The Same Self/ie: Blurring Academic, Creative, and Personal Identity through the Taking and Sharing of Self-Portraits

In this essay, I pursue a feeling of identity-based continuity and “authenticity” across academic and personal contexts, often through self-portraiture. However, the push for visual branding highlights pressures facing researchers (especially women and non-men) to be consistently visible and accessible, with the labor of media maintenance being unpaid and unrecognized. I thus present a “gallery” of my PhD-era selfies, combining autotheoretical reflections on life and career narration with discussions of visibility, self-promotion, community, friendship, disclosure and privacy, platforms, audience, and control. Ultimately, I find selfies to be useful but potentially detrimental tools of meaning-making and identity sharing when narrating early-stage academic careers.