Community and Social Interaction in Digital Religious Discourse in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon

Since the advent of the Internet, religion has maintained a very strong online presence. This study examines how African Christianity is negotiated and practised on the Internet. The main objectives are to investigate to what extent online worshippers in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon constitute (online) communities and how interactive the social networks of the churches are. This study shows that some important criteria for community are met by African digital worshippers. However, interaction flow is more of one to many, thus members do not regularly interact with one another as they would in offline worship. Worshippers view the forums as a sacred space solely for spiritual matters and not for sharing social or individual feelings and problems. However, the introduction of social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and interactive forums is an interesting and promising new development in religious worship in Africa

Silicon utopias: the making of a tech startuo ecosystem in Manchester (UK)

‘Silicon utopias’, the hope for a green, affluent and happy future through the creation of new tech-businesses, are today informing many urban development processes globally. In this contribution, I look at the recent remodeling of Manchester (Northern England) as an entrepreneurial city. In particular, I present a specific government investment scheme and its relation to the work of a group of local lobbyists who have been promoting a new tech startup community in the city since 2012. Stemming from this empirical example, I explore the interplay between local entrepreneurial dreams and the state’s promotion of startups. The paper concludes with the argument that an anthropologically informed concept of cynicism can contribute to a nuanced reading of silicon utopias and dystopias

Mario, Luigi and Dave: the effect of language on the social structure of a bilingual online mobile game

In this paper, we explore the structure of a social community built in an online game that was released in two languages, specifically examining the behaviours of players involved in inter-lingual interaction. This asynchronous social game was released simultaneously in Italian and English. The player base was seeded with English and Italian players but allowed to grow organically without restriction. Despite the built-in segregation by language, we found that the entire player-base formed into a single social network and developed strategies for overcoming the challenges faced by a multi-lingual game community. Using Network Analysis, we break down the community in the game based on language and play style. We demonstrate that the behaviour of both English and Italian players was equivalent, and that play style had no effect on the likelihood of players deliberately engaging in inter-lingual communication. In the context of the strategies used by the players in our experiment, we discuss game design patterns that provide incentives for users to behave more socially and how to create tools to enable the players to cross the lingual and cultural barriers in online games

Comments, Gifts and Kudos: Community and Gift Economy in Harry Potter Fanfiction

This research explores the Harry Potter fanfiction community and how fanfiction readers and authors interact in a virtual space. The primary interest is how the virtual community partakes in gift economy and how they motivate each other to produce fanworks in the form of fanfiction, as well as personal motivations that authors carry. Fanfiction participants from multiple social media groups dedicated to Harry Potter fanfiction volunteered to participate in a survey. The survey consisted of qualitative and quantitative questions, and the data was collected, and qualitative responses coded to determine commonalities and differences. The findings of this research show that the Harry Potter fanfiction community is motivated to provide feedback and gifts to authors in the form of kudos, comments and fanworks. Further, fanfiction authors provide gifts of their own to specific followers or editors in the form of dedicated fanfictions

Yorkshire’s folk culture in digital spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic : cultural practice, digitalisation and localisation

This thesis critically assesses the digital spaces where Yorkshire’s folk community practiced sonic and material cultures and developed identities of communal belonging during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data gathered throughout the UK’s first national ‘lockdown’ in 2020, it examines how a social group previously reliant on physical space and face-to-face community began to use digital spaces in a period of rapid cultural shift. By doing so, it reflects on the process of enacting folk culture in digital spaces, and the extent to which these spaces can nurture localised and collective perceptions of being part of a balanced, tightknit and tangible folk community.Defining the term ‘folk’ as established, localised and grassroots cultural practices, with emphasis on sound (folk music and voice), visual (text and artworks) and material (craft), this thesis is positioned between the established field of folk geographies and emerging studies into digital geographies. It aims to revitalise folk geographies by modernising research into the spatial variations of localised cultures within developing digital worlds, such as social media. In order to explore these issues, the research used an experimental multimethodology including (online) ethnography, art-elicitation and interviews within social media groups with strong connections to Yorkshire folk culture. This enabled the thesis to present an empathic but critical narrative of the Yorkshire folk community’s cultural shift to digital spaces, based on researcher and participant experiences and the expressions represented through various sonic, visual and material digital artforms.The thesis makes three key arguments. Firstly, that there are spatial frictions between physical spaces and emerging digital spaces as cultural practices are digitally reproduced, and that these frictions are powerful enough to reshape spaces of folk culture. Secondly, that the COVID-19 pandemic created unique digital geographies, which encouraged experimental practices of culture and redesigned cultural groups by placing new importance on online identities. Thirdly, that tensions between different geographical scales (the local to the global) developed as Yorkshire’s folk culture was digitally reproduced, with both productive and destructive consequences for folk communities. Collectively, the frictions, experimentations and tensions related to digital spaces substantially restructured and drove the practices of small-scale cultures into alternative networks of access, control, inclusion, intimacy, heterogeneity and hybridity

Navigating the Intersections of Migration and Motherhood in Online Communities: Digital Community Mothering and Migrant Maternal Imaginaries

This thesis explores the experiences of contemporary migrant mothers in Australia, through the lens of their online communities. Facebook groups created by and for migrant mothers from particular national, ethnic or linguistic communities have proliferated in the last decade. The analysis of these groups acts as a springboard to investigate how migrant mothers in Australia experience and respond to migration and motherhood, centring on four key areas: community-building and leadership; friendship and sociality; the emotions of motherhood and migration; and migrant mothers’ maternal practices, narratives and imaginaries.Literature and concepts from three distinct fields – motherhood studies, migration research and digital sociology – inform the research. Understandings of migration are extended and troubled by highlighting the importance of maternal social connection, not simply in relation to their partners and children or to the labour market, but also between mothers. The investigation of the role of migrant maternal Facebook groups in the everyday lives of migrant mothers also extends scholarship in digital sociology by bringing feminist, matricentric (A. O'Reilly 2016) and intersectional approaches into conversation with key themes relating to belonging, mobility and connection.The thesis involved a scoping exercise which mapped Australian online migrant mother’s groups, an online survey of women ‘mothering away from home’ , and semi-structured interviews with 41 migrant mothers from ten different countries living in Sydney and Melbourne, who were members of migrant mothers’ online groups. Fifteen of the interviewees held an administrator role in their group, and the digital and emotional labour involved in managing the groups became a central theme. The migrant maternal narratives elicited across the study demonstrate the role of the digital in managing the ruptures and connections of migrant motherhood. Mothers, as both consumers and producers of digital information and community, are shown to be working to effect settlement and create belonging for themselves and others.This thesis works to bring mothers out from the shadows of migration and digital social research. In order to achieve the task of making migrant mothers visible, new concepts have been introduced, such as ‘digital community mothering’, ‘relational settlement’, ‘affective settlement’ and ‘migrant maternal imagined communities’. The groups are representations of their collective maternal imaginary, as well as mechanisms for forging ‘real’ connections

Come, let's wrestle : language and the struggle for authority in online Persian social networking sites

This dissertation builds on prior scholarship in linguistic anthropological studies of performance to examine transnational spaces in online social networks where members of the Iranian diaspora use emerging technologies to interact with one another in ways that highlight the tensions between them. The focal point of this project will be the Facebook page Iranian Vines, which features short (5-15 second long) comedic videos that address issues unique to the experiences of Iranians living in diaspora. While many second-generation Iranians use online spaces to linguistically construct a hybridized identity, first-generation Iranians use these same spaces to evaluate the authenticity of these constructed identities by policing the language used by performers and deciding on the linguistic legitimacy of their performances. I argue that the performative nature of the Iranian Vines page creates a space for first-generation Iranians to respond to global sociolinguistic hierarchies that value English over Persian by acting as gatekeepers of Iranian authenticity through linguistic prescriptivism. Second-generation Iranians, on the other hand, use performance to decontextualize (and thus make visible) the moments of difference that define their particular vantage point and to acquire sociolinguistic capital through humor. These performers use “identity-switching,” a practice in which they juxtapose performances of non-Iranian and Iranian identity for comedic effect to challenge sociolinguistic hierarchies within the Iranian community that value monolingualism or parallel bilingualism. A core focus of this dissertation will be the ways that emerging technologies shape power relations between members of this community by making visible the processes by which members of ethnolinguistic communities negotiate the relationship between identity and language.Middle Eastern Studie

The role of context in incivility research

Incivility is a concept with a wide scope of interpretations, ranging from impoliteness to aggressive and extremist speech. The definition of uncivil speech is highly context-sensitive, and this contextual sensitivity should be considered in future research. In this chapter, I argue that choosing to omit context from incivility research may result in the diffusion of authoritarian norms in online content regulation and negatively influence freedom of speech in different sociopolitical settings. I suggest considering four layers of context in incivility research: (1) sociocultural context (the macro level), (2) sociopolitical context (the macro level), (3) organizational context (the meso level), and (4) situational context (the micro level). I elaborate on each level’s role in defining and regulating uncivil speech, and I conclude by suggesting paths for future research

The conflicts of a 'peaceful' diaspora: identity, power and peace politics among Cypriots in the UK and Cyprus

The thesis traces ethnographically the discursive, ideological and political processes through which connections between the Cypriot diaspora in the UK and Cyprus are imagined, articulated and (re)produced through peace politics and Cypriotist discourses that emphasise the need for reconciliation between Greek and Turkish Cypriots based on a common Cypriot identity. The fieldwork research was conducted between 2006 and 2008 in London and Cyprus, taking place at a very particular historical period, when a larger space apparently opened for British Cypriots’ involvement in the politics ‘at home’; I follow here their modes of political engagement across a number of actual sites and ‘imagined’ social fields –from community associations in London to online Cypriot networks; and from organised party groups in the UK to informal communal crossings of the Cypriot Green Line. The thesis ultimately presents an ethnographic account of Cypriotism and how individuals employ, perform and (re)define it within a transnational nexus of inter-related contexts, revealing that far from popular understandings of it as a unifying discourse, Cypriotism is also divisive and internally contested. Whereas anthropological work on Cyprus has been prolific in studying and analysing ethnic nationalisms extensively, Cypriotism in its own right has not been problematised enough beyond being treated as a counter-discourse to other dominant ideologies. The perspective of the diaspora helps to crystallise how discursive battles and exclusive ideas of ‘who is a Cypriot’ simultaneously challenge and (re)produce difference among Cypriotists. Moreover, to challenge the dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nationalisms of Western-centric discourses, it is argued here that the boundaries between Cypriotism and ethnic nationalism are more blurred than often assumed, especially as they co-exist and are employed in the cultural repertoires of Cypriots. The aims of the thesis, therefore, are threefold; first, it endeavours to illustrate empirically how connections between the Cypriot diaspora in the UK and Cyprus are constructed through ‘peace politics’ and how political subjectivities develop in such a transnational context by looking at the ways multiple agents mobilise, articulate and perform particular identities through the language of Cypriotism. To do this, the research methodologically integrates the ‘ethnography of the Cypriot diaspora’ with the ‘ethnography of Cyprus’, which have developed to some extent as two distinct study fields, through multi-sited fieldwork both in the UK and Cyprus. Moreover, with its focus on Cypriotism and how a Cypriot nation is (re)imagined within it, the thesis aims to contribute theoretically to ‘the anthropology of Cyprus’ by participating in ongoing discussions on nationalism and counter-nationalism, history and memory, identity and cultural ‘authenticity’