Alexandra Boutopoulou

I hold a BA in English Language and Literature (University of Athens), an MA in Communication (University of Westminster) and an MSc in Data Science (University of Sheffield).

Before starting my PhD, I worked in the fields of communication, advertising and digital/social media in London, Luxembourg and Athens, for 15 years

PhD project

My research draws upon the increasingly popular practices of a set of highly active online actors self-defined as ‘wellness’ bloggers and its aim is to chart the ways in which (visual) social media have shaped recent social phenomena of healthy eating, wellness discourses and lifestyle practices in the UK. To achieve its aim, the thesis focuses on the analysis of the visual social media content generated by a particular actor, the influential food blogger Deliciously Ella.

Through a set of questions that investigate, among others, a) the key features of wellness blogging micro-celebrities, b) the disruption of traditional media systems and hierarchies, c) the adoption of the wellness bloggers practices by ordinary social media users, d) the understanding of the wider social phenomenon of healthy eating and wellness lifestyle practices mediated through social media platforms, this research attempts to shed light to an under-explored and new social phenomenon.

A combination of mixed methods is being used in order to analyse a large dataset of Instagram images and at the same time, ethnographic methods further enhance this research, aiming at providing different epistemic points of entry into the phenomenon under study.

This project is funded by the White Rose ESRC Network on ‘Big Data and Food Safety’, led by Professor Peter Jackson (University of Sheffield). This network is a research collaboration with the Food Standards Agency UK.

Supervisors

• Dr Briony Birdi (University of Sheffield)
• Dr Nick Emmel (University of Leeds)