Preventing Violence Against Women: Emerging Practices of Canadian Activism through Social Media

The Canadian women’s movement has seen a recent surge in attention and participation. In a rising cycle of contention, broad collective action campaigns can appear as a single social movement. This research uses a comparative case study to examine three cases of varying scale through the causal mechanisms of signaling, innovation, and campaigns/coalitions to examine how social media contribute to the emerging repertoire of contention. The three cases under investigation are a localized case: Safe Stampede, a national case: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, and a transnational case: Women’s March on Washington. Results show that social media are not only integral to collective action but also influence the nature of many emerging practices. Organizers utilize personalized participation and localization, favoring tactics that improve visual imagery for social media posts. In outreach efforts, they rely on the scale of social media to connect with influencers, traditional media, and conscience constituents through affordances such as hashtags and addressivity markers. The affordances of social media encourage tactics designed to generate viral content and to leverage shame as a motivator for change. A sense of duty spurs organizers and participants to greater action beyond what might be termed clicktivism. Whether a campaign targets only the local community or a global one, organizers seek to localize their message for regional supporters. In all cases, ideological differences must be resolved in order to maintain solidarity and prevent damaging divides. As social movements progress, they tend to follow predictable patterns toward institutionalization, especially as a cycle of contention begins to recede

Social media and the social sciences: How researchers employ Big Data analytics

Social media posts are full of potential for data mining and analysis. Recognizing this potential, platform providers increasingly restrict free access to such data. This shift provides new challenges for social scientists and other non-profit researchers who seek to analyze public posts with a purpose of better understanding human interaction and improving the human condition. This paper seeks to outline some of the recent changes in social media data analysis, with a focus on Twitter, specifically. Using Twitter data from a 24-hour period following The Sisters in Spirit Candlelight Vigil, sponsored by the Native Women’s Association of Canada, this article compares three free-use Twitter application programming interfaces for capturing tweets and enabling analysis. Although recent Twitter data restrictions limit free access to tweets, there are many dynamic options for social scientists to choose from in the capture and analysis of Twitter and other social media platform data. This paper calls for critical social media data analytics combined with traditional, qualitative methods to address the developing ‘data gold rush.

Reification of the Teenage Victim: How Canadian News Frames Cyberbullying as a Social Problem

This study utilizes framing theory to conduct a mixed method content analysis of Canadian print news coverage of four high-profile teen suicides linked with cyberbullying. Results demonstrate that print news discourse frames cyberbullying as a social problem. News coverage of these deaths emphasizes more female victims than males, demonstrating a predisposition to focus on more ideal victims in the construction of social problems. Each case involves a process of reducing complicated circumstances leading to the teen’s death down to overly simplified caricatures portrayed as victims for the cause of cyberbullying. The social problem frame emphasizes the need for public attention and awareness of cyberbullying as well as new legislation to address an emerging issue. It is unclear whether legal changes in response to such extreme cases will impact the more common instances of what the literature describes as cyberbullying

The Mediatization Of Leadership: Grassroots Digital Facilitators As Organic Intellectuals

Whether due to an organizational shift to networks over bureaucracies or due to a change in values, many social movements in the current protest cycle are not characterized by visible leadership. This paper undertakes an in-depth analysis of data obtained through interviews, observations and analysis of media content related to three Canadian cases of civic mobilization of different scale, all of which strategically employed social media: the provincial MLA Playdate, the national Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women campaign, and the Canadian response to the international Refugees Welcome movement. What attributes, competencies, skills, and practices distinguished the individuals and groups that played key roles in the inception and ongoing organization of these movements? How can their role (or roles) be defined, if not as traditional organizational leadership? The paper uses Gramsci’s notion of the “organic intellectual” and Bourdieu’s (1991) model of the “political field” to propose a conceptual framework for understanding the role of these organizers as political discourse-producers, sociometric stars and organic intellectuals. Ultimately, the organizers of the mobilizations under study were successful in infiltrating the political field, typically the domain of institutional players, with discourses collaboratively produced in the exchanges among grassroots citizens. By looking closely at the three cases through the lenses offered by these concepts, we identify the specific competencies, strategies and styles that characterize mediatized civic leadership