Project description
Why female fashion influencers in Cameroon go offline
Africa’s fashion industry is rapidly growing, yet studies on social media influencers often overlook the continent, focusing only on financial value. Young women in Cameroon building their brands also engage in offline activities, sharing advice, images, garments, and money to reward followers who promote their styles. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the SMIIWA project will investigate the role of female fashion influencers in Cameroon, aiming to identify what constitutes economic and social value in the local market and how these values are created and sustained. Using participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and netnography, the project will examine the practices of young Cameroonian female influencers.
Objective
This study examines the role of female fashion influencers in Cameroon. Although the fashion industry in Africa is amongst the fastest growing globally, most studies of social media influencers not only overlook Africa but also understand economic value solely in financial terms. Yet, unlike Western influencers, young Cameroonian women seeking to create influencer positions and build their brands must engage in distribution offline – of advice, images, garments, money – to reward followers for their work of advertising their styles. As such they are constructing a unique influencer economy that differs radically from the Western models on which the existing literature is disproportionately focused. This study thus asks what counts as economic and other value for social media influencers in the Cameroonian influencer economy and how these values, and thus the economy, is created and sustained. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and netnography, this project investigates the redistributive practices of young Cameroonian female social media influencers building networks of followers, sharing images, and building brands. As the first fully-fledged study of fashion influencer economies in/from West Africa the project examines models of valuation underpinning influencer economies based on redistirbution in view of fostering new areas of interdisciplinary and decolonial research on alternatives to the formal digital economy. I shall carry out the fellowship at the University of Cape Town (UCT), under the supervision of Prof. Divine Fuh, and University College London (UCL), under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Miller.
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Keywords
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
WC1E 6BT London
United Kingdom
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.