Activists' Visual Strategies, and Visual Methods to Study Social Media Discourse

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 11. Methods in the Study of Social Movements

Abstract

A context of globalized societies, digital communication, and social media has inspired an increasing number of researchers to start including images and visual strategies of protest and culture in their research. In this paper, we define visual strategies as the developing of concepts and methods used to analyze physical, representational, and public visibility elements that exist in social movements (Doerr, Mattoni, and Teune 2013). Visual analysis extends primarily to three aspects of social movement dynamics: (1) visual manifestations, as a class of expressions, produced in social movements; (2) the representation of social movements in images disseminated in mediation processes; and (3) a larger societal framework granting visibility to certain groups and claims while others remain invisible. By assessing some of the most recent mobilizations in Europe and in the United States, we propose an interdisciplinary set of methods to study visual strategies of social movements, broadly defined.

Authors

• Nicole Doerr, Mount Holyoke College

• Noa Milman, University of Massachusetts-Amherst