This project focuses on student influencers on social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and the Little Red Book. It is widely known that students inhabit digital spaces. However, there is a limited understanding of how some students become influencers and the role that social media plays in shaping their student experiences and identity development and wider cultural reference points. It is known that students’ experience of higher education and their identities are increasingly digitally situated (Dyer 2020; Timmis et al. 2016). This is especially as current university-age students entering university will have been raised in a time of open access to internet, personal computers and rapid information delivery and consumption. This means that the ways in which students establish and enact their student experience and identity, as well as how they experience, negotiate and understand university as a social, academic and physical space is mediated through myriad of possibilities presented by technology.

Furthermore, from the start of their studies to the end of three years, university students go through various transitions in their identity formation. This paper takes a spatio-temporal approach to identity, emphasising the interaction between studenthood, youth culture and digital platforms. Such emphasis is vital when social media is constantly evolving with new ways to express oneself and where the student population has become younger, resulting in overlapping pressures between studenthood and youth transitions. The WHO has also announced the mental health crisis among students (Harvard Medical School n.d.), making the interaction between social media on student wellbeing pressing to explore.

This paper is centred around the following research questions:

• What are the competing narratives (produced through discourses, visuals) that construct student identities in digital spaces?

• How do these narratives differ across student lifecycle (e.g. transitioning in/out of university), background (e.g. gender, social class, ethnicity) and digital platforms used?

This project starts with the premise that identities are formed intersubjectively, through relations with others, and in our interaction with the material and virtual world. To fully appreciate the role of digital spaces in forming student identities, it is important to understand the pressures that students as young people experience in today’s society. The shift from knowledge society to digital society has been producing uncertain futures for young people with new challenges for identity construction (Bynner & Heinz 2021). For example, one is expected to sell their unwanted belongings on eBay, develop a start-up or become an Uber driver rather than rely on state support in times of need. Students are also treated as consumers, purchasing education as any other commodity (Brooks & Abrahams 2018; Raaper 2021). It is thus unsurprising that social media promotes an image of the self as an enterprise. We also argue that the psychological pressures students experience have been amplified by Covid-19, raising attention to youth unemployment and mental health disorders (Hellemans et al. 2020; Partington 2020) and creating concerns for social media addiction (Tarrant 2021).

We conceptualise social media as virtual spaces of collective knowledge/content production, and as contexts where identities are shaped relationally out of interaction with other users and the platforms themselves (Chen 2016; Braidotti 2013). Digital participatory cultures produce ‘new forms of power, status and control’ (Jenkins et al. 2016, 12) but are also themselves co-produced by the ‘imagined community’ of users (cf. Anderson 1991; Miller 2011). Part of our ambition will then be to investigate the ways students forge assemblages with electronic technologies and how they interact with other users and politico-economic structures that shape the formation of their identities.

This project uses a combination of innovative methods to generate and analyse data. By engaging with discursive (language, text, content) and visual elements (temporal organisation, image, camerawork, sound), it is possible to examine recurring narratives and aesthetic structures through which student identities are constructed and performed (Holmes 2017). The sample used in this paper involves ten UK-based student influencers whose following on TikTok/Instagram/Little Red Book ranges between 2000 to 800,000 followers. These influencers were selected through using purposive and snowball sampling. They include both undergraduate and postgraduate students from home and international student status. As part of this project, we have engaged with the student influencers’ social media posts and conducted follow-up individual interviews. First, to analyse the content of social media posts, we use software engineering and computational analysis to identify core patterns within a particular student influencer portfolio as well as patterns across the sample. The analysis will include the systematic mapping of the reach of content, primary language processing, content analysis of social media posts, and sentiment analysis. Guided by digital ethnography (cf. Pink et.al. 2015), we further conduct manual analysis of social media posts, exploring the meanings of content, and the elliptic and poetic capacities of the posts. Methodological cues from the field of visual anthropology will be employed to explore hegemonic representations of the self, communicated and perpetuated through pictorial modes. Second, we present the findings of follow-up individual interviews with these ten student influencers to explore the less visible aspects of social media use and the issues of self-actualisation, wellbeing and future transitions. Data is being analysed by using the combination of critical discourse analysis and thematic analysis. The project introduced as part of this paper has been approved by the XXX University Ethics Committee, and it complies with the BERA (2018) ethical guidelines on digital research. We will assure full on anonymity of our participants and no student influencer will be identified from this conference paper.

Our findings will demonstrate how students in the UK become influencers on social media, and how their social media practices and interactions with followers shape their wider sense of self, identity development and belonging. For example, we will demonstrate how student influencers with disabilities or from LGBTQ+ background construct their identities in relation to being a student and a young person from a minority background. We will also discuss how international students in the UK maintain their sense of ethnic belonging and friendship groups through their social media practices. In addition to themes related to student and youth identities, we will present findings related to monetisation of student influencer profiles, and the ways in which these students have capitalised their student experience and academic skills and produce content that is highly relevant for future and current students. Many brands and marketing companies regularly approach these student influencers for marketing and advertisement work. We will present and discuss how our interviewees navigate this complex space and the income they generate (e.g., often £500-£2000 for a short TikTok video) through their social media practices. This research topic on student influencers is highly unique, bringing together youth and studenthood that are likely to overlap when shaping identity construction and performance in digital spaces. Our ambitious theoretical and methodological approach helps to critique the traditional ideas of digital nativism that present contemporary youth as holding an authoritative role in using digital technologies, and we show that their identity development is complex, intersecting with youth transitions as well as monetisation that comes from private sector. It is also important to note that our focus is on image-rich real-time digital platforms, which we believe are particularly important for problematising further links with student wellbeing and mental health.

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