Call for Papers - Influ-Activism: New Forms of Civic Engagement between Digital Activism and Influence Culture
Influ-Activism: New Forms of Civic Engagement between Digital Activism and Influence Culture
Edited by Maria Francesca Murru (Università degli Studi di Bergamo), Marco Pedroni (Università degli Studi di Ferrara), and Simone Tosoni (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)
Digital activism and influence culture, increasingly central themes in the reflection of social sciences within the framework of platformization processes (Poell, Nieborg, and van Dijck 2019), have so far been treated separately in the scientific debate. However, in recent years, two concurrent processes have blurred this distinction. On one hand, leading influencers – those who engage in content production on digital platforms professionally and with profit-making purposes – have begun to take explicit stances on controversial public issues, like Chiara Ferragni on LGBTQIA+ rights. On the other hand, a growing number of creators have chosen controversial public issues as their main field of action, aiming to promote social change in areas such as intersectional feminism, sustainability, disability, and social justice, among others. This phenomenon, which we define as influ-activism, has sparked a debate in the field of digital activism about its ability to promote non-hegemonic narratives while being ineluctably conditioned by the neoliberal and commodifying logics of communication on social media.
Current research on digitally mediated activism involves various disciplinary perspectives and focal points. Many labels – including “networked publics” (boyd 2011), “hashtag publics” (Rambukkana 2015), and “affective publics” (Papacharissi 2015) – have been coined to capture how and to what extent digital platforms shape the characteristics, persistence, and political impact of publics. More recently, Kavada and Poell (2021) proposed a new approach focusing on “contentious publicness,” understood as a discontinuous activity of making instances and identities public. The goal is to examine all the various forms of digital activism shaped by the material infrastructure of social media, which do not necessarily result in the constitution of collective subjectivities. This is particularly relevant in a communication ecology (Mercea et al., 2016) that is based on an ego-centred logic of participation (Fenton and Barassi 2011), where the prominence of the individual over the collective brings an over-emphasis on personal expression at the expense of more stable relationships of commitment and solidarity.
According to Poell and Van Dijck (2015), the communicative processes underpinning contemporary activism can only be understood in their essentially “techno-commercial” nature. In this sense, the growing personalization of protest appears primarily as a technological development functional to the business model of platforms, based on user profiling and algorithmic architecture. In this context, cultural and social battles are now mediated by digital platforms and by a vast array of content creators able to influence a broad audience. These are the so-called "social media influencers" (Khamis et al. 2017) or "digital influencers" (Pedroni 2016; Cotter 2019), gatekeepers emerged in the last two decades within the promotional activities of various cultural industries (fashion, beauty, wellness, and travel) (Pedroni 2014, 2022; Rocamora 2018). The rise of influencers promoting commercial products has brought the notion of "influence" (Backaler 2018) back to the heart of the debate on social sciences and media.
From a sociological point of view, "influence" refers to the ability to impose one's will through persuasion, authority, or personal prestige, but without exercising any direct or explicit form of power and coercion. Correspondingly, digital influence identifies "the ability of an individual to influence the behaviors and opinions of other people online and to induce them to forms of action in a way that echoes the notion of opinion leadership in traditional mass media theory" (Gandini 2016: 38). The viral logic underlying digital influencers functions as a key tactic in commercial and technological contexts and as a structural mode of information and goods circulation within capitalist economies (Parikka 2007). However, digital influence is much more than the ability to sell goods (Pedroni 2023); rather, it is linked to cultural processes of message creation and circulation, as well as to building and maintaining relationships with the audience within media ecosystems governed by specific affordances (Van Dijck and Poell 2013) and algorithmic power (Gillespie 2014; Cotter 2019).
Therefore, the relationship between influence culture and digital activism, as well as their interaction, outline underexplored areas of contentiousness that deserve further exploration. The aim of this special issue is to provide an empirically grounded theoretical framework of the emerging phenomenon of influ-activism, bridging studies on digital activism and those on influence culture. For this purpose, the special issue will adopt an ecological approach to inquire:
- How must influ-activists adapt to platform affordances? Conversely, how do they contribute to redefining their use?
- To what extent do influ-activists participate in the mediatization process of the cultural industry (e.g., fashion, beauty, food) in which they work?
- To what extent do influ-activists contribute to the platformization process? How are they dependent on platforms for content production?
- What role do algorithms play in the content production of influ-activists?
- To what extent are influ-activists producers of information or disinformation (including commercial content)?
- To what extent do they exert the digital influence implied in their name (influ-activists)? And towards whom do they exert it? With what goals?
The special issue welcome contributions grounded on empirical research investigating the multiple experiences of influ-activism including (but not limited to) the following topics: forms of civic engagement enacted by mainstream commercial influencers; the influ-activist ecosystem of intersectional feminism; the influ-activist ecosystem of resistance to official science.
Submission guidelines
Maximum of 40,000 characters (including footnotes, bibliographic references, tables, figures, etc.).
The paper must be formatted according to the editorial guidelines of the journal. We invite you to visit the website of Mediascapes Journal for all information related to editorial standards: https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/mediascapes/about/submissions
Deadlines
Submission of full papers: 2 July 2024.
Confirmation of acceptance for peer review: 15 July 2024. Peer review outcomes: by 30 September 2024.
Submission of the final article: 15 November 2024. Publication of the Special Issue: December 2024
