Digital Activism in Times of the Pandemic

Hosted by the Centre for Digital Culture at the Art and Humanities Research Institute, King’s College London and International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Classes & Social Movements (RC-47) on the 7th of May 2020. Digital Activism has been an important trend in contemporary social movements, amid an era marked by rapid technological change. From the 2011 movements of the squares to the Gilets Jaunes and the 2019 anti-government protests from Chile, to Ecuador and Lebanon have seen the use of new social media tactics, using platforms such as Facebook and Twitter for purposes of organization and mobilization. The 2020 coronavirus crisis makes digital activism even more important. In the last weeks, we have witnessed new forms of collective action organised online. In this webinar, activists and social movement scholars from around the world discuss the new forms of online activism that are developing in this difficult period. It will ask how activists are using the Internet and social media to mobilise against the injustices revealed by the crisis, and how activists are using online organizing tool to cope with the isolation produced by lockdown measures. Participants: Paolo Gerbaudo is a sociologist and political theorist and the director of the Centre for Digital culture at King’s College London. He is the Author of Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy (2019) Anastasia Kavada is a Reader in Media and Politics at the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. She is Co-Director of the Arts, Communication and Culture Research Community. Mengying Li has recently completed her PhD at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She is currently writing a book on Weibo and WeChat’s involvement in Chinese online activism and is about to join the Journalism School at Shanghai Fudan University as a postdoctoral research fellow. Marisa von Bulow is a political scientist and Associate Professor at the University of Brasilia. She is author of Building Transnational Networks (2010), Social movement dynamics: new perspectives on theory and research from Latin America (2015) and Social movements in Chile: organization, trajectories and political consequences. For more on the Centre for Digital Culture, visit us on our website https://www.centrefordigitalculture.net. Or follow us on Twitter @DigiCultureKCL and Facebook.