Preventing Violence Against Women: Emerging Practices of Canadian Activism through Social Media
Date
2023-09-10
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Abstract
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.
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Social Media, Civic Activism, Social Movement, Gender-based Violence, Cycle of Contention, Indigenous Activism, Women's Movement, Comparative Case Study
Citation
Felt, J. M. W. (2023). Preventing violence against women: emerging practices of Canadian activism through social media (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.