Women Vloggers, Cultures & Nature: Narrativising Rural Lifescape (2024) (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing)

By: Alberta Natasia Adji

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Synopsis: This book explores the nature-inspired and place-based vlogging activities of five young women who have become global icons in the last five years, and whose digital projects are a form of ‘nature life writing’ in the Anthropocene. Li Ziqi, Dianxi Xiaoge, Jonna Jinton, Annabel Margaret and Paola Merrill draw on their culture and use technological equipment and social media (especially YouTube) to build dynamic narratives about living in the countryside. Through their online platform they show unique, picturesque footage of their daily routines and rural environments, and present the ways in which they nurture connections between people in the community and animals and landscapes. The study shows how, paradoxically, their digital life writing projects attempt to resist the attention economy but at the same time use strategies to sustain it. Through the various lenses of ecobiography, cultural ecology, digital archiving, ecospirituality, phytography, and ethological poetics, this book also foregrounds the significance of plant life and landscapes – they are reminders of how human lives are inextricably entangled with traditional values and the natural world.