Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition

This event was the launch Zoe Hurley's new book 'Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition'. Evaluating the cases of multiple influencers, from local to transnational content creators, Hurley reveals how residents, non-citizens and migrant workers survive as influencers in the city of ‘likes.’ Providing de-Westernising perspectives of Dubai’s social media influencing industry within the broader context of global platform capitalism, the book offers an important contribution to the field of social media through illustrating visible economies in a city circuited by social media influencing. Zoe Hurley is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and Assistant Professor in the College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Her research focuses on postdigital cultures, feminist-semiotics and social media in the Arabian Gulf. She has published articles in leading academic journals, including Feminist Media Studies, Visual Communication, New Media + Society, Social Media & Society, Information Communication & Society, Postdigital Science and Education. Her monograph, 'Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition', advances decolonial semiotic theorising. Sarah Hopkyns is an Assistant Professor/Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, UK. She has previously worked in higher education in the United Arab Emirates, Canada, and Japan. Her research interests include world Englishes, language and identity, language policy, translingual practice, linguistic ethnography, linguistic landscapes and English-medium instruction (EMI). Polly Withers is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre, where she leads the project “Neoliberal Visions: Gendering Consumer Culture and its Resistances in the Levant”. Polly’s interdisciplinary work questions and explores how gender, sexuality, race, and class intersect in popular culture and commercial media in the global south.