Between Ancestry and Algorithms: Indigenous Women’s Content Production on TikTok (2020–2023)
TikTok; Indigenous Women; Indigenous Media; Digital Public History.
This dissertation analyzes how Indigenous women use the TikTok plataform to promote cultural visibility, dispute narratives, and deconstruct stereotypes historically associated with Indigenous peoples. Situated within the field of Digital Public History, the research is grounded in the assumption that social media platforms enable the expansion of Indigenous voices, allowing historically silenced subjects to assume the role of legitimate producers of their own histories. The study is guided by the following research question: how does content produced by Indigenous creators on TikTok, and the interpretations it generates, reveal the mediations that structure narrative disputes in the digital space (2020–2023)? As sources, approximately 200 videos published between 2020 and 2023 by four Indigenous creators were analyzed, selected based on engagement criteria and a defined temporal framework. Methodologically, the research draws on Content Analysis, as proposed by Laurence Bardin, and on Jesús Martín-Barbero’s Theory of Mediations, enabling the examination of both the thematic and discursive aspects of the videos and their dimensions related to communicational mediations.