Shining a light: Active participation in a mental health Internet support group

Internet Support Groups (ISGs) are a valued and popular source of health information and support among consumers and carers. Although ISGs are premised upon mutual help, it has been observed that only a small minority of users, of the order of 1%, are responsible for the majority of activity. Despite their potential importance to the outcomes and sustainability of online groups, little is known about the characteristics of these participants or the nature of their participation. This thesis comprises a systematic review of the literature on styles of participation in ISGs followed by a series of five empirical studies focusing on the nature of participation in a Mental Health Internet Support Group (MHISG). These studies sought to address fundamental gaps in our knowledge regarding active participation in an MHISG, posing the questions: ‘Who participates?’, ‘With whom do they communicate?’, ‘What do they communicate about?’ and ‘How do these factors differ as a function of user engagement?’. These questions were addressed using log data generated by all active users (n=2932) of the MHISG ‘BlueBoard’ and a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods including novel analyses, such as social network modularity and topic modelling algorithms. It was found that the demographic characteristics of higher- and lower-engaged users were broadly similar, although the members of the higher-engaged group were older and more likely to identify as consumers. Network analysis demonstrated users communicated with each other in a pattern that resembled five generational cohorts transcending disorder-specific subforums, in which the highest-engaged users of each cohort were central and registered earlier than the majority of other users. Topic modelling and qualitative content analysis revealed the content of the communications of the two groups differed. The communications of higherengaged users appeared to reflect a consumer model of recovery and those of lower-engaged users a medical model of recovery. However, higher-engaged users modified the content of their responses when communicating with lower-engaged users. Qualitative analysis of users’ initial posts revealed higher- and lower-engaged users differed in terms of their ‘awareness’ characteristics at the outset of participation, with higher-engaged users demonstrating greater interpersonal-, mental health- and self-awareness. Based on these findings, this thesis presents ‘The Tripartite Model of MHISG Participation’ which, contrary to prevailing assumptions, posits that differences in posting frequency are associated with different styles of active participation across the spectrum of engagement. The higher end comprises a minority group of users—referred to as ‘mutual helpers’—who are central, aware and proactive about participating in peer support for their ongoing recovery. At the lower end, the majority of users, referred to as ‘active help seekers’ and ‘active help providers’, participate in transient and asymmetrical exchanges, often with ‘mutual helpers’. Those who do not post are ‘passive followers and help seekers’. The model is iterated for each cohort. In addition to extending our scientific knowledge base, and informing the above new model of user participation, these findings are of potential relevance to the design of future research studies, managers of Internet support groups and policy makers

The Politics of Identity

The issue of Indigenous identity has gained more attention in recent years from social science scholars, yet much of the discussions still centre on the politics of belonging or not belonging. While these recent discussions in part speak to the complicated and contested nature of Indigeneity, both those who claim Indigenous identity and those who write about it seem to fall into a paradox of acknowledging its complexity on the one hand, while on the other hand reifying notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘authentic cultural expression’ as core features of an Indigenous identity. Since identity theorists generally agree that who we understand ourselves to be is as much a function of the time and place in which we live as it is about who we and others say we are, this scholarship does not progress our knowledge on the contemporary characteristics of Indigenous identity formations. The range of international scholars in this volume have begun an approach to the contemporary identity issues from very different perspectives, although collectively they all push the boundaries of the scholarship that relate to identities of Indigenous people in various contexts from around the world. Their essays provide at times provocative insights as the authors write about their own experiences and as they seek to answer the hard questions: Are emergent identities newly constructed identities that emerge as a function of historical moments, places, and social forces? If so, what is it that helps to forge these identities and what helps them to retain markers of Indigeneity? And what are some of the challenges (both from outside and within groups) that Indigenous individuals face as they negotiate the line between ‘authentic’ cultural expression and emergent identities? Is there anything to be learned from the ways in which these identities are performed throughout the world among Indigenous groups? Indeed why do we assume claims to multiple racial or ethnic identities limits one’s Indigenous identity? The question at the heart of our enquiry about the emerging Indigenous identities is when is it the right time to say me, us, we… them

Virtual cosmopolitics and global ethics: an analysis of transnational global justice movements across social media networks

Global ethics in recent scholarship has been understood in largely substantive terms as constituting a normative set of political principles, cultural values and religious moral imperatives. It has thus been commonly understood as a type of strong moral universalism with prescriptive moral frameworks rooted in foundational principles. In contrast, this thesis understands a global ethics in sociocognitive terms in ways of thinking, feeling and acting; it is found in a moral consciousness of the need for an ethics on a planetary scale which is articulated in emotional responses to global issues within critical publics throughout the world and embodied in ethico-political practices that shape common struggles around a global justice politics that extends beyond national frames of reference. By this understanding, its conceptual indicators can be seen in discourses of co-responsibility emerging around perceived global threats that can generate social bonds in transnational solidarities and collective-identities. Understood through the normative perspective of critical cosmopolitanism, this study examines a global ethics—as emerging out of a critical way of seeing the world, in moral evaluations and critical diagnoses of social conditions—articulated in cross-national political projects which are digitally mediated in social media networks. There has been scarce scholarship on the relationship between digital technology and a global ethics—a gap this thesis fills by focusing on the way in which global ethics today arises within interactive, creative and collaborative digital spaces built across social media networks. Despite its imbrication in new digital systems of exploitation, domination and surveillance capitalism, the central argument of this thesis is that social media networks open digital spaces integral to expressions of a post-traditional ethics today: as a new global communications ecology, they have (a) heightened our sense of moralpractical reflection toward the non-human world and the universe of distant others and (b) offered digital symbolic spaces within which to build collective action frames in response to global risk through building shared antagonisms, common meanings and radical imaginaries of alternative futures which can mobilise collective actions, in multiple urban spaces, across the globe. To support this central argument, the thesis draws on the recent cross-national cases of digital activism in response to global problems in the form of the Occupy Everywhere, Friday- For-Futures and Global Frackdown movements. These movements exhibited network practices that displayed social, symbolic and cognitive articulations of a cosmopolitan citizenship