Suchergebnisse

This intervention offers an aesthetic contribution to the studies of camouflage cultures by situating them in contemporary Ukraine. Using collaging as an analytic technique, I present three ontological cuts that demonstrate how scraps of camouflage remediate the spaces in which war is produced, contemplated and fought. Interrogating the relationship between visibility and survival on a macroscopic scale, I ask: how can camouflage scraps – textiles whose primary function is to conceal – work to reclaim the agency of those who craft them? I draw on the Ukrainian context to argue that not all militarisations are equal - cutting and layering the scraps of the Soviet/imperial military-industrial complex onto a new plane of representation, Ukrainian craftivists make a decolonial cut from Ukraine's Soviet past, reconstituting the social fabric torn in three centuries of wars and occupation. As hegemonic imperialist discourses continue to erase lived experiences of military violence, camouflage aesthetic may also become a symbol of collective resistance.

Social media have reconfigured the international relief landscape by creating discursive spaces for grassroots activism. In this study, I use semantic networks to systematically investigate the role of social media in mobilizing a new actor – diasporas – for providing humanitarian aid. I visualize the structure of conversations among Ukrainian diaspora communities to illuminate the social contexts for two sets of behaviors: political advocacy, the traditional pathway for diaspora engagement with their country of origin; and humanitarian relief, an emergent collective behavior in which grassroots actors supply aid to their homeland directly, bypassing institutional brokers such as international nonprofit organizations. Leveraging data from online discussions within ten diaspora communities on Facebook, I demonstrate how social media facilitate diasporic activism by reinforcing horizontal ties between benefactors and affected communities. This comparative case study contributes to a deeper understanding of diasporic involvement in relief in the age of social media.

Ukraine's efforts to resist the Russian invasion have sparked unprecedented levels of civic engagement. While the more tangible efforts to alleviate immediate needs have been prominently featured in mass media and elsewhere, the norms and values that shaped this large-scale collective effort often remain behind the scenes. Approaching narratives of volunteering through a critical cultural sociology lens, we find that wartime involvement constitutes a shift from duty-based norms in which citizens are required or expected to engage in civic activities, to forms of engaged citizenship which contribute not just to the state, but also to the wellbeing of those in need. In this context, volunteering facilitates the emergence of civil society that often occupies the space outside of the currently defined institutional contexts and works through the collective shaping and contestation of social norms and values. Documenting these dynamics provides valuable new insights into the important role volunteerism plays in broader sociopolitical transformations, especially in non-Western and postcolonial contexts where the processes of civil society development take many forms and may be easily overlooked.

This study combines ethnographic and computational approaches to critically examine what gets 'lost in translation' when studying intersecting social contexts of diasporic mobilisation around homeland politics. Considering how Ukrainians living in the U.S. engaged with homeland politics during the Euromaidan protests, we map transnational diasporic mobilisation, shining light on the various material, discursive, and affective connections that emerged in the process. We find that Euromaidan protests were a point of passage – and thus, convergence – between the often incongruous notions of national identity across regional as well as national territorial borders. Translating the local meanings and cultural codes associated with the Euromaidan protests, diasporas sought to amplify them to reach global audiences through their use of the grammars and vocabularies of socially mediated protest. Situating our inquiry in networked diasporic discourses and building on a decolonial understanding of Ukraine's history and politics, our approach illuminates the possibilities for studying transnational mobilisation and activism as a heterogeneous network of publics, discourses, and identity practices.

This study combines ethnographic and computational approaches to critically examine what gets 'lost in translation' when studying intersecting social contexts of diasporic mobilisation around homeland politics. Considering how Ukrainians living in the U.S. engaged with homeland politics during the Euromaidan protests, we map transnational diasporic mobilisation, shining light on the various material, discursive, and affective connections that emerged in the process. We find that Euromaidan protests were a point of passage – and thus, convergence – between the often incongruous notions of national identity across regional as well as national territorial borders. Translating the local meanings and cultural codes associated with the Euromaidan protests, diasporas sought to amplify them to reach global audiences through their use of the grammars and vocabularies of socially mediated protest. Situating our inquiry in networked diasporic discourses and building on a decolonial understanding of Ukraine's history and politics, our approach illuminates the possibilities for studying transnational mobilisation and activism as a heterogeneous network of publics, discourses, and identity practices.

AbstractNational web is a series of interlinked online spaces, generated and visited by users who share a common national identity, language and/or an interest in a particular country. For diasporic communities living outside of their country of origin, national web is an entity that emerges through the production and circulation of culturally significant content and genres. A wealth of textual and visual data, produced in the process of mediated communication among diasporic actors, turn social media into a point of entry for mapping national webs. In this paper, we explore hyperlinking behaviours among Ukrainian Canadians to map geographic, linguistic and geopolitical boundaries of the Ukrainian national web. Shining light on the spaces and cultures of diasporic mobilization in the digital age, we identify distinct web spheres that mediate the Ukrainian Canadians' relationship to their country of origin, demonstrating their elevated significance in the current geopolitical context.

Social media enable broad and diverse publics to mobilize around a shared collective identity. In this article, the authors use social movement literature and studies of peace and conflict to foreground the role of platform-mediated communication in creating a national identity in a fragile state. We argue that, by affording activists with a possibility of public, yet anonymous interactions, social media may play a crucial role in conferring state legitimacy during a violent conflict. Investigating the case of Mariupol, Ukraine, where a small group of citizens employed social media to support and legitimize the Ukrainian state among the city population, the authors illuminate the use of new media affordances to construct a national identity among digitally networked publics, mobilizing support for a threatened state.

Zooming in on automated and semiautomated social actors created to influence public opinion on social media, we employ a novel analytic approach to identify patterns of inauthentic behavior across election campaigns on Twitter. Comparing two recent national election campaigns, the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the 2017 German federal election, we analyze patterns and effects of orchestrated intervention in political discourse on Twitter. Focusing on two main aspects of information flows—scale and range—we find that orchestrated interventions help amplify, but not diffuse, the candidates' messages, mostly failing to reach new audiences in the process. This study adds an information diffusion perspective to a growing body of literature on computational propaganda, showing that although false amplification is quite effective in increasing the scale of information events, in most cases the information fails to reach new depths.