Figure 1. Screenshot from Dazed’s social media app officially goes global (Dazed Digital, 2025). Source: Dazed Digital (2025).
Existing Networks
My research explores how algorithm-driven visual culture reshapes femininity, emotional expression, self image, and identity through aesthetic conformity, visual performance, and digital platform systems.
Existing networks relevant to this research include Dazed Club / Dazed Media, which functions as a creative networking platform connecting emerging photographers, artists, writers, stylists, and interdisciplinary creatives through community interaction, open calls, and events. Through this platform, I aim to engage with both its membership network and identify a creative whose work relates to visual identity, self-image, photography, or styling.
My research is also informed by visual artists such as Selman Hoşgör, whose collage-based work uses colour, fragmentation, and layered visual storytelling, and Laleper Aytek, whose black and white photographic practice explores atmosphere, contrast, and emotional visual tone.
Wellcome Collection provides an interdisciplinary network at the intersection of mental health, emotional wellbeing, identity, and creative public engagement, which is relevant to my project’s focus on perfectionism, emotional distress, and self image.
My research also engages with Prof. Jonathan Hardy and the Branded Content Research Hub (LCC), whose work on media policy, platform economies, branded content, digital advertising systems, and commercial visibility helps frame online visual culture as both a cultural and economic system.
Networks I Would Like to Develop
Moving forward, I want to expand my network through photographers, stylists, immersive media artists, influencers, researchers in psychology and digital culture, and independent creative platforms.
I also want to connect with participants from different cultural and social backgrounds to make the research more diverse and experience-based.
The aim is to build interdisciplinary conversations that can support both the theoretical and visual development of the project.
Engagement Plan
My engagement plan focuses on combining research with active audience participation and ongoing feedback.
This includes interviews, surveys, photography-based research, social media interaction, and visual experiments, alongside outreach through email, workshops, discussions, and creative communities.
I also plan to document meetings, feedback exchanges, and collaborative conversations throughout the project in order to track how the research evolves over time.
The research direction was recently refined, so the networking process is currently in its early stages. I have begun primary research by interviewing a potential participant as part of stakeholder engagement.
What I bring to these networks is an interdisciplinary visual research project combining photography, emotional storytelling, visual culture analysis, and audience participation. These networks may act as driving forces by contributing dialogue, collaboration, feedback, and expertise, while the restraining forces my project critically examines include algorithmic beauty standards, commercial platform visibility, self-surveillance, and perfectionist pressures that shape digital self-presentation.
References
Dazed Digital (2025) Dazed’s social media app officially goes global [image]. Available at: https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/68169/1/dazed-social-media-app-officially-goes-global-google-play (Accessed: 21 May 2026).
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