Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and other non-heterosexual and gender diverse (LGBTIQ+) young people utilise a range of digital media platforms to explore identity, find support and manage boundaries. Less well understood, however, is how they navigate risk and rewards across the different social media platforms that are part of their everyday lives. In this study, we draw on the concept of affordances, as well as recent work on curation, to examine 23 in-depth interviews with LGBTIQ+ young people about their uses of social media. Our findings show how the affordances of platforms used by LGBTIQ+ young people, and the contexts of their engagement, situate and inform a typology of uses. These practices – focused on finding, building and fostering support – draw on young people’s social media literacies, where their affective experiences range from feelings of safety, security and control, to fear, disappointment and anger. These practices also work to manage boundaries between what is ‘for them’ (family, work colleagues, friends) and ‘not for them’. This work allowed our participants to mitigate risk, and circumnavigate normative platform policies and norms, contributing to queer-world building beyond the self. In doing so, we argue that young people’s social media curation strategies contribute to their health and well-being.

Over the past couple of decades, the cultural field formerly known as 'domestic', and later 'personal' photography has been remediated and transformed as part of the social web, with its convergence of personal expression, interpersonal communication, and online social networks (most recently via platforms like Flickr, Facebook and Twitter). Meanwhile, the Digital Storytelling movement (involving the workshop--based production of short autobiographical videos) from its beginnings in the mid 1990s relied heavily on the narrative power of the personal photograph, often sourced from family albums, and later from online archives. This paper addresses the new issues arising for the politics of self--representation and personal photography in the era of social media, focusing particularly on the consequences of online image--sharing. It discusses in detail the practices of selection, curation, manipulation and editing of personal photographic images among a group of activist--oriented queer digital storytellers who have in common a stated desire to share their personal stories in pursuit of social change, and whose stories often aim to address both intimate and antagonistic publics.

This study aims to explore the effect of attending events on young residents' place attachment levels. Events generate a wide range of social outcomes but it is not known whether they influence feelings towards the place where the event is held. After examining the motivations of event attendees, a survey of young residents in Adelaide, Australia found that there was no correlation between the events attended and place attachment. However, it was found that the motivations for event attendance did correlate with place identity. The other variable that was found to effect place identity was length of residence. The results indicate that these variables have a bearing on the effective bonds that develop between a person and a place, which in this case is the place of residence.

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