Locating privileged spreaders on an Online Social Network

Social media have provided plentiful evidence of their capacity for information diffusion. Fads and rumors, but also social unrest and riots travel fast and affect large fractions of the population participating in online social networks (OSNs). This has spurred much research regarding the mechanisms that underlie social contagion, and also who (if any) can unleash system-wide information dissemination. Access to real data, both regarding topology --the network of friendships-- and dynamics --the actual way in which OSNs users interact--, is crucial to decipher how the former facilitates the latter's success, understood as efficiency in information spreading. With the quantitative analysis that stems from complex network theory, we discuss who (and why) has privileged spreading capabilities when it comes to information diffusion. This is done considering the evolution of an episode of political protest which took place in Spain, spanning one month in 2011.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Signs of criticality in social explosions

The success of an on-line movement could be defined in terms of the shift to large-scale and the later off-line massive street actions of protests. The role of social media in this process is to facilitate the transformation from small or local feelings of disagreement into large-scale social actions. The way how social media achieves that effect is by growing clusters of people and groups with similar effervescent feelings, which in another case would never be in communication. It is natural to think that these kinds of macro social actions, as a consequence of the spontaneous and massive interactions, will attain the growth and divergence of the correlation length, giving rise to important simplifications on several statistics. In this work, we report the presence of signs of criticality in social demonstrations. Namely, the same power-law exponents are found whenever the distributions are calculated, either considering the same windows-time or the same number of hashtags. The exponents for the distributions during the event were found to be smaller than before (and after) the event. The latter also happens whenever the hashtags are counted only once per user or if all their usages are considered. By means of network representations, we show that the systems present two kinds of high correlations, characterised by either high or low values of modularity. The temporal points of high modularity are characterised by a sustained correlation while the ones of low modularity are characterised by a punctual correlation. The importance of analysing systems near a critical point is that any small disturbance can escalate and induce large-scale -- nationwide -- chain reactions.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Infectious Inequalities; Epidemics, Trust, and Social Vulnerabilities in Cinema

This book explores societal vulnerabilities highlighted within cinema and develops an interpretive framework for understanding the depiction of societal responses to epidemic disease outbreaks across cinematic history.Drawing on a large database of twentieth- and twenty-first-century films depicting epidemics, the study looks into issues including trust, distrust, and mistrust; different epidemic experiences down the lines of expertise, gender, and wealth; and the difficulties in visualizing the invisible pathogen on screen. The authors argue that epidemics have long been presented in cinema as forming a point of cohesion for the communities portrayed, as individuals and groups “from below” represented as characters in these films find solidarity in battling a common enemy of elite institutions and authority figures. Throughout the book, a central question is also posed: “cohesion for whom?”, which sheds light on the fortunes of those characters that are excluded from these expressions of collective solidarity.This book is a valuable reference for scholars and students of film studies and visual studies as well as academic and general readers interested in topics of films and history, and disease and society

Infectious Inequalities

This book explores societal vulnerabilities highlighted within cinema and develops an interpretive framework for understanding the depiction of societal responses to epidemic disease outbreaks across cinematic history. Drawing on a large database of twentieth- and twenty-first-century films depicting epidemics, the study looks into issues including trust, distrust, and mistrust; different epidemic experiences down the lines of expertise, gender, and wealth; and the difficulties in visualizing the invisible pathogen on screen. The authors argue that epidemics have long been presented in cinema as forming a point of cohesion for the communities portrayed, as individuals and groups “from below” represented as characters in these films find solidarity in battling a common enemy of elite institutions and authority figures. Throughout the book, a central question is also posed: “cohesion for whom?”, which sheds light on the fortunes of those characters that are excluded from these expressions of collective solidarity. This book is a valuable reference for scholars and students of film studies and visual studies as well as academic and general readers interested in topics of films and history, and disease and society

Infectious Inequalities

This book explores societal vulnerabilities highlighted within cinema and develops an interpretive framework for understanding the depiction of societal responses to epidemic disease outbreaks across cinematic history. Drawing on a large database of twentieth- and twenty-first-century films depicting epidemics, the study looks into issues including trust, distrust, and mistrust; different epidemic experiences down the lines of expertise, gender, and wealth; and the difficulties in visualizing the invisible pathogen on screen. The authors argue that epidemics have long been presented in cinema as forming a point of cohesion for the communities portrayed, as individuals and groups “from below” represented as characters in these films find solidarity in battling a common enemy of elite institutions and authority figures. Throughout the book, a central question is also posed: “cohesion for whom?”, which sheds light on the fortunes of those characters that are excluded from these expressions of collective solidarity. This book is a valuable reference for scholars and students of film studies and visual studies as well as academic and general readers interested in topics of films and history, and disease and society

Unsettling Times: land, political economy and protest in the Bedouin villages of central Jordan

This thesis is a study of discourses of contemporary Bedouin identity and political economy in central Jordan. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it follows the experiences of young, mostly male, interlocutors living in small villages around the town of Madaba, from two largely settled but still discursively Bedouin ‘ashā’ir (socio-political categories normally glossed in English as ‘tribes’); the Bani Sakhr and the Bani Hamida. I explore the ways in which these interlocutors imagine and anticipate their futures, considering the dilemmas they face in seeking meaningful social reproduction, and their entanglement with various modes of everyday politics, in order to understand how and why political forms and identity categories are adapted and reproduced, especially in the context of new rural protest movements. This provides a new approach to wider processes of nation-building, identity-formation, and state encompassment of marginal areas, in the face of mass forced migration, structural adjustment, the rise of new social forums (on- and off-line), and widespread protests. It considers questions of land settlement, sovereignty and the politics of everyday life in a rural region from which the protest movement dubbed Jordan's 'Arab Spring' emerged among supposedly traditionalist and loyalist Bedouin. I examine the historical context behind the current social, political and economic position of my interlocutors via histories of land settlement, sedenterisation initiatives, and changing political institutions through Ottoman rule and the British Mandate, examining various processes of frontier governmentality that sought to pacify and settle, but also define and repurpose Bedouin as a conceptual category. Making an intervention in the long-standing anthropological debate around the nature and analytical usage of tribalism and the role of colonial effect in its construction in the region, I consider ‘asha’īr as political modalities existing in a relationship of co-(re)production with the nation-state, within a political and moral economy of hospitality, protection and encompassment, which has also come to be used to symbolise the nation of Jordan itself. In the face of postcolonial critiques and challenges over representation and Orientalism, anthropologists have rightly called for greater reflexivity and attention to positionality. Yet, more problematically, they have largely withdrawn from examinations of non-state political forms and non-national identity categories. Concepts of Bedouin and tribe, aside from their contested and critiqued construction, continue to have conceptual and political power in Jordan and elsewhere, and anthropology is at risk of leaving them to development practitioners and policy-makers. Anthropologists might formerly have explained the social setting I study as one generated by agnatic kinship and segmentary lineage. I instead reconsider ‘ashā’ir as historically contingent political responses centred on certain limited projects of representational sovereignty.Cambridge Trust, Fitzwilliam College, Trinity College, CBRL

"For the sake of my children" : Exploring the centrality of motherhood within QAmom accounts in social media spaces

The QAnon conspiracy theory erupted into the mainstream during the Summer of 2020, spreading throughout social media, entering political discourse, and providing a platform for mobilization on the January 6th storming of the capitol. This increased relevance to US political life has resulted in an increasing body of research on the QAnon conspiracy theory. Although some research has begun to acknowledge and explore the central role women played in bringing QAnon to the mainstream, one group is rendered invisible: mothers. The research surrounding motherhood has been restricted by notions of apolitical female agency, the politics of white motherhood and maternal thinking. In summary, mothers who promote the QAnon conspiracy theory have been essentialized to their function as mothers—the rationale for their engagement being their inherent maternal desire to protect their children. This thesis locates mothers as agentic and intentional in their employment of motherhood as a rationale for the creation of and spreading of conspiracy theories. Further, it recognizes that white motherhood is a particularity valuable identity for analysis. It does not suggest that the experiences of white motherhood are monolithic, but instead utilizes the image of the white mother within white supremacist logics and the historical and contemporary use of this imagery as a means with which to understand the politics of white motherhood. This thesis explores three separate QAnon mom, or QAmom influencers, to investigate the centrality of motherhood within their posts. Throughout this investigation of the influencers, it seeks to understand if the centrality of motherhood, the softening of messaging, and the presumed apolitical nature of mothers can partly explain QAnons entrance into the mainstream and its popularity amongst women. Passive netnography or online ethnography was used to collect data from various platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Telegram and Parler. A hermeneutic approach was used for the analysis, weaving a story of these women and situating the story within the larger literature on the politics of white motherhood within the United States. Ultimately, this research concludes that motherhood was a central feature of these accounts and was often used as a justification for the spread of misinformation, hate and conspiracy theories. Interestingly, motherhood was often employed to reach out to other women, using a language which spoke to mothers at large, invoking a sense of motherly duty. This research also argues the need for greater exploration into online communities such as mommy-blogs and Tradwife spaces to understand the unique ways in which conspiracy theories and hate are disseminated