Emilie Owens

• Owens, Emilie Maeve (2026). Conceptualising TikTok in Youth and Media Research. Journal of Applied Youth Studies (JAYS). ISSN 2204-9193. doi: 10.1007/s43151-026-00223-3. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This research article examines the multifaceted role of TikTok in the lives of young users, focusing on empirical data collected through creative workshops with teenagers aged 16–17 in Oslo. The study builds on a framework from mediatisation research and previous analyses of TikTok to differentiate between the micro, meso, and macro level functions of TikTok in social life. At the micro level, TikTok serves as an algorithmic ‘feel good’ space, enabling users to engage with content that resonates with their identities and promotes personal development. The meso level highlights TikTok’s role in fostering vibrant, interest-driven transcultural spaces where users navigate social interactions and collective expressions. Finally, at the macro level, the platform emerges as a cultural symbol reflecting broader societal anxieties and moral panics regarding youth behaviour. Incorporating insights from recent literature, this article underscores the need for a nuanced understanding of TikTok in youth research, challenging traditional perceptions of digital platforms. By including the voices and experiences of young people, this study contributes significantly to contemporary discussions about digital youth culture and the implications of algorithm-driven platforms in shaping their everyday lives.

• Owens, Emilie Maeve (2025). ‘It speaks to me in brain rot’: Theorising ‘brain rot’ as a genre of participation among teenagers. New Media & Society. ISSN 1461-4448. p. 1–19. doi: 10.1177/14614448251351527. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In 2024, Oxford University Press made ‘brain rot’ – a piece of teenage slang found primarily on the popular video sharing application TikTok – its word of the year. This announcement was received by a public discourse of media panic wherein ‘brain rot’ was understood primarily as a threat to young people’s mental and physical wellbeing. This article seeks to challenge this discourse, building on the participatory approach to children’s media scholarship to argue instead that ‘brain rot’ constitutes a complex, and historically situated, genre of participation. Drawing on empirical data from seven TikTok workshops with 16- and 17-year-olds in Oslo, ‘brain rot’ is conceptualised as a collection of related practices that (1) are childish or unserious, (2) provide no cognitive or developmental benefit, and (3) are deliberately non-productive. In this way, it can be understood as a decompression-driven genre of participation whereby young people actively resist the pressures of productivity and self-optimisation.

• Owens, Emilie Maeve & Kulkarni, Sonali (2025). Sound Memes on BookTok Understanding Affect in the Platformised Reviewing of Young Adult Books on TikTok. Barnboken. ISSN 0347-772X. doi: 10.14811/clr.v48.983. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article addresses the changing landscape of book reviewing within the field of young adult (YA) literature, particularly in the context of emerging and increasingly ubiquitous digital platforms and platformisation. Starting from the recognition that BookTok – the popular book-related subculture of the even more popular digital video-sharing platform TikTok – is becoming one of the most significant forces within the realm of YA literature at the levels of marketing, sale, and readership, we argue that there is a need to investigate how the affordances of TikTok as a platform are transforming YA literature reviews, particularly given the emerging popularity of YA literature reviews by young people and for young people on TikTok. We argue that hitherto unrecognised and seemingly unimportant modes of meaning-making have become central to the reviewing of YA literature on BookTok, focusing specifically on the way sound is used on and afforded by the platform. Building on the evolving literature on internet memes and specifically sound memes, as well as on Swedish-Finnish scholar Maarit Jaakkola’s work exploring how digital platforms are challenging monopolies which have traditionally characterised literary criticism, this article undertakes an analysis of three BookTok videos and the sounds they employ. The aim in this is to establish how the mimetic and affective properties of sound allows young users to express highly nuanced feelings relating to the books they review, ultimately pushing at the boundaries of what constitute valid and valuable practices for reviewing YA literature.

• Kulkarni, Sonali & Owens, Emilie Maeve (2025). Young Adult Agency on BookTok: A Practice Theory Inquiry into Young Readers’ Active Reshaping of Digital Literary Criticism on TikTok. In Fenech, Giuliana (Eds.), Child as Citizen: Agency and Activism in Children's Literature and Culture. University Press of Mississippi. ISSN 9781496858405. p. 230–248. doi: 10.2307/jj.25465131.17. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Child as Citizen: Agency and Activism in Children's Literature and Culture addresses children’s and young adult agency and activism across literature and culture, demonstrating how these forces influence child citizenship. Contributors to this volume highlight the agentic voices and activist practices that are growing across all spheres of young people’s lives, as well as the challenges to active citizenship that children growing up in unjust sociopolitical contexts face. The volume is interdisciplinary and draws on the sociology of childhood, children’s literature studies, youth culture studies, media, technology, and cultural studies, and Anthropocene, ecofeminist, and disability studies. Agency occurs in and around literature and storytelling, and this collection establishes how it is always influenced by identity as well as geopolitics, how it is both subjective and collective, how it is cultural and embodied, and how, like citizenship, it is not a static status but rather an ongoing negotiation. In this collection, contributors invite readers to consider agency as a system of relations between children themselves, between children and adults, children and institutions, and children and nation-states, as well as between children and the nonhuman. This book reviews the interconnectedness between these relationships and attempts to untangle some of the complications that emerge.

• Owens, Emilie Maeve (2024). Teens on TikTok: Understanding young people’s digital agency as practice. International Research in Children's Literature (IRCL). ISSN 1755-6198. 17(2), p. 174–188. doi: 10.3366/ircl.2024.0562. Full text in Research Archive

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• Owens, Emily Maeve (2023). ‘Um, cold take’: The memeification of youth experience on TikTok. Full text in Research Archive
• Owens, Emily Maeve (2023). The Sound of BookTok: Exploring the evolving role of music in promoting YA literature across digital platforms. Full text in Research Archive
• Owens, Emily Maeve (2022). TikTok and BookTok: Digital Platforms for Literary Discourses. Full text in Research Archive
• Owens, Emilie Maeve; Staksrud, Elisabeth & Johansen, Stine Liv (2026). Teens and TikTok: Exploring the mediatised everyday lives of teenagers. Universitetet i Oslo. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This PhD thesis investigates the mediatisation of teenagers’ everyday lives, using TikTok as a case study to illuminate broader dynamics of digital culture and communication. It contributes to mediatisation theory by centring the lived experiences of teenagers— individuals aged 13–19—whose voices have often been marginalised or overgeneralised in media research. The main research question asks: How are teenagers’ everyday lives mediatised? Four operational questions guide the inquiry: (1) How can mediatisation theory help explain the relationship between teenagers and digital media? (2) Why is TikTok a productive case for examining mediatisation? (3) How do teenagers use digital media to build and express identity? (4) How does TikTok shape their social experiences? Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, participatory approach, conducting seven creative TikTok workshops with 16–17-year-old students at an international school in Oslo. Empirical data—audio recordings, field notes, and dialogic vignettes—were analysed through the lens of mediatisation theory, focusing on agency, identity, and social worlds as interrelated processes. Findings show that TikTok is embedded in teenagers’ social lives as both an expressive space and a site of pressure. The platform enables identity exploration and social connection, while simultaneously intensifying dynamics of visibility, comparison, and social validation. Teenagers use TikTok collaboratively and creatively, but also navigate anxieties tied to peer perception and performance. The thesis advances a conceptual framework that views mediatisation as a dynamic interplay between practices, textures, and ecologies in everyday life. It challenges narratives of moral panic by foregrounding teenagers as active participants in shaping digital culture rather than passive consumers. In conclusion, TikTok provides a window into how digital media mediate not only communication, but the very fabric of teenage social existence. Teenagers are not merely affected by media—they actively shape and negotiate them. Understanding mediatisation, therefore, means understanding how young people live and make meaning through media in a deeply digital society.

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