The Tradwife as a Problem for Research

This workshop will use the figure of the tradwife to think about questions of method in the study of social media cultures. There are two major questions: a question of research communities and a question of data collection. (1) In our research on tradwives, Astrid Lorange and I have been drawing from Marxist-feminist social theory, the study of political rhetoric (discourse analysis), critical social media studies, research on digital labour, and somewhere in our deep background there is always cultural materialism and literary studies. How do we decide what tools to use and what do we do with them? (2) How should one identify key “texts” — particular accounts, representative instances, virality or something else? And how do you know when you have “enough”? 

Recommended reading for the workshop: From Scratch by Sarah Brouillette and Astrid Lorange

About the speaker

Sarah Brouillette is a professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Literature and the Creative Economy (2014), UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (2019), Underdevelopment and African Literature: Emerging Forms of Reading (a “minigraph,” 2021) and Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era, forthcoming fall 2026 from Duke University Press.

This event is organized by the Global Comparative Humanities Working Group, based in the Center for the Humanities and funded by an Arts & Sciences SPEED Grant.