Politicized Identity in Digital Spaces: Creating Change through Consciousness-Raising and Mass Mobilization

PI: Melina Much, Ph.D. Candidate, UC Irvine

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,500, Second Century Fund

Project Abstract: Twitter represents an invaluable space for sparking and mobilizing political movements. An example of this is the most recent iteration of the women’s movement, spanning from #Metoo beginning in 2017 to the current moment surrounding the Roe V. Wade Supreme Court leak. This movement represents one of the largest social and political reckonings with sexual violence and women’s reproductive rights with social media being used as a key tool. Using an original dataset of Tweets on the movement over the last three years, this paper provides evidence through text analysis that consciousness-raising efforts using personal testimonials on Twitter helped mobilize individuals by activating more politicized conceptions of their identity groups, namely group consciousness. I propose a combination of topic analysis (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to capture dynamic topical changes in the #Metoo movement’s language on Twitter starting with early consciousness-raising efforts and their subsequent politicized calls to action. In doing this, the paper presents both a novel approach to capturing the space between consciousness-raising and activated identity, as well as using unsupervised machine learning tools that are revamped to understand intersectionality and its nuances in text data. Lastly, the project will utilize structural topic modeling (STM) to understand the determinants of consciousness-raising versus politically mobilized topics.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *