Nell Haynes is Faculty Fellow in Anthropology at Colby College. Her research addresses themes of gender & indigeneity in Latin America. Specifically she is interested in the ways that notions of who counts as "authentically indigenous" become expressed through and troubled by popular culture and media. Nell earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology at American University in 2013 with a concentration in Race, Gender, and Social Justice, and holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from Northwestern University in Anthropology and Theater. Nell has previously worked at Georgetown University, Northwestern University, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and University College London. Nell is author of Social Media in Northern Chile (2016) and co-author of How the World Changed Social Media (2016). Nell is currently working on her second book, which explores how the pop culture spectacle of lucha libre, featuring women as chola characters, reflects and contributes to current debates over the nature of indigeneity in Bolivia.
latest news
Sexuality and the discursive construction of the digital self in the Global South (with Baird Campbell)
Under this title, I have co-edited a special issue of Journal of Language and Sexuality. It includes an introduction, written with Baird Campbell and my own article on Chile. Titles and abstracts are below. Clicking the link above will take you to the issue page including both articles.
Constructing the Digital Self in the Global South (Campbell and Haynes)
The papers in this special section examine how people in various contexts of the Global South “construct the self” in online spaces. With examples from Chile, Senegal, and Trinidad, the papers show the wide range of discursive practices, encompassing the textual and the aesthetic, which individuals use to enact gendered and sexual selves online. By privileging gender and sexuality as central components of selfhood, we draw from the longstanding attention paid to gender and sexuality in linguistic studies of identification (see Bucholtz & Hall 2004). In placing this concept within digital worlds, we pay attention to the ways in which daily life is now lived and experienced online. Authors in this issue think critically about practices of self-formation and the performance of gender and sexuality that differ from those that have normalized in the Global North, considering both revolutionary possibility, and re-entrenchment of constraint.
'Overloaded like a Bolivian Truck': Discursive Constructions of Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Northern Chilean Memes
Memes have become an important linguistic tool not only for communicating emotions and ideas, but also are integral to constructing the self in online space. This paper concentrates on copper miners in northern Chile and the ways they use memes to make claims related to (hetero)sexuality, mestizaje, and nationalism. With men at the mine during week-long shifts and families in towns several hours away, social media is important for maintaining communication as well as representing the self. Miners present their labor as central to their sense of self, with memes that indirectly index heterosexuality, modernity associated with resource extraction, and racial mestizaje linked to nationalism. The visibility of these memes across spaces of both mine and town gives men an opportunity to construct a cohesive digital self, with implications for reinforcing assumptions about what is appropriate gender performance.
Under this title, I have co-edited a special issue of Journal of Language and Sexuality. It includes an introduction, written with Baird Campbell and my own article on Chile. Titles and abstracts are below. Clicking the link above will take you to the issue page including both articles.
Constructing the Digital Self in the Global South (Campbell and Haynes)
The papers in this special section examine how people in various contexts of the Global South “construct the self” in online spaces. With examples from Chile, Senegal, and Trinidad, the papers show the wide range of discursive practices, encompassing the textual and the aesthetic, which individuals use to enact gendered and sexual selves online. By privileging gender and sexuality as central components of selfhood, we draw from the longstanding attention paid to gender and sexuality in linguistic studies of identification (see Bucholtz & Hall 2004). In placing this concept within digital worlds, we pay attention to the ways in which daily life is now lived and experienced online. Authors in this issue think critically about practices of self-formation and the performance of gender and sexuality that differ from those that have normalized in the Global North, considering both revolutionary possibility, and re-entrenchment of constraint.
'Overloaded like a Bolivian Truck': Discursive Constructions of Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Northern Chilean Memes
Memes have become an important linguistic tool not only for communicating emotions and ideas, but also are integral to constructing the self in online space. This paper concentrates on copper miners in northern Chile and the ways they use memes to make claims related to (hetero)sexuality, mestizaje, and nationalism. With men at the mine during week-long shifts and families in towns several hours away, social media is important for maintaining communication as well as representing the self. Miners present their labor as central to their sense of self, with memes that indirectly index heterosexuality, modernity associated with resource extraction, and racial mestizaje linked to nationalism. The visibility of these memes across spaces of both mine and town gives men an opportunity to construct a cohesive digital self, with implications for reinforcing assumptions about what is appropriate gender performance.
Making Migrant Identities on Social Media: A Tale of Two Neoliberal Cities on the Pacific Rim (with XinYuan Wang)
The copper mining city of of Alto Hospicio, Chile and GoodPath town, a factory city in China both seem to be archetypal neoliberal cities. They epitomize the circulation of goods, people, and ideas through their export-based economies, large migrant populations, and high penetration of Internet and social media use. Yet, we find that in migrants’ social media use, there are stark contrasts in the significance they place on their movement and the identities they form around these migrations. In China, factory workers take to the ‘online world’ to escape harsh realities and engage in identity formations that privilege cosmopolitan aspirations. In Chile, mining workers express the harshness of their lived reality, using social media to build identities around a sense of pride in their abrasive conditions. This comparative essay reveals how processes associated with neoliberal capitalism – including migrations of people, goods, and information, and the commodification of identities – is preconditioned by local contexts. We find that the processes of neoliberal capitalism sometimes yield starkly different consequences, even when local circumstances seem to be similar. This demonstrates that even as media (and particularly social media) connect people more closely, their effects are anything but homogenizing.
Writing on the Walls: Discourses on Bolivian Immigrants in Chilean Meme Humor
Why is there so much hate on social media? How dangerous is online vitriol for politics and society? Can there be a universal definition of hate speech?
Edited by Sahana Udupa (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität LMU Munich, Germany) and Matti Pohjonen (School of Oriental and African Studies, UK), this Special Section on Extreme Speech and Global Digital Cultures advances these questions by introducing the concept of “extreme speech” as a critical ethnographic intervention into heated scholarly debates around disinformation, online extremism and hateful communication online.
It brings together nine leading scholars researching online vitriol as situated speech cultures, focusing on the actual rather than abstract conditions of possibility for action against it. By taking a distinctly global perspective honed by ethnographic sensibility to broader histories of difference and exclusion, the special section moves the debate beyond legal-normative approaches dominant in North America and Europe, and moral panics around fake news and filter bubbles. It foregrounds the different ways online vitriol is entangled with, and has come to significantly shape, the cultural, social and political fabric of vastly diverse world regions: from Chile, Denmark and Syria to the U.S., Ethiopia, India and Myanmar. Ethnographic explorations of online “extreme speech” open up a new ground to critique the contemporary global conjuncture of exclusionary politics.
Read the full journal issue here.
The copper mining city of of Alto Hospicio, Chile and GoodPath town, a factory city in China both seem to be archetypal neoliberal cities. They epitomize the circulation of goods, people, and ideas through their export-based economies, large migrant populations, and high penetration of Internet and social media use. Yet, we find that in migrants’ social media use, there are stark contrasts in the significance they place on their movement and the identities they form around these migrations. In China, factory workers take to the ‘online world’ to escape harsh realities and engage in identity formations that privilege cosmopolitan aspirations. In Chile, mining workers express the harshness of their lived reality, using social media to build identities around a sense of pride in their abrasive conditions. This comparative essay reveals how processes associated with neoliberal capitalism – including migrations of people, goods, and information, and the commodification of identities – is preconditioned by local contexts. We find that the processes of neoliberal capitalism sometimes yield starkly different consequences, even when local circumstances seem to be similar. This demonstrates that even as media (and particularly social media) connect people more closely, their effects are anything but homogenizing.
Writing on the Walls: Discourses on Bolivian Immigrants in Chilean Meme Humor
Why is there so much hate on social media? How dangerous is online vitriol for politics and society? Can there be a universal definition of hate speech?
Edited by Sahana Udupa (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität LMU Munich, Germany) and Matti Pohjonen (School of Oriental and African Studies, UK), this Special Section on Extreme Speech and Global Digital Cultures advances these questions by introducing the concept of “extreme speech” as a critical ethnographic intervention into heated scholarly debates around disinformation, online extremism and hateful communication online.
It brings together nine leading scholars researching online vitriol as situated speech cultures, focusing on the actual rather than abstract conditions of possibility for action against it. By taking a distinctly global perspective honed by ethnographic sensibility to broader histories of difference and exclusion, the special section moves the debate beyond legal-normative approaches dominant in North America and Europe, and moral panics around fake news and filter bubbles. It foregrounds the different ways online vitriol is entangled with, and has come to significantly shape, the cultural, social and political fabric of vastly diverse world regions: from Chile, Denmark and Syria to the U.S., Ethiopia, India and Myanmar. Ethnographic explorations of online “extreme speech” open up a new ground to critique the contemporary global conjuncture of exclusionary politics.
Read the full journal issue here.
Making Histories of Bolivian Sexual and Diversity Legible in the Twenty-First Century in NOTCHES: Remarks on the History of Sexuality
My blog, written with Bolivian activist and scholar David Aruquipa Pérez, examines how political allegiances and competing priorities have shaped equality movements for LGBTI Bolivians, and thus, their histories.
How the World Changed Social Media is the MOST READ OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK ON JSTOR!!!
This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the ethnographic research exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communicatin? Are we becoming mroe individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet?
How the World Changed Social Media argues that the only way to appreciate and understanding something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how peole all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences.
Go to the UCL Press website to order your copy or download free PDFs.
Social Media in Northern Chile: Posting the Extraordinarily Ordinary is now available from UCL Press
Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the city of Alto Hospicio in northern Chile, this book describes how the residents use social media, and the consequences of this use in their daily lives. Nell Haynes argues that social media is a place where Alto Hospicio’s residents – or Hospiceños – express their feelings of marginalisation that result from living in city far from the national capital, and with a notoriously low quality of life compared to other urban areas in Chile.
In actively distancing themselves from residents in cities such as Santiago, Hospiceños identify as marginalised citizens, and express a new kind of social norm. Yet Haynes finds that by contrasting their own lived experiences with those of people in metropolitan areas, Hospiceños are strengthening their own sense of community and the sense of normativity that shapes their daily lives. This exciting conclusion is illustrated by the range of social media posts about personal relationships, politics and national citizenship, particularly on Facebook.
Go to the UCL Press website to order your copy or download free PDFs.
