VR grant for new research on girls' music and health on TikTok

The Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology Veronika Muchitsch, a previous PhD student at the Department of Musicology in Uppsala, has been awarded research grants by the Swedish Research Council (VR) for the 3-year project titled "Mental health, affect, and gender in young women’s digital music and media practices". The project description is:

Contemporary public debate has discussed young women's deteriorating mental health and linked this development to the negative effects of social media. Simultaneously, young people increasingly discuss mental health in digital media practices. On the digital media app TikTok, the ability to easily record, save, and repurpose audio tracks has enabled new forms of creativity and participation in which sound and music play central roles. Bringing together these perspectives on technology, mental health, gender, and music, this project examines young women's negotiations of mental health through musical participation on TikTok. The project investigates how these practices are mediated by sonic and musical qualities as well as TikTok's sociotechnical properties and seeks to theorize emergent gendered subjectivities at the intersection of music, technology, and affect.