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This month: February 2021 Archiving affect and activism: Hashtag feminism and structures of feeling in Women’s March tweets On 21 January 2017, over three million women participated in the Women’s March throughout the U.S., one day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. This paper investigates the digital component of this historic protest as a powerful moment of hashtag feminism, one that exemplifies the vital role of affect in contributing to social change. Through qualitative analysis of 2,600 #WhyIMarch tweets from the day of the March, rhetorical strategies are described. These rhetorical strategies and their affective outcomes create a digital archive of affect that captures the cultural climate surrounding the Women’s March and mediates the way that this cultural moment is remembered. |
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Also this month Rename and resist settler colonialism: Land acknowledgments and Twitter’s toponymic politics Connected with various resurgent and decolonizing projects, Canada has seen a surge of renaming and Indigenous land acknowledgement, which draw attention to Indigenous territories that have been overwritten through colonial naming practices. While renaming practices and land acknowledgments are contested for having merely representational effects, they may also be linked with decolonizing efforts. This paper explores subversive (re)naming practices afforded by the free-form location identifying function on Twitter’s user profiles. It then draws a connection to issue-alignment in relation to the contested Trans Mountain pipeline as a means of considering to what extent toponymic selection is linked with actual issue alignment within the colonial context of resource extraction in Canada. |
