BA Creative and Cultural Industries

How have people used digital technologies and media to (re)shape the possibilities for and outcomes of social movements? How have technological developments and economic functions, in turn, shaped how digital activism can be conducted? This course unit explores the use of digital means to conduct activism, organize protests, create opposition, make harms visible, and express political dissent. We will also consider the related ways that companies and governments around the world have introduced novel forms of response including content moderation and internet censorship to exercise their control over how and what people can share and do online. To better understand the dynamics at work in such transformations, we examine the development of digital dissent through a series of case studies from 2010s pro-democracy movements to contemporary culture wars activism, including:

· Decentralized Movements such as the “Arab Spring,” Occupy Wall Street, and the Umbrella Movement.

· Hashtag Movements such as: Black Lives Matter and #MeToo

· Culture Wars and Backlash Movements such as Gamer Gate, Meme Warfare, and QAnon affiliated #SavetheChildren.

Through this approach, students will scrutinise the promises and pitfalls of digital technology in relation to wider social debates about democracy, the role of civil society, the public sphere, and freedom of speech.

The unit aims to: 

• Introduce students to key concepts, theories and perspectives in social movement studies, especially in relation to digital media and technology
• Support students in examining the role of digital media and technology in real-life case studies of protesting, self-organising and mobilising support 
• Provide students with experience of analysing and designing social media campaigns

Introduction – Publics and Dissent

Technology - Digital Activism, Technological Responses

Case Studies - Early Online / Digital Social Movements, Hashtag Activism, Networked Harassment, Backlash Activism

Moving Forward - Tipping Points & Imagining New Futures, Where do We go from Here?

Assessment: - Reading Week, Project Workshop / Consultations

The unit consists of ten 1h-long lectures and 2h-long seminars a week. 

During lectures, students will be introduced to key concepts, theories and writes in the field of social movement studies and digital activism. Lectures will employ a diversity of textual and visual materials to illustrate the key points and help students relate them to real-life case studies.

During seminars, students will be involved in a series of activities to enhance their understanding of the key concepts and theories, and will explore several case studies to assess the utility of the concepts and theories. These will include discussions of core readings, analyses of actual social media campaigns, debates about the internet freedom and mini-research projects on the topics of digital power and activism. 

For the first form of assessment, hashtag analysis, students will need to choose a particular hashtag that is relevant to some form of activism and analyse the public content available online using the hashtag. This will help students reflect on the specificities of digital activism and reflect on methodological and ethical issues related to hashtag analysis. Their analyses will be guided by relevant academic literature on this topic (e.g. Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; McCosker & Gerrard, 2021) and reflection on what hashtags do and what they do not do in the contemporary digital media landscape.

For the second form of assessment, social media campaign, students will need to design a social media campaign for a particular NGO, charity or cause of their choice. During seminars, they will analyse some real-life examples of social media campaigns and discuss their advantages and disadvantages, which will feed into this assessment task.

• Define and explain key concepts, theories and perspectives in social movement studies, especially in relation to digital media and technology. 
• Identify and describe major case studies of self-organising, protesting and mobilising support in the context of digital activism.

• Situate key concepts, theories and perspectives in social media studies in a comparative, historical and global perspective. 
• Critically assess and analyse digital activism campaigns and their effectiveness. 
• Evaluate the potential risks and challenges associated with digital activism, such as censorship, surveillance, and online harassment.

• Analyse dispersed social media content in a systematic and ethical way using appropriate digital tools. 
• Retrieve reliable information using appropriate sources and communicate it clearly to non-academic audience. 
• Design and implement strategies for raising awareness and mobilizing support through social media.

• Synthesise complex information from various sources to formulate well-informed arguments, presented in a clear and consistent manner. 
• Manage a project of designing social media campaign independently, demonstrating innovation, communication and time management skills.

Agur, C., & Frisch, N. (2019). Digital disobedience and the limits of persuasion: Social media activism in Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement. Social Media+ Society, 5(1), 2056305119827002.

Bastos, M.T., & Mercea, D. (2016). Serial activists: Political Twitter beyond influential and the twitterariat. New Media & Society, 18(10), 2359-2378.

Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, communication & society, 15(5), 739-768.

Bonilla, Y., & Rosa, J. (2015). #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist, 42(1), 4-17.

Bruns, A., Highfield, T., & Burgess, J. (2014). The Arab Spring and its social media audiences: English and Arabic Twitter users and their networks. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(7), 871-898.

Brunton, F., & Nissenbaum, H. (2015). Obfuscation: A user's guide for privacy and protest. MIT Press.

Counter-Cartographies Collective, see: https://www.countercartographies.org/

Davis, A., Fenton, N., Freedman, D. & Khiabany, G. (2020). Media, Democracy and Social Change: Re-imagining Political Communications. London: SAGE Publications.

Dencik, L., Hintz, A., Redden, J., & Treré, E. (2022). Data justice. Sage.

Dyer-Witheford, N., & Matviyenko, S. (2019). Cyberwar and revolution: Digital subterfuge in global capitalism. University of Minnesota Press.

Galloway, A. R. (2004). Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. MIT press.

Gray, J. (2019). Data witnessing: Attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s Decoders project. Information, Communication & Society, 22(7), 971-991.

Howard, P. N., Duffy, A., Freelon, D., Hussain, M. M., Mari, W., & Maziad, M. (2011). Opening closed regimes: what was the role of social media during the Arab Spring? SSRN. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2595096  

Huang, R., & Sun, X. (2014). Weibo network, information diffusion and implications for collective action in China. Information, Communication & Society, 17(1), 86-104.

Ireland, L. (2022). We are all (not) Anonymous: Individual-and country-level correlates of support for and opposition to hacktivism. New Media & Society.

Jackson, S. J., Bailey, M., & Welles, B. F. (2020). #HashtagActivism: Networks of race and gender justice. MIT Press.

Lee, F. L., Chan, M., & Chen, H