Emotions and Expert Frames in Platformed Publics: Normative Contestation around This is America

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: The Role of Digital Platforms in the Practice and Study of Movements: The Case of the U.S.

Abstract

This extended abstract presents a two-stage research design that examines how platformed interaction organizes emotions into distinct forms of participation and how these emotional dynamics relate to normative contestation, moral imagination, and the communicative foundations of collective action in social movements. The empirical focus is the YouTube comment space surrounding Childish Gambino’s This Is America. Study 1 establishes baseline findings using a large-scale comment dataset, BERT-based emotion classification, and social network analysis. Study 2 extends this foundation through a structured meta-analysis of English-language expert interpretations published between 2018-05 and 2019-05. This extended study examines how interpretive frames circulate between expert discourse and lay discussion, and how such frames are associated with engagement patterns, emotional configurations, and network structure.

Author

• Xinyue Ma, Senshu University