Team member and QUT PhD candidate Amy Schoonens is researching the consumption practices of YA fiction on social media by teens and other content creators (including authors and publishers). Amy explores the ways teens use their reading experience to engage in digital and social media spaces creatively, critically, socially, and in ways that represent an extension of their book engagement and recreational reading practices. These practices include:
- Reviewing and rating the book
- Recreating the book in some form, such as book covers, or character fashion
- Curating aesthetics and themes from the book through digital image collages
- Creating memes about books and other kinds of fandoms
These practices occur across many different kinds of media such as audio-visual platforms like YouTube and TikTok, photographic spaces like Instagram, review spaces such as Tumblr and other blog sites, fan fiction, and other social media sites.
Amy has chosen not to focus on individual platforms and online communities, but rather on young adult fiction titles themselves as case studies. Three Australian YA texts form the basis of the study: House of Hollow (Krystal Sutherland), Illuminae (Kristoff & Kaufman), and The Boy Who Steals Houses (C.G. Drews). Amy examines these titles online to construct a kind of ‘online life’ of the book, in order to analyse the types of digital practices teens are engaging with in and around the books.
