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No Fracking Way! Media Activism, Discursive Opportunities and Local Opposition against Hydraulic Fracturing

Mon, August 18, 10:30am to 12:10pm, TBA

Abstract

A variety of recent studies have emphasized the importance of “discursive opportunities” for a movement’s capacity to achieve its political goals through contentious claims-making. Much of this research, however, focuses more on opportunities made possible by shifts in the discourse of relatively privileged actors in the media, the professions, and/or elite policymaking fields. While such actors are undoubtedly influential, these studies neglect the relationships between movements and the dynamics of broader mass public discourse (especially using modern social media technologies), as well as the importance of “media activism” that takes place through political films, books, or other cultural products. We study these dynamics through an investigation of social movement influences on the passage of local moratoria against the controversial natural gas extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). We use data from large-scale scrapes of social media discourse from Twitter and Google, evidence of where the controversial Gasland documentary was aired in public, and data culled from traditional news media, in addition to evidence of fracking activity from state disclosures. We find that (1) the Gasland documentary represented a significant influence upon anti-fracking activism, (2) that such activism, in turn, had a significant effect upon the passage of moratoria, (3) that Gasland significantly increased social media attention to fracking, and (4) that the civic capacity of local communities also encouraged the passage of fracking bans.

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