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Hybrid activism: Contentious politics on social media

Zozan Baran Manderbach

Kommentar

Early scholarship– optimists and pessimists alike – emphasized the novelties provided by digital tools for political activism. Moreover, disciplinary boundaries created separate literatures. In communication science focus has been on novelties and platform structures, whereas sociology and geographical research investigated continuities and the offline strategies. These divisions further perpetuated separate approaches which either overemphasized the novelties of digital media and platform structures, or ignored these tools to large extent and focused on existing repertoires of actions. In this seminar, we aim to overcome such divisions and approach the role of digital media for political activism from an interdisciplinary perspective. We employ the concept of hybrid activism to emphasize that the digital tools indeed create new opportunities and raise new obstacles for political activism. Yet, in order to fully appreciate these novel opportunities and obstacles, we need to take two aspects into considerations. First, the theories of digital activism need to set a dialogue with sociological literature on social movements. Second, activists often use online and offline tools in complementary fashions. This means that we need to investigate the contribution of digital tools in relation to offline and physical strategies. To this end, we start with basic discussions on the role of digital media on activism. In an interdisciplinary fashion, we discuss sociological theories on social movements before we get into hybrid activism research. Each week we will cover literature on different generations of social movements and their increasing use of digital tools. Students will discuss various social movements and examples of political activism, their offline and online strategies in the light of the literature. Schließen