Call for proposals, CSCW Journal Special Issue

Net activism shows how easily available tools allow the organization of social movements to be scaled up and extended globally. These media ecologies enable new forms of power. This special issue gathers research focusing on the collaborative efforts within social movements, looking into the socio-technical systems; the organization of activism; the relations between traditional and social media; and the complex network of systems, information, people, values, theories, histories, ideologies and aesthetics underlying various types of activism. The purpose with the issue is to explore how activism is materialized, enabled, and constrained by human computer interfaces, while also contributing to the development of useful tools.

The special issue builds on the result from the workshop “Materalizing activism” at ECSCW 2019.

Deadline for the first submissions of extended abstract is December 1, 2019. (Deadline for full papers will be July 2020.)

The maximum length of the extended paper is 2,000 words. The papers should follow the JCSCW formatting guidelines. Anonymize the submission and add your name and the submission title in a separate document. Submissions of extended papers and inquiries shall be sent to the following email address: khansson@dsv.su.se

For more information about the journal: https://www.springer.com/computer/journal/10606

Background

Social activism consists of efforts to promote, or intervene, with the goal of bringing about social change. Networked online environments can effectively supportthe infrastructuring of social movements, and have the potential to enable more inclusive and decentralized power structures. In this regard, the popular appeal of social media has made such online environments central for social activists’ communicative strategies (Askanius et al. 2011; Neumayer, Rossi, and Karlsson 2016). The environmental movement has, in the past, made use of social media to engage a broad public around substantive issues (DeLuca, Brunner, and Sun 2016; Goodwin and Jasper 2014; Pang and Law 2017). Other examples of activism where social media has played a central role include the Arab Spring (AlSayyad and Guvenc 2015; Smidi and Shahin 2017), the Occupy Movement (Kavada 2015), and the #MeToo movement (Hansson et al 2019; Eilermann 2018). More locally situated examples are movements such as the Gezi protests in Turkey (Haciyakupoglu and Zhang 2015), Ukraine’s Euromaidan Uprising (Bohdanova 2014), Indignados movement in Spain (Anduiza, Cristancho, and Sabucedo 2014), the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong (Chan 2014; Lee, So, and Leung 2015; Tsui 2015)and the Save KPK movement in Indonesia (Suwana 2019).

Media and communication scholar Paolo Gerbaudo (2012)suggests that these movements are characterized by a “liquid” organization, where membership is performative and informal, and where leadership is value-based rather than based on democratic structures. Just like in a mob, there are no formal membership application, clear leadership, or decision-making rules. A salient aspect of such social movements, it is suggested, lies in the technologies and cultural practices that are involved; the infrastructural arrangements supporting these movements serve to circumvent formal organizational practices, while also lowering the cost of political participation (Dahlberg-Grundberg 2016; Earl and Kimport 2011). Rather than being part of a political organization, political participation can here be seen as a way to work autonomously but in parallel towards goals and issues that are articulated by a scattered public and communicated broadly through public manifests (Milan 2017). Another feature ascribed to these movements is the way transnational activism intersects with the national configuration of political work, such as, for example the feminist movement or environmental movement, where shared goals can unite people across diverse national contexts (Sadowski 2016; Scharff, Smith-Prei, and Stehle 2016).

While these socio-technical arrangements often use a hybrid of media and methods to organize and reach out, some elements of the technologies in use are more dominant in their action repertoires (Dahlberg-Grundberg 2016). Social media has also made the quantification of data easier by putting that data to new uses (Milan 2017; Milan and Velden 2016), or by providing activists with new forms of arguments when surveys can extend to millions of people enabling a “rhetoric of collection” (Pickard and Yang 2017). #Metoo demonstrates how activists crowdsourced data that made a massive impact on the public sphere. This has also been labeled as a scientizationof activism (Kimura 2017), and provides an interesting link between activism and citizen science (Paulos et al. 2008).

Furthermore, campaigns such as #metoo also show how online spaces provide opportunities for victims of discrimination, harassment and abuse to come out and receive support from other victims, and also to participate in public debates around these issues. Simultaneously, research also points at the negative consequences, which may render digital activism risky, exhausting and overwhelming (Mendes, Ringrose, and Keller 2018).

Yet activism has always been risky and those who make a stand put themselves in harm’s way one way or another. In particular, digital media may amplify such vulnerability that characterizes activism, by exposing and surveilling and contributing at times a digital panopticon, or a means to spread disinformation about activisms(Bradshaw and Howard 2017; Pickard and Yang 2017; Uldam 2018). Social media exposition makes it easier for companies and authorities to monitor activists’ activities (Dencik et al., 2016; Trottier and Fuchs, 2015; Uldam, 2016). Through technological affordances, user regulations and social norms, these platforms are shaping and controlling the ways in which we communicate (Klang and Madison 2016), such as by censoring LBTQ activism or breastfeeding activism on Facebook.

Most often, social media users are aware of the limitations of the technology, but less aware of the potential social implications (Klang and Madison 2016). The system of metrics that measure success in the number of friends, likes, retweets and shares, helps to effectively map out the network of supporters by creating a detailed overview of the online activism. Activism in social media thus creates new sorts of risks: the risk of relying on a technology that also is a means for surveillance; the risk of relying on a crowd you might never meet face to face; the risk of disinformation especially linked to the unreliability of user-generated data. This might include, for example, a situation where activists mistrust official information, such as during the Gezi protests in Turkey (Haciyakupoglu and Zhang 2015). In this particular case, the technology created instead an opportunity to “aggregate trustworthiness” (Jessen and Jørgensen 2011)from a large number of sources, where social trust and technical affordances are interdependent (Haciyakupoglu and Zhang 2015).

Dahlberg-Grundberg(2016)suggests the concept ofmedia ecologyas a lens to capture the coexistence of, and interdependence between, human actors and technologies and to point out the dynamic and fragile interrelations of people, processes, practices and artifacts. From a media ecology perspective, the technology involves not just extensions or prostheses through which activists operate; they also embed us and define the range of actions possible, indicating that media structure our actions, just like cultural norms and practices.

These media ecologies are thus not primarily artifacts but consist of social beings structured by technology and cultural norms, but who share a common interest that brings them together.

Against this background, the question is how we can understand and conceptualize these media ecologies, while also contributing to the development of useful technical tools for activism.

Guest editors

Karin Hansson, Associate Professor in Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University, has written extensively about technology-based participation from a design perspective. She is currently part of a research project on the development of #MeToo activism in Sweden, and part of the “Metadata culture” research group at Stockholm University that investigates and develops methods for obtaining qualified and extensive metadata in digitalized cultural heritage collections.

Teresa Cerratto Pargman, Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. Her research interests include educational and collaborative learning technologies, sustainable HCI and Digital Civics.

Shaowen Bardzellis Professor of Human-Computer Interaction Design in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research areas include feminist HCI, domestic computing, intimate interaction, affective computing and virtual worlds for collaboration.

Malin Sveningsson, Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Gothenburg, is the author of several books and research articles in areas such as digital media, computer-mediated communication, virtual worlds, social interaction, popular culture, youth culture, gender and identity. She takes part in the interdisciplinary research project on feminist net activism at Stockholm University.

References

AlSayyad, Nezar; and Muna Guvenc. (2015). Virtual Uprisings: On the Interaction of New Social Media, Traditional Media Coverage and Urban Space during the ‘Arab Spring.’ Urban Studies, vol. 52, no. 11, pp. 2018–2034. doi:10.1177/0042098013505881

Anduiza, Eva; Camilo Cristancho; and José M. Sabucedo. (2014). Mobilization through online social networks: the political protest of the indignadosin Spain. Information, Communication & Society, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 750–764. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2013.808360

Askanius, Tina; Julie Uldam; Asa Briggs Hall; and Ansdell Street. (2011). Online social media for radical politics: climate change activism on YouTube – International Journal of Electronic Governance – Volume 4, Number 1-2/2011 – Inderscience Publishers, vol. 4, no. 1–2, pp. 69–84.

Björgvinsson, Erling; Pelle Ehn; and Per-Anders Hillgren. (2010). Participatory design and “democratizing innovation.” In Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference on – PDC ’10(p. 41). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.

Bohdanova, Tetyana. (2014). Unexpected Revolution: The Role of Social Media in Ukraine’s Euromaidan Uprising. European View, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 133–142. doi:10.1007/s12290-014-0296-4

Bradshaw, Samantha; and Philip N. Howard. (2017). Troops, trolls and troublemakers: a global inventory of organized social media manipulationOxford, UK. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(59)90596-3

Chan, Johannes. (2014). Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. The Round Table, vol. 103, no. 6, pp. 571–580. doi:10.1080/00358533.2014.985465

Dahlberg-Grundberg, Michael. (2016). Technology as movement: On hybrid organizational types and the mutual constitution of movement identity and technological infrastructure in digital activism. Convergence, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 524–542. doi:10.1177/1354856515577921

Dantec, C. A. L.; and C. DiSalvo. (2013). Infrastructuring and the formation of publics in participatory design. Social Studies of Science, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 241–264. doi:10.1177/0306312712471581

DeLuca, Kevin Michael; Elizabeth Brunner; and Ye Sun. (2016). Constructing Public Space|Weibo, WeChat, and the Transformative Events of Environmental Activism in China. International Journal of Communication, vol. 10, no. June 2014, pp. 19. doi:321–339 1932–8036/20160005

Earl, Jennifer; and Katrina Kimport. (2011). Digitally enabled social change : activism in the Internet age. MIT Press.

Eilermann, Wiebke. (2018).Constructing # MeToo: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the German News Media’s Discursive Construction of the #MeToo Movement. Malmö University.

Gerbaudo, Paolo. (2013). Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 105–106.

Goodwin, Jeff; and James M. Jasper. (2014). The social movements reader : cases and concepts(3. ed.). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Haciyakupoglu, Gulizar; and Weiyu Zhang. (2015). Social Media and Trust during the Gezi Protests in Turkey. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 450–466. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12121

Karin Hansson; Malin Sveningsson; Maria Sandgren; and Hillevi Ganetz. 2019. “We passed the trust on”: Strategies for security in #MeToo activism in Sweden. In Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 1-19. https://doi.org/10.18420/ecscw2019_ep14

Jessen, Johan; and Anker Helms Jørgensen. (2011). Aggregated trustworthiness: Redefining online credibility through social validation. First Monday, vol. 17, no. 1–2, pp. 1–8.

Kavada, Anastasia. (2015). Creating the collective: social media, the Occupy Movement and its constitution as a collective actor. Information Communication and Society, vol. 18, no. 8, pp. 872–886. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2015.1043318

Kimura, Aya H. (2017). Citizen Science in Post-Fukushima Japan: The Gendered Scientization of Radiation Measurement. Science as Culture. doi:10.1080/09505431.2017.1347154

Klang, Mathias; and Nora Madison. (2016). Domestication of online activism. First Monday, vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 1–15.

Lee, Paul S. N. ; Clement Y. K. So, and Louis Leung. (2015). Social media and Umbrella Movement: insurgent public sphere in formation. Chinese Journal of Communication, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 356–375. doi:10.1080/17544750.2015.1088874

Mendes, Kaitlynn; Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller. (2018). #MeToo and the promise and pitfalls of challenging rape culture through digital feminist activism. European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 236–246. doi:10.1177/1350506818765318

Milan, Stefania. (2017). Data activism as the new frontier of media activism. In G. Yang and V. Pickard (Eds.), Media activism in the digital age. Routledge.

Milan, Stefania; and Lonneke van der Velden. (2016). The Alternative Epistemologies of Data Activism. Digital Culture & Society, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 1–11. doi:10.14361/dcs-2016-0205

Neumayer, Christina; Luca Rossi, and Björn Karlsson. (2016). Contested hashtags: Blockupy Frankfurt in social media. International Journal of Communication, vol. 10, , pp. 5558–5579. doi:10.1007/s13398-014-0173-7.2

Pang, Natalie; and Pei Wen Law. (2017). Retweeting #WorldEnvironmentDay: A study of content features and visual rhetoric in an environmental movement. Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 69, , pp. 54–61. doi:10.1016/J.CHB.2016.12.003

Paulos, Eric; Marcus Foth; Christine Satchell, Younghui Kim, Paul Dourish, and Jaz Hee-jeong Choi. (2008). Ubiquitous Sustainability: Citizen Science and Activism (Workshop). In Tenth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), 21-24 September 2008, Seoul, South Korea.Association for Computing Machinery Press, pp. 1-35.

Pickard, Victor; and Guobin Yang. (2017). Media activism in the digital age. (V. Pickard & G. Yang, Eds.)Shaping inquiry in culture, communication and media studies. London: Routledge. doi:10.1080/15295036.2018.1465194

Sadowski, Helga. (2016). From #aufschrei to hatr.org: Digital-material entanglements in the context of German digital feminist activisms. Feminist Media Studies. doi:10.1080/14680777.2015.1093090

Scharff, Christina; Carrie Smith-Prei, and Maria Stehle. (2016). Digital feminisms: Transnational activism in German protest cultures. Feminist Media Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 1–16. doi:10.1080/14680777.2015.1093069

Smidi, Adam; and Saif Shahin. (2017). Social Media and Social Mobilisation in the Middle East: A Survey of Research on the Arab Spring. India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, vol. 73, no. 2, pp. 196–209. doi:10.1177/0974928417700798

Suwana, Fiona. (2019). What motivates digital activism? The case of the Save KPK movement in Indonesia. Information, Communication & Society, vol. 4462, , pp. 1–16. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2018.1563205

Tsui, Lokman. (2015). The coming colonization of Hong Kong cyberspace: government responses to the use of new technologies by the umbrella movement. Chinese Journal of Communication, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 1–9. doi:10.1080/17544750.2015.1058834

Uldam, Julie. (2018). Social media visibility: challenges to activism. Media, Culture and Society, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 41–58. doi:10.1177/0163443717704997

MATERIALIZING ACTIVISM

CfP JCSCW Special Issue

Background

Suggested topics and inquiries for the special issue

Guest editors

References