Suchergebnisse

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, social media was one of the key digital spaces for community and information. As cases and deaths rose within US Black communities, Black Twitter continued to serve as a counterpublic for humor, health commentary, and hashtag activism. This study will examine the techno discourses of Black Twitter's usage of hashtag activism during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the hashtags and tweets used within the Black Twitter counterpublic addressed social justice issues and challenged health inequalities in the mainstream media. We found three main discourses: Black Popular Culture, Lack of Access, and Vaccination Awareness. Overall, these discourses allow Black communities to culturally advocate for themselves and create counterpublic spheres to present their lived experiences.

Using counterpublic theory as framework and situating the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a counterpublic, counterpublics being alternative, non-dominant publics who voice their oppositional needs and values through diverse discursive practices, the goal of this study is to: (a) Examine, in the context of the years preceding the 2011 Egyptian uprising, whether the Egyptian MB, as a counterpublic, portrays a deliberative ethic/voice in its cyber rhetoric; (b) Explore whether traditional/Western ideas of deliberation are upheld or challenged in the cyber rhetoric of the Egyptian MB; and (c) Comment on the role of Ikhwanweb, as a counterpublic sphere, in providing the Egyptian MB a space to demonstrate its deliberative potential. By looking for traits and evidences of deliberative ethic in the Egyptian MB's cyber rhetoric—in a 'text' produced by an Islamist organization functioning within a secular/authoritarian socio-political 'context'—the overarching purpose of this analysis is to make sense of : (a) an Islamist organization's role as a counterpublic and its deliberative potential in a non-democratic setting; (b) the implications of this for thinking about deliberation between diverse groups of social agents in non-democratic cultures; and (c) the role of the Internet in facilitating counterpublics' deliberative potential in authoritarian contexts. Thus, from a heuristic standpoint, this study is an endeavor towards contributing to a key question that animates public deliberation: how can we engage/engage with voices that hold (or are assumed to hold) anti-deliberative attitudes and/or those that operate within non-democratic socio-political contexts?

This article presents findings of a research carried out among pro-refugee individuals in social media in Hungary. During the so-called refugee crisis that emerged in the summer of 2015, anti-immigrant sentiments in the Hungarian public were fueled by a strong governmental campaign. This unusually strong propaganda campaign created a strong hegemonic discourse. Nevertheless, a pro-refugee counterpublic opposing the hegemonic discourse also emerged. The article discusses existing scholarly literature on the phenomenon and how it appears in and is shaped by the digital sphere. The empirical findings focus on two characteristics of the pro-refugee counterpublic. First, we look at the political affiliations of this counterpublic. Second, we ask if the different digital affordances used by the counterpublic and their combinations indicate the formation of a community. The methodological ambition of the article is to present a digital data-driven approach, based on data provided by Facebook, which allows the individual profiling of each user. The connections and schemata of these profiles provide the analytical background of the present research. We aim to illustrate that such a digital approach has a number of advantages over traditional sociological methods, especially in the research of subaltern counterpublics.

This article explores the often normative and idealist notion of the public sphere at its possible breaking point by analysing the online reactions to two tabloid articles about a 2016 performance of Dancing with Strangers: From Calais to England by Instant Dissidence. It first looks at how a comment platform could be perceived as a subaltern public sphere and as a substitute for a live audience in order to reconsider the notion of the counterpublic. For this, it examines the dialectical tension between politics and aesthetics within a subaltern online public sphere not immune to all kinds of extremism. This leads to an attempt to consider online hostile lay critics as a potentially legitimate public to address the dilemma faced by contemporary artists when engaging with society in an all-inclusive manner. Finally, this article offers a different reading of Instant Dissidence&rsquo ; s performance and of the possible reasons for the commentators&rsquo ; rage and alienation and proposes syncopolitics as a way out of both online polarisation echo chambers and the public engagement conundrum.

Populist hunting movements have risen in recent years to safeguard rural interests against nature conservation. In extreme cases this movement has been accompanied by the illegal hunting of protected species. Using Sweden and Finland as a case study, the article elucidates how the perceived exclusion of hunters in the public debate on conservation mobilised this subculture toward resistance against regulatory agencies. Establishment of an alternative discursive platform comprising several ruralities - counterpublic in Negt and Kluge's original term - allowed hunters to publicise oppositional needs, interests and rationalities in the debate, and was a key juncture in their radicalisation trajectory. Finally the paper argues that failure to grant recognition to the counterpublic radicalised some individuals beyond counterpublic by engaging in illegal hunting. This practice is marked by the termination of political debate with society and represents a danger to political legitimacy.

Radical right online discussion groups have grown in importance in the Swedish political landscape, yet the dynamics of these groups are still poorly understood. Apart from their topical import, these groups provide a unique entrance to grassroots discourses of the radical right movement and the mechanisms for radical nationalist mobilization. In this paper, we present an analysis of the largest current anti-immigrant online discussion group in Sweden by using a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis. We argue that this type of social media group needs to be approached as both a "counterpublic" within a wider public sphere and as a "free social space" for social movements. The analysis reveals that the use of external links in the group reflects an active negotiation of frames that both confirm and contradict those of the group, thereby challenging a simplistic understanding of the so-called "echo chamber" dynamics. A form of collective identity can be discerned, mainly through the opposition to various outgroups and through an implicit form of nationalism expressed through the concern of "sacred objects" typically perceived to be under threat. ; Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv

Studies of digital religion frequently take democratic regime settings and developed economic contexts for granted, leaving regime and economic development levels as background factors (Campbell 2013). However, in China, the role of the authoritarian state, restrictions on religion, and rapid social change mean that online and offline religious practices will develop in distinct ways. This article analyzes the 2019 Bible handcopying movement promoted through China&rsquo ; s most popular social media WeChat as a way to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the publication of China&rsquo ; s most widely used translation of the Bible. Drawing on interviews by and communication with the movement&rsquo ; s founder, the co-authors participated in and collected postings from a 500-member WeChat group from March to August 2019. We argue that while offline handcopying is an innovation in religious practice due to Chinese cultural and historical traditions, the online group constitutes a micro-scale &ldquo ; alter-public&rdquo ; (Chen 2015 ; Warner 2002), a site for religious discussion, prayer, and devotion that strengthens an &ldquo ; alternative&rdquo ; Protestant identity alongside that of Chinese citizen of the People&rsquo ; s Republic of China.

Although human rights are often framed as the result of centuries of Western Christian thought, many English evangelicals are wary of the U.K.'s recent embrace of rights-based law. Yet this wariness does not preclude their use of human rights instruments in the courts. Drawing upon fieldwork with Christian lobbyists and lawyers in London, I argue that evangelical activists instrumentalise rights-based law so as to undermine the universalist claims on which they rest. By constructing themselves as a marginalised counterpublic whose rights are frequently 'trumped' by the competing claims of others, they hope to convince their fellow Britons that a society built upon the logic of equal rights cannot hope to deliver the human flourishing it promises. Given the salience of contemporary political conservatism, I call for further ethnographic research into counterpublic movements, and offer my interlocutors' instrumentalisation of human rights as a critique of the inconsistencies of secular law.

The study attempts to locate transgender counter-public as an alternate public sphere in India. It argues that transgender counter-public is necessitated owing to the exclusionary practices of the Indian public sphere as well as the successive counter-public spheres. The study, further claims that transgender counter-public is constructed by critiquing the marginalisation of transgender people through exclusionary practices, and articulation of concerns linked to transgender people. Public discourse analysis of both discursive arenas—print: newspaper articles, journal articles, autobiographies, biographies, memoir, and others, and non-discursive arenas—activism, pride parade, protests and alike have been adopted as methodology. The study concludes that transgender counter-public achieves the dissemination of their concerns to the wider public that exclusion and discrimination of transgender people are a denial of social justice in the democratic social structure.

This article explores the production of human rights discourse by examining the organization and social actors involved in its construction. The author proposes a triad constellation configuration for situating the varied engagements of human rights by different constituencies at the United Nations level: dominant understandings, counterpublic approaches, and social praxis. Dominant understandings are affiliated with the Western-legal apparatus, counterpublic approaches embrace antiracist and feminist epistemologies, and social praxis is about the mediation between the first two constellations. This article argues that the social praxis constellation is where the discourse of human rights can be inventive and dynamic because an envisioning of human rights moves beyond the rubric of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights.

History is a projection of realities from the historian's lens and parameters. The popularity and acceptance of historical accounts depend much on hegemonic structures and knowledge. The Dalit community was marginalized within the Indian economic, social, and political historiography. Gradually, with the rise of Dalit consciousness, men—the better-positioned gender of the community—tried to express their vulnerabilities from a masculinist perspective. The literature written also projected women only as extensions of male protagonists. Though the traumas Dalit women have faced due to intersectional realities are separate from that of men, they could not find a place in early literature as complete entities, entitled to be acknowledged as such. The trade union movements also sidelined the issues of Dalit women laborers. To date, issues of Dalit women's property rights, longevity, education, and empowerment are largely androcentric, as the state's schemes and policies are majorly heteronormative and male-centric. The reason why we need to keep invoking the past and history is to assert that the present condition of Dalit women has its roots in the past and their issues and voices continue to remain on the margins despite the rich social experiences they carry and represent.

2011 Fall. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; In 1937, the United Automobile Workers (UAW) won recognition from General Motors (GM) through the historic sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan. This strike marked the beginning of the labor movement and the battle for worker's rights that is continuing into the present day. Sitdowners Memorial Park (SMP), located in Flint, remembers and commemorates the striker's great achievements in 1937. It is also a place where citizens encounter compelling narratives of the past, pay tribute to those who have come before them, build community, negotiate identity, and receive instruction for the present and future. In this thesis, I explore SMP as an experiential landscape. In exploring the park, I answer two questions. First, how does SMP construct a UAW member's identity? Second, how does SMP represent female gender roles and, more specifically, what kind of agency is attributed to women as members of the UAW in this counterpublic space? I argue that SMP enlists memories of the sit-down strike and its impacts on society to reinvigorate a dying community and offer visitors rhetorical resources justifying pro-union perspectives. In doing so, a counterpublic identity is created. In establishing a UAW member's identity as counterpublic, still fighting for recognition from the larger public, SMP also reinforces the worker/homemaker double bind that is prevalent as part of many women workers' historical and contemporary lived experience. This double bind can inhibit female workers' agency within the counterpublic space of the UAW where they can occupy a "counterprivate" space. Today, however, through the corrections and additions to the park over time, female workers are granted agency, but they are reminded that their participation in the public comes at a cost; the double bind continues to discipline them. Ultimately, SMP works to educate its visitors on the progress that the UAW has attained and the social significance of the sit-down strike. Through this education and remembering, SMP advocates that a visitor to the park must work to maintain what was won in 1937 and participate in a pro-union fight by carrying on the strikers' tradition of progressive politics.

This essay analyses the literature on the foibe to illustrate a political use of human
remains. The foibe are the deep karstic pits in Istria and around Trieste where
Yugoslavian Communist troops disposed of Italians they executed en masse during World War
II. By comparing contemporary literature on the foibe to a selection of archival reports
of foibe exhumation processes it will be argued that the foibe literature popular in Italy
today serves a political rather than informational purpose. Counterpublic theory will be
applied to examine how the recent increase in popular foibe literature brought the
identity of the esuli, one of Italy's subaltern counterpublics, to the national stage. The
paper argues that by employing the narrative structure of the Holocaust, contemporary
literature on the foibe attempts to recast Italy as a counterpublic in the wider European
public sphere, presenting Italy as an unrecognised victim in World War II.