Caitlin Thomson
Bio
Student writing for fun, hoping to be an author one day!
Stories (2/0)
Dark Academia, Sculpture, and Whiteness
Dark Academia is a hyper-curated aesthetic subculture, whereby elements of academic study are turned into a visual display, often through images in which the objects that are seen to represent the aesthetic are digitally collaged together. As suggested by its defining adjective, Dark Academia has a colour scheme of dark and muted tones, the majority of images appearing in a Google Image search consisting of grey, brown, beige and white. Although it has existed as a subculture for many years, it has become widely popularised in 2020 and 2021, with #darkacademia accumulating roughly 778,000,000 views on TikTok and 700,000 posts on Instagram at time of writing, with these numbers only increasing. The popularity of Dark Academia is striking for its apparent democratisation of academic study, with TikTok creator Lucien K explaining in interview with the New York Times that Dark Academia is ‘a very open community, even though it’s about classics’. By employing Dresang’s Radical Change Theory, whereby the ‘three technology-influenced digital age principles’ of Interactivity, Connectivity and Access are used to examine and explain changes in social behaviour in the digital age, we can explain the subculture’s ability to popularise academic study: Dark Academia certainly embodies the first two principles by engaging its content creators on social media, and, perhaps most impactfully in an area still driven by class-based socio-economic elitism, it provides free and easily accessible resources by which to engage with academia.
By Caitlin Thomson2 years ago in Education