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Methods workshop "Understanding Mobilization on Social Media: Methodological Approaches to Activists' Affective and Networking Practices": July 4-5, 2024

How can researchers address and analyze the role of emotions and affect in protest mobilization on social media? How do they go about handling vast amounts of multimodal data, rapidly changing digital infrastructures, and data security laws? What are the challenges and opportunities of computational methods, and how can qualitative methods be applied to social media data? On July 4-5, a methods workshop titled "Understanding Mobilization on Social Media: Methodological Approaches to Activists' Affective and Networking Practices" will address these questions from a multidisciplinary perspective.

News from Jun 10, 2024

Social media has become an important place for local and global activist and protest movements. Groups that have been marginalized in the past can now use social media to express themselves and challenge mainstream views. This has been seen in anti-racist, transgender, and feminist activism online.

However, Men's Rights Activists, the alt/far right, and anti-gender groups are also using social media to hijack feminist and anti-racist movements online. They have created their own networks across different platforms, often referred to as the "manosphere".

Emotions and feelings shape how activists use social media, as well as how they mobilize and develop strategies. Sometimes different activist groups form emotional alliances, such as between some feminist and anti-feminist activists, as seen in studies on racist and anti-transgender mobilizations.

As the online public sphere becomes more fragmented and the lines between various movements grow indistinct, studying activism on social media platforms presents greater complexity.

On 4-5 July, a methods workshop titled "Understanding Mobilization on Social Media: Methodological Approaches to Activists' Affective and Networking Practices" will bring together international scholars working with various methods of automated, quantitative, qualitative, and multimodal analysis to present and discuss the different layers of analyzing social media data. The areas of interest include applied analysis of activist practices, feminist and anti-feminist protest movements and their formations on social media, contestations within and among these movements, and finally, the role of affect, emotion, and embodiment in social media activism. Questions of technological, methodological, and ethical challenges around social media analysis will also be discussed.

 We will start with a keynote by Prof. Sarah J. Jackson (University of Pennsylvania) on 4 July and continue with workshop sessions on 5 July.

You can find the abstract of the keynote below and the full program here.

Keynote by Prof. Sarah J. Jackson

Revisiting #HashtagActivism: Methods, Ethics, and Moving On

Date and location: 4 July, 18 – 20h, Hörsaal 21B, Ihnestr. 21.

 In this talk, I revisit the methods from my 2020 book, #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, to several ends. First, I discuss how and why the mixed methodological approaches my collaborators and I began using to study Twitter in 2014 worked during the primary period of our research (through 2018). I revisit our data collection methods, methods of organizing and analyzing that data, and the tools we used to present it. Then I reflect on how the enshittification of platforms, alongside an overrun of defensive publics and the delimitation of data access, presents challenges to this model. I also consider instructive challenges to methodological assumptions offered by recent work on other platforms. Along the way, I discuss ethical concerns emerging from the last decade of studying digital activism, considering potential assuaging practices.

Workshop sessions:

Date and location: 5 July, 09:30 – 16:00, in seminar room 0.2051, Holzlaube, Fabeckstr. 23/25.

You can attend the keynote without registration. However, if you would like to attend the workshops, please register by 24 June by emailing andrea.lora.rojas@fu-berlin.de

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