Exploring the relationship between international Twitter campaigns and domestic women’s rights

This thesis sets out to empirically examine the relationship between international campaigns which originate in and continue to be driven by Twitter and domestic women’s rights. The study looks at eight campaigns targeting seven countries, with over 1 million Tweets and 1500 pieces of legal evidence. The study looks at four aspects of legal change: legislation, institutionalisation, law enforcement, and dialogue with international human rights bodies. The campaigns are explored in four areas as well, looking at persistence, users, engagement, and Tweet content. The study sets out to provide evidence for whether hashtag campaigns can contribute to domestic legal change, and, if so, if certain campaign behaviours are more associated with change and in what way. Overall, this study has found that hashtag campaigns can contribute towards domestic legal change, both positively and negatively. Two campaigns resulted in backsliding, three had no impact, two led to tactical concessions, and one campaign showed some elements of tentative success. Campaigns which are domestically driven, with a high level of foreign-attention, showing persistence, engagement, and consistency are more likely to see to positive legal outcomes. Conversely, campaigns which lack in domestic drive, can be seen as ‘foreign meddling’, and fail to achieve persistence, engagement, or consistency are more likely to see to negative outcomes

Social Media and Social Order

This book addresses the relationship between social media and social order at multiple scales and sites, from city neighborhoods to national politics, to how the data harvested by transnational corporations influence lives worldwide. It provides insights into how diverse social worlds are being reshaped by social media, analysis of what this means, and reflection on how critical publics might constructively respond

Social Media and Social Order

Social Media and Social Order combines a structural analysis of the global impact of social media as contributing to the production of a datafied social order with a series of actor-focused analyses, each examining how roles structured by social media are performed at various sites: enmeshed in European cities, entangled in contested Middle Eastern borders, and embedded in provincial Indian small-town networks. The final section then arcs back to a focus on the general properties of social media networks revealed through two American cases, emphasizing the human costs for the recipients of abuse (legislators of color) and the political costs of participatory propaganda for a deliberative understanding of democracy. A central theme is how the principle of differential treatment embedded in the datafied social order is becoming increasingly widespread across social fields. The book demonstrates how social media are implicated in reshaping social order in ways which align with this principle, including creating new precarious hierarchies of esteem, reinforcing existing social, class and religious hierarchies, opening political discussion to more participants but at the cost of reinforcing local hierarchies and dominant discourses, underlining gendered constructions of national identity, amplifying the abuse received by women and people of color in leadership positions and enmeshing users in the circulation of propaganda which resonates with their preconceptions, thus deepening societal polarization

Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia

Digital media histories are part of a global network, and South Asia is a key nexus in shaping the trajectory of digital media in the twenty-first century. Digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others are deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, shaping how people engage with others as kin, as citizens, and as consumers. Moving away from Anglo-American and strictly national frameworks, the essays in this book explore the intersections of local, national, regional, and global forces that shape contemporary digital culture(s) in regions like South Asia: the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media practice and use that are reconfiguring sociocultural, political, and economic terrains across the Indian subcontinent. From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption

The Coalescent State: Assemblages of Surveillance and Public Policy

Traditional public policy models are not fully capable of analysing the multiplicities of public policy, particularly when dealing with the rhizomatic qualities of surveillance and protest. Instead, public policy and its effects should be considered an emergent and intensive property of the assemblages that ebb and flow around policy issues. This thesis takes a programmatic approach to understanding discourse around protest as part of an attempt to operationalise assemblage based research at a large scale