Book Review: The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics:

#BlackLivesMatter, a social-media-fueled social movement for racial justice in the United States, rose to international prominence between 2014 and 2016. Described by one of its co-creators as a ca...

White folks’ work: digital allyship praxis in the #BlackLivesMatter movement

The advent of social media heralded great promises for social movements. First, social movements would be emancipated from the confines of geography. Since disparate activists can now communicate directly, protest can spread and scale quickly. Second, since social media allow activists to build horizontal networks, they would no longer rely on organizations and their leaders to organize mobilizations, opening up the possibility for more egalitarian social movements. This book develops a unique approach to provide nuanced answers to both these assertions. Using new data sources and computational techniques, it addresses long-standing questions about how movements grow and develop leadership. Central to the approach are movements’ “relational dynamics”: the way relations are structured between activists over time and across space. Using a combination of computational, qualitative, and geographical analyses, the book shows that online activism is still firmly rooted in place and relies on leadership. But it also shows that the role of space and leadership has transformed in important ways, allowing more room for activists who were previously on the margin. Thus, social media (re)produce inequalities in social movements, while simultaneously providing new means of analyzing relational dynamics. Contrary to popular understanding, these do not inherently produce egalitarian outcomes, and are just as likely to increase rather than decrease tendencies towards inequalities and conflict.

Digitally networked grassroots : Social media and the development of the movement for black lives and immigrant rights movement in the United States

Educators increasingly teach with social media in varied ways, but they may do so without considering the ways in which social media corporations profit from their uses or compromise transparency, ...

Teaching “Against” Social Media: Confronting Problems of Profit in the Curriculum:

\n Consumer feedback platforms offer consumers tools to provide feedback on their market and consumption experiences. Beyond broad prior characterizations, little is known about the specific means by which platforms affect empowerment. Elements of empowerment identified in extant studies include voice, choice, justice, inclusion, catalysis, and consciousness-raising. We research a popular Brazilian platform to learn how platforms facilitate and constrain consumer empowerment. Our approach is immersive, a more-than-human netnography of the platform involving depth interviews with twenty-one of its consumer and corporate users. Findings show same-side and cross-side network effects driving the ability of the platform to offer consumers empowerment. Furthermore, affordances are critically important. Affordances provide opportunities for consumer choice, voice, justice, and inclusion. However, platforms’ cross-side network effects create economic considerations that limit those opportunities in theoretically and practically important ways. Although other feedback platforms might offer catalysis and consciousness-raising elements of empowerment, our focal platform does not. Earlier studies of consumer empowerment on the Internet may have been overly general and exuberant because they failed to recognize the constraining impacts of network effects, affordances, and algorithms. Consumer-citizenry, collective action, and consumer power are thoroughly transformed in the age of the platform, opening up new spaces for further investigation.

How Do Platforms Empower Consumers? Insights from the Affordances and Constraints of Reclame Aqui

In this article, we explore the potential role of social media in helping movements expand and/or strengthen themselves internally, processes we refer to as scaling up. Drawing on a case study of B...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2056305118807911

Scaling Social Movements Through Social Media: The Case of Black Lives Matter:

Since launching five years ago, SeaSketch has been used in approximately 30 large-scale projects and over 200 educational programs and research-based initiatives distributed over 40 countries. The study presented in this article engages SeaSketch developers, project administrators, and users through semi-structured interviews and surveys meant to inform designers on how to better incorporate the participatory process within geodesign applications. The results of this study suggest five ways in which designers can help increase public participation including: (1) determining the eligibility of a project by mapping stakeholder engagement, (2) monitoring perceptions of fairness, (3) visualizing data for non-technical experts, (4) alternatives to usability models with chauffeurs, and (5) project management features within geodesign. Each one of these suggestions provides ample avenues of inquiry and can help practitioners and researchers conduct longitudinal studies across projects and/or applications.

Incorporating the participatory process in the design of geospatial support tools: Lessons learned from SeaSketch

Intersectionality is both an analytic framework and a complicated set of social practices that can, if implemented correctly, lead to collective solidarity and action. In practice, intersectionality has the potential to illuminate invisible and complex social relationships that bring to light hidden injustices, socially, politically, and economically. This chapter explores foreign development by drawing from scholarly and practitioner-based intersectional feminist literature, such as the work of Fenella Portman and Caroline Sweetman, to analyse contemporary trends in development practice, particularly around gender-based programming. Contemporarily, gender mainstreaming has been integral in maintaining and distributing gender politics to the Global South. Drawing on the case of Palestine, the author provides framework that merges current discourses laid out by Olena Hankivsky et al.’s intersectionality-based policy framework to create a new theoretical-based framework for international development professionals. In the coming sections, gender development will be adequately defined and framed from within both development/policy and feminist paradigms.

Charla M. Burnett

Papers

Scaling Social Movements Through Social Media: The Case of Black Lives Matter:

Incorporating the participatory process in the design of geospatial support tools: Lessons learned from SeaSketch

How Intersectionality-Based Approaches to International Development Illuminate the Plight of Palestine Refugees

Scaling‐Up Peacebuilding and Social Justice Work: A Conceptual Model