Clock, Cloud, and Everyday Politics in Understanding Activism with Dr Jun Liu

This event was held in person and online at RMIT University on Tuesday 23 July 2024.

Across the globe, activism has attracted much journalistic and scholarly attention over the past decades, due in no small part to the rise of digital communication technologies (e.g., Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Earl & Kimport, 2011; Kaun & Uldam, 2018; Pickard & Yang, 2017). Despite being extensively studied, the field of (digital) activism research remains dominated by a far too restricted view of activism, one that prefers or even privileges open, visible, and public confrontation but may leave out a great deal of what is politically significant that sets the scene for the moment of activism. This paper uncovers theoretical and empirical blind spots as well as opportunities for innovation in the study of digital activism. The preference for studying visible and public confrontation, first, exemplifies researchers’ limited access to data and material. Second, this preference affects the kinds of political behaviour studied. In other words, such a preference largely fails to answer questions of how and why specific digital communication technologies are selected, retained, and deployed in and for political activism. Additionally, this preference risks the danger of misplacing the agency to either digital technology or activists in understanding activism.

To advance understanding, the study of digital activism necessitates a broader picture that involves and integrates the dynamics of activism, resistance, and politics in everyday life. As Doherty and Hayes (2018) explicate, contentious behaviour is “not merely the action that takes place when collective actors plan protests or choose tactics; it is also present in [an] intuitive form, when their ways of doing things become routinized, as habits, repertoires, traditions.” In other words, if open, visible, and public confrontation has no existence apart from the practices that constitute it, then an interrogation of activism, resistance, and politics in everyday life helps identify the principles—agency—that pattern these practices. This study further brings together different theoretical and empirical agendas to address the everyday matters for activism with suggestions of a few priorities for future research.

Speaker bio: