An emerging activist tactic on visual-based social media such as Instagram, slideshow activism adapts the production and consumption of political information to the logic of the platform. In so ...doing, slideshow activism provides followers with an ideal subject position for civic engagement. By examining a popular slideshow activist Instagram account, we outline the features of this activist tactic and its mobilizing appeal. The qualitative content analysis of a sample of 50 posts reveals that slideshow activism addresses its followers as individuals who are actively staying well-informed on the social justice dimension of a wide range of political issues and are constantly engaged in self-transformation in order to become better citizens. This ideal, we argue, entrenches social justice as a core political value for civic engagement, and recommends a mix of argumentation and personal transformation as the everyday means for individuals to bring about political change. We further explore the consequences of this subject position for citizen engagement with politics.
How marginalized groups use Twitter to advance counter-narratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent.
The power of hashtag activism became clear in 2011, when ...#IranElection served as an organizing tool for Iranians protesting a disputed election and offered a global audience a front-row seat to a nascent revolution. Since then, activists have used a variety of hashtags, including #JusticeForTrayvon, #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen, and #MeToo to advocate, mobilize, and communicate. In this book, Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles explore how and why Twitter has become an important platform for historically disenfranchised populations, including Black Americans, women, and transgender people. They show how marginalized groups, long excluded from elite media spaces, have used Twitter hashtags to advance counternarratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent.
The authors describe how such hashtags as #MeToo, #SurvivorPrivilege, and #WhyIStayed have challenged the conventional understanding of gendered violence; examine the voices and narratives of Black feminism enabled by #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, and #SayHerName; and explore the creation and use of #GirlsLikeUs, a network of transgender women. They investigate the digital signatures of the “new civil rights movement”—the online activism, storytelling, and strategy-building that set the stage for #BlackLivesMatter—and recount the spread of racial justice hashtags after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other high-profile incidents of killings by police. Finally, they consider hashtag created by allies, including #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite.
•The study applied a co-creational approach to hashtag activism by social movement organizations during the #MeToo movement.•Semantic network analysis revealed the network structure, identifying the ...co-occurrences of words used by SMOs and publics.•Six different framing strategies emerged that reflect SMO approaches to facilitating the co-creation of meaning with publics.•Hashtags function as mechanisms that enabled SMOs to foster better engagement with publics.
During the #MeToo movement, social movement organizations (SMOs) played a crucial role in the online mobilization by utilizing various message frames and appealing hashtags during the social movement. Applying a co-creational approach and using framing as a theoretical framework, the study explored how SMOs use words and hashtags to participate in the #MeToo movement through Twitter. Based on both semantic network analysis and thematic analysis methods, findings of the study enhance literature of social movement organizations and activism as well as provide practical implications for effective social movement campaigns.
The focus of this Special Section stems from research presented in the 2019 PILAS Conference held at the University of York. The conference theme ‘Communities of Knowledge, Communities of Action’ ...sought to bridge the gap between scholarly research and Latin American activism. The collegial exchange of ideas between a new generation of engaged and innovative researchers at the conference represented a critical alternative to the traditional isolation of academia – a reality that has since been exacerbated and magnified by the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic. This Special Section of the Bulletin of Latin American Research seeks to offer a platform that will advance these new epistemologies and propel the voices of a new generation of engaged scholars.
What would a world without money look like? This book is a lively thought experiment that deepens our understanding of how money is the driver of political power, environmental destruction and social ...inequality today, arguing that it has to be abolished rather than repurposed to achieve a postcapitalist future. Grounded in historical debates about money, Anitra Nelson draws on a spectrum of political and economic thought and activism, including feminism, ecoanarchism, degrowth, permaculture, autonomism, Marxism and ecosocialism. Looking to Indigenous rights activism and the defence of commons, an international network of activists engaged in a fight for a money-free society emerges. Beyond Money shows that, by organising around post-money versions of the future, activists have a hope of creating a world that embodies their radical values and visions.
This article explores the political differences between academic activism and the recently emerged research impact agenda. While both claim that academic work can and should engage with and influence ...the world beyond the academic ‘ivory tower’, their political meaning and practice are radically different. Following the distinction made by Jacques Rancière, we argue that research impact performs a policing function which, despite its own rhetoric, is arranged as an attempt to ensure that academic work maintains a neoliberal status quo by actually having no real political impact. Academic activism, in contrast, serves to politicize scholarly work by democratically disrupting political consensus in the name of equality. Being an academic activist in an era of research impact rests in a twofold movement: that of both acting in the name of equality in an effort (using Marx’s terms) to ‘change the world’ and resisting and contesting an academic administration whose police actions have attempted to eliminate such forms of democratic practice from the political consensus. The argument is illustrated with examples from the Australia Research Council’s statements on research impact and the practice of climate change activism.
Building on Karl Mannheim's theory of generations, this address argues that U.S. Millennials comprise a new political generation with lived experiences and worldviews that set them apart from their ...elders. Not only are they the first generation of "digital natives," but, although they are more educated than any previous U.S. generation, they face a labor market in which precarity is increasingly the norm. And despite proclamations to the contrary, they confront persistent racial and gender disparities, discrimination against sexual minorities, and widening class inequality—all of which they understand in the framework of "intersectionality." This address analyzes the four largest social movements spearheaded by college-educated Millennials: the young undocumented immigrant "Dreamers," the 2011 Occupy Wall Street uprising, the campus movement protesting sexual assault, and the Black Lives Matter movement. All four reflect the distinctive historical experience of the Millennial generation, but they vary along two cross-cutting dimensions: (1) the social characteristics of activists and leaders, and (2) the dominant modes of organization and strategic repertoires.
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