my father. Embroidery gave me a purpose, it enveloped me in community, it offered me a sense of value and worth, and it connected me with a group of people experiencing the same thing at the same time. I spent two years embroidering and one year sharing my embroidery on Instagram using the account @auburnevening. This article comprises an autoethnographic process (see Ellis; Hollman Jones; Hughes and Pennington) in which I reflect on my experience of embroidering and analyse twelve months of being on Instagram, consisting of 300 posts, thousands of comments and interactions, and many deep and long-lasting relationships developed through private messages. I explore the role of making and online community in self-care, as a collective way to engage with, and respond to, personal and global lived experience. Embroidery as Therapy The history of embroidery as therapeutic is broad-ranging and well-documented. In the sixteenth century, Mary Queen of Scots famously used embroidery to pass her time in captivity. Mary was held captive from 1569 to 1585, and during this time she embroidered a series of “veiled symbols” demonstrating “the resistant pride of a woman with few other ways to assert control over her existence” (V&A Museum). In more recent history, embroidery was used as a therapeutic application to treat British, Australian, and New Zealand soldiers suffering from shell-shock (Davidson). Returning WWI soldiers who experienced combat trauma were encouraged to take up “fancy work” (embroidery) “as a form of therapy and source of income” (Davidson 390). There are also “accounts of prisoners of war using needlework to cope with the hardships of captivity”, demonstrating that “creative activity of this type can be used to deal with extreme adversity” (391). Like these returned soldiers, I found that embroidery “affords the opportunity to focus attention away from personal ailments and fears, and through the finished product, to confer a sense of worth or even income” (391). In addition to the welcome opportunity to focus on the achievement of making a tangible product, like others I found embroidery to be soothing and peaceful. Nurit Wolk and Michal Bat Or explore the therapeutic aspects of embroidery for adolescent girls in post-hospitalisation boarding schools in Israel between 2020-2022. Among the five themes that they identified, they found that embroidery “inspires a sense of uniqueness and unconventionality … and provides a source of relaxation and tranquility” (14), acting as a “calming”, “soothing”, or “grounding” activity while processing trauma (Wolk and Bat Or). Similarly, Kari Sawden explores Saeedeh Niktab Etaati’s use of embroidery to process and ritualise personal grief during COVID-19 as an Iranian-Canadian (Sawden and Etaati). In their reflexive ethnography Sawden and Etaati explore embroidery as an opportunity to “meditate upon and emotionally grapple with experiences of grief and to make such reflections tangible in a way that allows for their release and the reclamation of personal peace” (2). Like Etaati, my experience of embroidery was profound as it allowed me to reclaim internal peace at a time of personal anguish. I began embroidering at a time when I had seemingly no control over my circumstances, with multiple lockdowns and lengthy periods of COVID restrictions, or over my feelings of intense grief over the death of my father, resulting in acute anxiety attacks that would last multiple days. During this period, embroidery allowed me to switch off in the quiet moments when my grief would visit me and my anxious thoughts were loudest. The creative focus that embroidery requires silenced my thoughts and feelings. While some, like Etaati, use embroidery to explore their feelings, I used embroidery as a respite from my feelings. Embroidery allowed me to focus on the process of making, and to momentarily attribute my worth to my ability to create something beautiful. In my very first post on Instagram, I write auburnevening A new venture to share my evening creations. As a mother of two small children, there is nothing like the long awaited bliss of the evening. After a day full of chaos and noise, I crave the quiet, still evenings, when I pick up my embroidery hoop. There’s nothing like the process of making something beautiful with your hands. I love the way time stands still as I lose myself in the task, the rhythm, the creating. I love the way my brain goes quiet and I forget about all the demands and difficulties of the day. It’s my time. #auburnevening #eveningcreation #embroidery #embroideryart #embroiderydesign #embroiderylove #embroideryhoop #eveningescape #metime #make #create The focus of my work at the time was simply creating beautiful work, and I have never followed a pattern. All my designs are free-form. While some celebrate the role of the pattern, valuing it for its structure (Wolk and Bat Or), and its connection to a collective (such as Etaati’s contribution to the Redwork Embroidery Project; Sawden and Etaati), the fact that I was not bound to a pattern and free to create whatever I wanted in the moment was critical. It gave me a sense of control over my design, and it gave me a sense of freedom, both of which I was lacking in my personal life (with multiple lockdowns, anxiety attacks, and the existential crisis following the death of my father). Not surprisingly, my designs centred on finding beauty in the everyday mundane, something women are skilled at, and something much of the world was thrust into during COVID. My designs, like home, breathe, slow down, and be still, were a direct response to world events – lockdown, personal and collective lack of control, and anxiety. I was performing and embodying a “smell the roses” attitude, which while seemingly superficial when taken on its own was a desperate act of survival during a time of deep personal and social unrest. Fig. 1: My embroideries shared on Instagram as @auburnevening. I experienced a significant increase in positive affect as a direct result of creating something tangible and beautiful. Embroidery gave me a daily focus and purpose, a routine of switching off and creating, which I looked forward to each day. The positive impact of embroidery was lasting, continuing throughout my two-year period of embroidering, which is consistent with studies exploring the ongoing effect of creative pursuits. In their study exploring 658 young adults, Conner, DeYoung, and Silvia found that daily creative activity leads to increased positive affect (feelings of happiness) and flourishing, a state of well-being described as “a state of optimal functioning accompanied by feelings of meaning, engagement, and purpose in life” (Conner et al.; Ryan and Deci). While most studies of this nature explore how mood affects creativity, Conner et al. focus on how creativity affects mood. They suggest that creative pursuits are “intrinsically motivating”, ultimately increasing feelings of happiness and well-being that importantly carry over into the “next-day”, which they call “next-day well-being” and “next-day flourishing”. A significant component of my flourishing was the collective, collaborative, communal experience of creating. Crafting Community and Creative Activism One of the most important aspects of my experience of embroidery was sharing my work on Instagram, and as a result forming connections with others and participating in a community. There are a growing number of women participating in embroidery on Instagram, which reflects the proliferation and resurgence of traditional textile crafts among young women (Minahan and Cox; Robertson and Vinebaum; Jefferies; Hackney). Through posting my embroideries on Instagram I connected with women, both here in Australia, and all over the world. One of my deepest connections was with Mary, a young woman living in Russia, who in addition to processing the experience of COVID was now facing life under sanctions due to the Russian war with Ukraine, and was experiencing a growing sense of despair. Although our contexts and circumstances are completely different – even our experience of the seasons is opposite – we both connected over our shared use of embroidery as a welcome escape from the difficulties we faced in life. Our friendship began with likes and comments but quickly expanded and developed through Instagram’s direct message function. Through embroidery, through our sharing of making online, we not only exchanged information about the craft, but also intimate information about our lives. #embroidery offers women like myself and Mary an opportunity to process, share, and respond to everyday life, and to connect with others doing the same. I shared intimate information about my experience, my feelings, my grief, and my anxiety with the embroidery community on Instagram. Sharing in this way fosters deep connection with others. In the embroidery community on Instagram I found a group of women who were socially conscious, deeply empathetic, brave in their bold and public statements, and deeply affirming of each other. I connected with women over various life experiences, but mostly over the experience of being a woman. I learned about the socio-political issues facing different communities through making. I participated in affirming narratives and experiences and I received enormous affirmation of my work, and in turn myself. At a time when we could not gather or connect in person, we gathered and connected online daily, and supported each other through our personal and collective grief. In one of my posts I write, “I just love the creative space and community on Instagram. You’re all so amazing and it’s a joy every time I get to connect and interact with any of you! I feel so welcomed and encouraged here – thank you ❤️”. In the same post I write that embroidery and the community “really helped me get through 2021 which was one of the darkest years of my life (anyone else? ✋)”. As I experienced, #embroidery continues the long history of women making as a relational act of care towards others (Robertson and Vinebaum; Emery; Vyas). Not only do women use embroidery to create social space and foster social bonds, they also use it to advocate for social change (Robertson and Vinebaum). Women are using textiles like embroidery in spaces like Instagram “to spur interpersonal dialog and exchange, and to educate, build community, and advocate for social change” (3). Minahan and Cox call this a “unique cyber-feminist phenomenon, one of women expressing their own thoughts and reflecting their own circumstances and environment” (Minahan and Cox 10; Florida). The embroidery community on Instagram brings together ordinary young women – amateur hobbyists, who are self-taught – who embody Luckman’s cyber-feminist description as “women-with-attitude” who are “modern, hip, sassy, postfeminist” (36), technology-literate (Minahan and Cox), informed, historically savvy, and reflexive (Hackney 171). Fiona Hackney calls these women the “new amateur”. These women come together in public, “transforming public spaces into shared, dynamic, communal social space” (Robertson and Vinebaum 5) in which “alternative values and ways of living can be imagined and shared, and practical examples for change defined and materialized” (Hackney 187). I argue elsewhere that women have gathered online to create space, share information, and find community for decades, in genres such as blogging (see Morrison) and vlogging (see Kennedy Becoming). Embroidery on Instagram is an example of this, a congregation of women who make as part of their everyday existence. Making is relational and collaborative, and fosters a collective narrative about life, about COVID, about embroidery techniques and process, about motherhood and domesticity and balancing domestic responsibilities with professional pursuits (embroidery is now included in this as a viable small-business and source of income for some). It also fosters a collective, collaborative response to current social issues, like climate change, diversity and inclusion, movements such as Black Lives Matter, events like Pride Month, and current political debates like abortion rights. All of this continues the long history of embroidery as a subversive act. Today’s “fancy work” on Instagram features beautifully embellished and bedazzled swearwords, breasts, and vulvas, for example, messages that continue to promote female empowerment and advocate for all human rights. Embroidery on Instagram is therefore an extension of craft that is “firmly placed in the language of empowerment and liberation” (Jefferies 28). This collective, participatory act of #embroidery can be understood as a type of “craftivism”, “slow activism”, or “quiet activism” (Greer; Williams; Jefferies; Hackney). Betsy Greer defines craftivism as “a way of looking at life where voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger, your compassion deeper and your quest for justice more infinite” (in Jefferies 25). K.A. Williams defines craftivism as “a social activism that explicitly links individual creativity with human based mechanisms of production to broader sociopolitical cultural contexts in an attempt to influence the social world” (305). Craft offers a way of knowing the world (Hardy 176), and for the new amateur, Fiona Hackney suggests, “craft is power” (170). Women on Instagram engage in the “quiet activism of everyday making” (169), which Sarah Corbett suggests is a form of slow activism, “a reflexive action which changes the participant as much as it does the world” (in Jefferies 27). One way in which #stitchersofinstagram continue the subversive act of embroidery is by selling their work on Etsy, through which they experience individual and collective affirmation and continue to challenge traditional notions of craft vs. art. Selling on Etsy An important part of the experience of sharing embroidery on Instagram is the progression that many stitchers make from making to selling their work. It wasn't long before I started sharing my embroidery on Instagram that I too opened an Etsy shop. In one of my posts on Instagram, responding to the #marchmeetthemaker tag, I introduce myself as the face behind @auburnevening. In addition to my introduction and my heart-felt gratitude to the community I had found on the site, I also shared the news about my shop: “I’ve recently opened an Etsy shop, not to become a small business and not to make a profit but simply to supplement this rather expensive hobby 💸 and as a solution to my growing piles of finished hoops that I have no idea what to do with 😂”. As a stay-at-home-mother at the time, as many #stitchersofinstagram are, producing a tangible product with social and financial value had a significant impact on my sense of worth. I only ever earned half the amount I spent on supplies, but for others selling their embroidery is much more successful. It is not surprising that part of the exchange of information and knowledge on Instagram, therefore, is increasingly about content creation, managing the algorithm (see Bishop), setting up a small business, branding and marketing, selling on Etsy (Robertson Embroidery), and generally the labour of creating on social media (see Duffy and Hund; Kennedy Arriving). As others have noted, craft is increasingly a “source of achievement and economic self-sufficiency” (Jefferies 28; Waterhouse), offering “lucrative opportunities” (Robertson Embroidery 87). The opportunity to sell embroidery is celebrated on Instagram as affirming and empowering, although it has been criticised by some. Janis Jefferies argues that the crafting movement is being reconfigured by a neoliberal agenda, which celebrates self-employment and entrepreneurship in the new creative economy (26). Although she argues that this reconfiguration threatens to wipe out 40 years of feminist literature, I suggest that this movement is a contemporary progression. The second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s discussed by Jefferies achieved the phenomenon of moving women’s craft from the private, domestic sphere into the public sphere, and this has continued ever since. As Fiona Hackney writes, “we need to recognize the existence of a new super connected amateur who, informed by a wealth of on- and offline resources … as well as their individual life experiences and expertise, are equally active as they open up new channels of value and exchange by engaging in alternative craft economies and harnessing assets in often surprising, productive ways” (171). Women embroidering on Instagram and selling on Etsy are an example of this. Today’s #stitchersofInstagram are entrepreneurs and small business owners. Responding to a history of unseen, unpaid, undervalued domestic labour, selling “fancy work” on sites like Etsy continues to challenge traditional notions of amateur vs. professional and craft vs. art by generating income from craft. The fact that everyday ordinary women (many of whom are stay-at-home-mothers with small children) are successfully selling their embroideries, often through commissions from strangers, challenges the traditional lack of value associated with women’s craft. Rather than removing embroidery from its gendered identity, or erasing a rich feminist history, the current trend of women making and selling embroidery reflects a postfeminist (see McRobbie; Duffy and Hund) orientation which seeks to re-define women’s work and domestic work as tangible, valuable, paid work. Conclusion Embroidery continues to be a subversive act, bringing women together on Instagram from all over the world to share information and knowledge about the practice, and to share their experiences of life. Through sharing #embroidery on Instagram, women form deep connections and community with each other. This community works together to create a collective public voice and narrative about the issues facing our society. Embroidery offers a way to process and respond to current events and personal issues, acting as a form of personal and collective therapy. As I experienced, embroidery gave me a respite from my anxiety, allowing me to focus solely on my ability to create something with my hands. Sharing my creations on Instagram was affirming, connecting me with others, and giving me a sense of purpose, meaning, value, and worth. Through the connections I formed with others on Instagram I gained a deeper understanding of, and empathy towards, the issues facing our world. Engaging in the participatory collective of #embroidery offers women like myself the ability to engage with ideas and dialogue in a tangible way, through the act of creating permanent material artifacts. These artifacts are significant as unique personal and communal responses to a specific time in our history and socio-political context. Stitchers of Instagram continue to challenge the traditional tensions that surround women’s creative activities. By selling their work on sites such as Etsy as a collective, they blur the traditional boundaries of amateur vs. professional and craft vs. art. #embroidery is valuable not only because it represents an individual and collective contemporary (mostly young female) voice, but also because increasingly the artifacts produced out of this making are sought after, commissioned, paid for, and valued as art that people want to display in their homes. 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Babies and toddlers are amassing huge followings on social media, achieving microcelebrity status, and raking in five figure sums. In East Asia, many of these lucrative “micro­-microcelebrities” rise to fame by inheriting exposure and proximate microcelebrification from their social media Influencer mothers. Through self-branding techniques, Influencer mothers’ portrayals of their young’ children’s lives “as lived” are the canvas on which (baby) products and services are marketed to readers as “advertorials”. In turning to investigate this budding phenomenon, I draw on ethnographic case studies in Singapore to outline the career trajectory of these young children (under 4yo) including their social media presence, branding strategies, and engagement with their followers. The chapter closes with a brief discussion on some ethical considerations of such young children’s labour in the social media age.Influencer MothersTheresa Senft first coined the term “microcelebrity” in her work Camgirls as a burgeoning online trend, wherein people attempt to gain popularity by employing digital media technologies, such as videos, blogs, and social media. She describes microcelebrities as “non-actors as performers” whose narratives take place “without overt manipulation”, and who are “more ‘real’ than television personalities with ‘perfect hair, perfect friends and perfect lives’” (Senft 16), foregrounding their active response to their communities in the ways that maintain open channels of feedback on social media to engage with their following.Influencers – a vernacular industry term albeit inspired by Katz & Lazarsfeld’s notion of “personal influence” that predates Internet culture – are one type of microcelebrity; they are everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in “digital” and “physical” spaces, and monetize their following by integrating “advertorials” into their blog or social media posts and making physical appearances at events. A pastiche of “advertisement” and “editorial”, advertorials in the Influencer industry are highly personalized, opinion-laden promotions of products/services that Influencers personally experience and endorse for a fee. Influencers in Singapore often brand themselves as having “relatability”, or the ability to persuade their followers to identify with them (Abidin). They do so by make consciously visible the backstage (Goffman) of the usually “inaccessible”, “personal”, and “private” aspects of mundane, everyday life to curate personae that feel “authentic” to fans (Marwick 114), and more accessible than traditional celebrity (Senft 16).Historically, the Influencer industry in Singapore can be traced back to the early beginnings of the “blogshop” industry from the mid-2000s and the “commercial blogging” industry. Influencers are predominantly young women, and market products and services from diverse industries, although the most popular have been fashion, beauty, F&B, travel, and electronics. Most prominent Influencers are contracted to management agencies who broker deals in exchange for commission and assist in the production of their vlogs. Since then, the industry has grown, matured, and expanded so rapidly that Influencers developed emergent models of advertorials, with the earliest cohorts moving into different life stages and monetizing several other aspects of their personal lives such as the “micro-microcelebrity” of their young children. What this paper provides is an important analysis of the genesis and normative practices of micro-microcelebrity commerce in Singapore from its earliest years, and future research trajectories in this field.Micro-Microcelebrity and Proximate MicrocelebrificationI define micro-microcelebrities as the children of Influencers who have themselves become proximate microcelebrities, having derived exposure and fame from their prominent Influencer mothers, usually through a more prolific, deliberate, and commercial form of what Blum-Ross defines as “sharenting”: the act of parents sharing images and stores about their children in digital spaces such as social networking sites and blogs. Marwick (116-117), drawing from Rojek’s work on types of celebrity – distinguishes between two types of microcelebrity: “ascribed microcelebrity” where the online personality is made recognizable through the “production of celebrity media” such as paparazzi shots and user-produced online memes, or “achieved microcelebrity” where users engage in “self-presentation strateg[ies]”, such as fostering the illusion of intimacy with fans, maintaining a persona, and selective disclosure about oneself.Micro-microcelebrities lie somewhere between the two: In a process I term “proximate microcelebrification”, micro-microcelebrities themselves inherit celebrity through the preemptive and continuous exposure from their Influencer mothers, many beginning even during the pre-birth pregnancy stages in the form of ultrasound scans, as a form of “achieved microcelebrity”. Influencer mothers whose “presentational strategies” (cf. Marshall, “Promotion” 45) are successful enough (as will be addressed later) gain traction among followers, who in turn further popularize the micro-microcelebrity by setting up fan accounts, tribute sites, and gossip forums through which fame is heightened in a feedback loop as a model of “ascribed microcelebrity”.Here, however, I refrain from conceptualizing these young stars as “micro-Influencers” for unlike Influencers, these children do not yet curate their self-presentation to command the attention of followers, but instead are used, framed, and appropriated by their mothers for advertorials. In other words, Influencer mothers “curate [micro-microcelebrities’] identities into being” (Leaver, “Birth”). Following this, many aspects of their micro-microcelebrities become rapidly commodified and commercialized, with advertisers clamoring to endorse anything from maternity hospital stays to nappy cream.Although children of mommybloggers have the prospect to become micro-microcelebrities, both groups are conceptually distinct. Friedman (200-201) argues that among mommybloggers arose a tension between those who adopt “the raw authenticity of nonmonetized blogging”, documenting the “unglamorous minutiae” of their daily lives and a “more authentic view of motherhood” and those who use mommyblogs “primarily as a source of extra income rather than as a site for memoir”, focusing on “parent-centered products” (cf. Mom Bloggers Club).In contrast, micro-microcelebrities and their digital presence are deliberately commercial, framed and staged by Influencer mothers in order to maximize their advertorial potential, and are often postured to market even non-baby/parenting products such as fast food and vehicles (see later). Because of the overt commerce, it is unclear if micro-microcelebrity displays constitute “intimate surveillance”, an “almost always well-intentioned surveillance of young people by parents” (Leaver, “Born” 4). Furthermore, children are generally peripheral to mommybloggers whose own parenting narratives take precedence as a way to connect with fellow mothers, while micro-microcelebrities are the primary feature whose everyday lives and digital presence enrapture followers.MethodologyThe analysis presented is informed by my original fieldwork with 125 Influencers and related actors among whom I conducted a mixture of physical and digital personal interviews, participant observation, web archaeology, and archival research between December 2011 and October 2014. However, the material presented here is based on my digital participant observation of publicly accessible and intentionally-public digital presence of the first four highly successful micro-microcelebrities in Singapore: “Baby Dash” (b.2013) is the son of Influencer xiaxue, “#HeYurou” (b.2011) is the niece of Influencer bongqiuqiu, “#BabyElroyE” (b.2014) is the son of Influencer ohsofickle, and “@MereGoRound” (b.2015) is the daughter of Influencer bongqiuqiu.The microcelebrity/social media handles of these children take different forms, following the platform on which their parent/aunt has exposed them on the most. Baby Dash appears in all of xiaxue’s digital platforms under a variety of over 30 indexical, ironic, or humourous hashtags (Leaver, “Birth”) including “#pointylipped”, #pineappledash”, and “#面包脸” (trans. “bread face”); “#HeYurou” appears on bongqiuqiu’s Instagram and Twitter; “#BabyElroyE” appears on ohsofickle’s Instagram and blog, and is the central figure of his mother’s new YouTube channel; and “@MereGoRound” appears on all of bongqiuqiu’s digital platforms but also has her own Instagram account and dedicated YouTube channel. The images reproduced here are screenshot from Influencer mothers’ highly public social media: xiaxue, bongqiuqiu, and ohsofickle boast 593k, 277k, and 124k followers on Instagram and 263k, 41k, and 17k followers on Twitter respectively at the time of writing.Anticipation and Digital EstatesIn an exclusive front-pager (Figure 1) on the day of his induced birth, it was announced that Baby Dash had already received up to SGD25,000 worth of endorsement deals brokered by his Influencer mother, xiaxue. As the first micro-microcelebrity in his cohort (his mother was among the pioneer Influencers), Baby Dash’s Caesarean section was even filmed and posted on xiaxue’s YouTube channel in three parts (Figure 2). xiaxue had announced her pregnancy on her blog while in her second trimester, following which she consistently posted mirror selfies of her baby bump.Figure 1 & 2, screenshot April 2013 from ‹instagram.com/xiaxue›In her successful attempt at generating anticipation, the “bump” itself seemed to garner its own following on Twitter and Instagram, with many followers discussing how the Influencer dressed “it”, and how “it” was evolving over the weeks. One follower even compiled a collage of xiaxue’s “bump” chronologically and gifted it to the Influencer as an art image via Twitter on the day she delivered Baby Dash (Figure 3 & 4). Followers also frequently speculated and bantered about how her baby would look, and mused about how much they were going to adore him. Figure 3 & 4, screenshot March 2013 from ‹twitter.com/xiaxue› While Lupton (42) has conceptualized the sharing of images that precede birth as a “rite of passage”, Influencer mothers who publish sonograms deliberately do so in order to claim digital estates for their to-be micro-microcelebrities in the form of “reserved” social media handles, blog URLs, and unique hashtags for self-branding. For instance, at the 3-month mark of her pregnancy, Influencer bongqiuqiu debuted her baby’s dedicated hashtag, “#MereGoRound” in a birth announcement on her on Instagram account. Shortly after, she started an Instagram account, “@MereGoRound”, for her baby, who amassed over 5.5k followers prior to her birth. Figure 5 & 6, screenshot March 2015 from instagram.com/meregoround and instagram.com/bongqiuqiuThe debut picture features a heavily pregnant belly shot of bongqiuqiu (Figure 5), creating much anticipation for the arrival of a new micro-microcelebrity: in the six months leading up to her birth, various family, friends, and fans shared Instagram images of their gifts and welcome party for @MereGoRound, and followers shared congratulations and fan art on the dedicated Instagram hashtag. During this time, bongqiuqiu also frequently updated followers on her pregnancy progress, not without advertising her (presumably sponsored) gynecologist and hospital stay in her pregnancy diaries (Figure 6) – like Baby Dash, even as a foetus @MereGoRound was accumulating advertorials. Presently at six months old, @MereGoRound boasts almost 40k followers on Instagram on which embedded in the narrative of her growth are sponsored products and services from various advertisers.Non-Baby-Related AdvertorialsPrior to her pregnancy, Influencer bongqiuqiu hopped onto the micro-microcelebrity bandwagon in the wake of Baby Dash’s birth, by using her niece “#HeYurou” in her advertorials. Many Influencers attempt to naturalize their advertorials by composing their post as if recounting a family event. With reference to a child, parent, or partner, they may muse or quip about a product being used or an experience being shared in a bid to mask the distinction between their personal and commercial material. bongqiuqiu frequently posted personal, non-sponsored images engaging in daily mundane activities under the dedicated hashtag “#HeYurou”.However, this was occasionally interspersed with pictures of her niece holding on to various products including storybooks (Figure 8) and shopping bags (Figure 9). At first glance, this might have seemed like any mundane daily update the Influencer often posts. However, a close inspection reveals the caption bearing sponsor hashtags, tags, and campaign information. For instance, one Instagram post shows #HeYurou casually holding on to and staring at a burger in KFC wrapping (Figure 7), but when read in tandem with bongqiuqiu’s other KFC-related posts published over a span of a few months, it becomes clear that #HeYurou was in fact advertising for KFC. Figure 7, 8, 9, screenshot December 2014 from ‹instagram.com/bongqiuqiu›Elsewhere, Baby Dash was incorporated into xiaxue’s car sponsorship with over 20 large decals of one of his viral photos – dubbed “pineapple Dash” among followers – plastered all over her vehicle (Figure 10). Followers who spot the car in public are encouraged to photograph and upload the image using its dedicated hashtag, “#xiaxuecar” as part of the Influencer’s car sponsorship – an engagement scarcely related to her young child. Since then, xiaxue has speculated producing offshoots of “pineapple Dash” products including smartphone casings. Figure 10, screenshot December 2014 from ‹instagram.com/xiaxue›Follower EngagementSponsors regularly organize fan meet-and-greets headlined by micro-microcelebrities in order to attract potential customers. Photo opportunities and the chance to see Baby Dash “in the flesh” frequently front press and promotional material of marketing campaigns. Elsewhere on social media, several Baby Dash fan and tribute accounts have also emerged on Instagram, reposting images and related media of the micro-microcelebrity with overt adoration, no doubt encouraged by xiaxue, who began crowdsourcing captions for Baby Dash’s photos.Influencer ohsofickle postures #BabyElroyE’s follower engagement in a more subtle way. In her YouTube channel that debut in the month of her baby’s birth, ohsofickle produces video diaries of being a young, single, mother who is raising a child (Figure 11). In each episode, #BabyElroyE is the main feature whose daily activities are documented, and while there is some advertising embedded, ohsofickle’s approach on YouTube is much less overt than others as it features much more non-monetized personal content (Figure 12). Her blog serves as a backchannel to her vlogs, in which she recounts her struggles with motherhood and explicitly solicits the advice of mothers. However, owing to her young age (she became an Influencer at 17 and gave birth at 24), many of her followers are teenagers and young women who respond to her solicitations by gushing over #BabyElroyE’s images on Instagram. Figure 11 & 12, screenshot September 2015 from ‹instagram.com/ohsofickle›PrivacyAs noted by Holloway et al. (23), children like micro-microcelebrities will be among the first cohorts to inherit “digital profiles” of their “whole lifetime” as a “work in progress”, from parents who habitually underestimate or discount the privacy and long term effects of publicizing information about their children at the time of posting. This matters in a climate where social media platforms can amend privacy policies without user consent (23), and is even more pressing for micro-microcelebrities whose followers store, republish, and recirculate information in fan networks, resulting in digital footprints with persistence, replicability, scalability, searchability (boyd), and extended longevity in public circulation which can be attributed back to the children indefinitely (Leaver, “Ends”).Despite minimum age restrictions and recent concerns with “digital kidnapping” where users steal images of other young children to be re-posted as their own (Whigham), some social media platforms rarely police the proliferation of accounts set up by parents on behalf of their underage children prominently displaying their legal names and life histories, citing differing jurisdictions in various countries (Facebook; Instagram), while others claim to disable accounts if users report an “incorrect birth date” (cf. Google for YouTube). In Singapore, the Media Development Authority (MDA) which governs all print and digital media has no firm regulations for this but suggests that the age of consent is 16 judging by their recommendation to parents with children aged below 16 to subscribe to Internet filtering services (Media Development Authority, “Regulatory” 1). Moreover, current initiatives have been focused on how parents can impart digital literacy to their children (Media Development Authority, “Empowered”; Media Literacy Council) as opposed to educating parents about the digital footprints they may be unwittingly leaving about their children.The digital lives of micro-microcelebrities pose new layers of concern given their publicness and deliberate publicity, specifically hinged on making visible the usually inaccessible, private aspects of everyday life (Marshall, “Persona” 5).Scholars note that celebrities are individuals for whom speculation of their private lives takes precedence over their actual public role or career (Geraghty 100-101; Turner 8). However, the personae of Influencers and their young children are shaped by ambiguously blurring the boundaries of privacy and publicness in order to bait followers’ attention, such that privacy and publicness are defined by being broadcast, circulated, and publicized (Warner 414). In other words, the publicness of micro-microcelebrities is premised on the extent of the intentional publicity rather than simply being in the public domain (Marwick 223-231, emphasis mine).Among Influencers privacy concerns have aroused awareness but not action – Baby Dash’s Influencer mother admitted in a national radio interview that he has received a death threat via Instagram but feels that her child is unlikely to be actually attacked (Channel News Asia) – because privacy is a commodity that is manipulated and performed to advance their micro-microcelebrities’ careers. As pioneer micro-microcelebrities are all under 2-years-old at present, future research warrants investigating “child-centred definitions” (Third et al.) of the transition in which they come of age, grow an awareness of their digital presence, respond to their Influencer mothers’ actions, and potentially take over their accounts.Young LabourThe Ministry of Manpower (MOM) in Singapore, which regulates the employment of children and young persons, states that children under the age of 13 may not legally work in non-industrial or industrial settings (Ministry of Manpower). However, the same document later ambiguously states underaged children who do work can only do so under strict work limits (Ministry of Manpower). Elsewhere (Chan), it is noted that national labour statistics have thus far only focused on those above the age of 15, thus neglecting a true reflection of underaged labour in Singapore. This is despite the prominence of micro-microcelebrities who are put in front of (video) cameras to build social media content. Additionally, the work of micro-microcelebrities on digital platforms has not yet been formally recognized as labour, and is not regulated by any authority including Influencer management firms, clients, the MDA, and the MOM. Brief snippets from my ethnographic fieldwork with Influencer management agencies in Singapore similarly reveal that micro-microcelebrities’ labour engagements and control of their earnings are entirely at their parents’ discretion.As models and actors, micro-microcelebrities are one form of entertainment workers who if between the ages of 15 days and 18 years in the state of California are required to obtain an Entertainment Work Permit to be gainfully employed, adhering to strict work, schooling, and rest hour quotas (Department of Industrial Relations). Furthermore, the Californian Coogan Law affirms that earnings by these minors are their own property and not their parents’, although they are not old enough to legally control their finances and rely on the state to govern their earnings with a legal guardian (Screen Actors Guild). However, this similarly excludes underaged children and micro-microcelebrities engaged in creative digital ecologies. Future research should look into safeguards and instruments among young child entertainers, especially for micro-micrcocelebrities’ among whom commercial work and personal documentation is not always distinct, and are in fact deliberately intertwined in order to better engage with followers for relatabilityGrowing Up BrandedIn the wake of moral panics over excessive surveillance technologies, children’s safety on the Internet, and data retention concerns, micro-microcelebrities and their Influencer mothers stand out for their deliberately personal and overtly commercial approach towards self-documenting, self-presenting, and self-publicizing from the moment of conception. As these debut micro-microcelebrities grow older and inherit digital publics, personae, and careers, future research should focus on the transition of their ownership, engagement, and reactions to a branded childhood in which babies were postured for an initimate public.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “Communicative Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology. Forthcoming, Nov 2015.Aiello, Marianne. “Mommy Blog Banner Ads Get Results.” Healthcare Marketing Advisor 17 Nov. 2010. HealthLeaders Media. 16 Aug. 2015 ‹http://healthleadersmedia.com/content/MAR-259215/Mommy-Blog-Banner-Ads-Get-Results›.Azzarone, Stephanie. “When Consumers Report: Mommy Blogging Your Way to Success.” Playthings 18 Feb. 2009. 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