Examining multiplicity and dynamics of publics’ crisis narratives with large-scale Twitter data

The new reality of networked publics on social media calls for crisis communication practitioners and researchers to understand the narratives generated by publics on social media during organizational crises. As social media publics possess diverse, unique characteristics and communicative needs during a crisis, they form interpretative communities and co-create various symbolic interpretations of the crisis. Extending the public-centric and narrative perspective to the context of social media crises, we examined what crisis narratives were constructed by social media publics (i.e., multiplicity) and how these narratives changed by crisis stages (i.e., dynamics). Using topic modelling based on large-scale Twitter data of the Chipotle E. coli crisis (N?=?40,610), we identified ten narratives subsumed under two themes (i.e., sharing-based and conversation-based) based on publics’ social constructions of their perceived risks and crisis experience. On the one hand, sharing-based narratives, heavily impacted by publics’ shared media coverage, reflected media crisis narratives and salient risk perceptions aligning with the news agenda. On the other hand, conversation-based narratives, fueled by publics’ opinion expression and emotional venting, demonstrated publics’ interpretations of their experience with the organization in the crisis with less salient but more diversified risk perceptions. Crisis managers are recommended to produce and deliver compelling narratives resonating with different groups of social media publics during crises.     

Datafication,development and marginalised urban communities: an applied data justice framework

ABSTRACT

The role of data within international development is rapidly expanding. However, the recency of this phenomenon means analysis has been lagging; particularly, analysis of broader impacts of real-world initiatives. Addressing this gap through a focus on data’s increasing presence in urban development, this paper makes two contributions. First – drawing from the emerging literature on ‘data justice’ – it presents an explicit, systematic and comprehensive new framework that can be used for analysis of datafication. Second, it applies the framework to four mapping initiatives in cities of the global South. These initiatives capture and visualise new data about marginalised communities: residents living in slums and other informal settlements about whom data has traditionally been lacking. Analysing across procedural, rights, instrumental and structural dimensions, it finds these initiatives deliver real incremental gains for their target communities. But it is external actors and wealthier communities that gain more; thus, increasing relative inequality.     

Facebook Bras and #digitalharems: Fantasies of Mimesis and the Transgressions of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Sboui

Abstract

This article presents a horizontal reading of Aliaa Elmahdy's and Amina Sboui's corporeal interventions alongside the efficacy of digital platforms in order to consider how algorithmic and normative protocols related to content filtering on social media amplify certain forms of political communication while prohibiting others. I argue that readings of Elmahdy's and Sboui's bodily politics through the lens of liberal feminism rely on what I call discourses of mimetic networking, where particular mediated events become reterritorialized as part of an archival knowledge of ‘Arabness’. This is done through the organization of data via hashtagging and content moderation, and through rhetorics of techno-optimism that mirror ‘first contact’ narratives which gender, racialize, and flatten complex and fluid engagements with new media in non-US/European contexts. The article concludes with a consideration of how the persistence of their corporeality relays with both normative and programmatic parameters online to make alternative visions of communication possible.     

Haunting and the Aesthetics of Trauma in A Woman in Berlin and For Those Who Can Tell No Tales: Redefining Cultural Memory

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a comparative analysis of the aesthetics of trauma in the German film A Woman in Berlin and the Bosnian film For Those Who Can Tell No Tales, both of which address wartime rapes that happened in mid-to late twentieth century Europe. We use trauma studies as well as Avery Gordon's sociological theory of haunting to examine how two historical episodes of war-time rape (post-WWII Germany and late twentieth century Bosnia) have created ghostly effects that can be seen in the periodic return to these histories through artistic productions. Gordon argues that a traumatic past continues to co-exist with the present in the form of ghosts; thus, we need to produce case studies of haunting that attend to the social and political effects/affects of the ghostly and how they complicate our accounts of social trauma and oppression. We focus on: (1) the national and transnational reception of the two narratives; (2) the films’ similarities and differences regarding the cinematography of trauma, narrative styles used and female agency; and (3) masculinity and the male voices’ ‘right’ to tell a story. We conclude by addressing the limits of representation in both films and their role in challenging the dominant cultural memory.     

Situating social work within the post-2015 Global Agenda

ABSTRACT

The launch of the post-2015 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations (UN) initiates a new set of global priorities to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Over a three-year process, governments and civil society representatives at the UN planned and negotiated the post-2015 Agenda and a set of SDGs and targets. Unlike the MDGs which focused almost entirely on developing countries, the new agenda is intended to be universal and therefore applicable to Europe and North America. The goals address a wide range of issues including poverty and inequality, health, international trade, climate change and gender, with a strong emphasis on the environment. This article will provide an overview of the post-2015 process and explore the implications of this agenda for social work globally and locally. It will highlight areas of particular interest to the profession, especially prospects for addressing growing global inequality within and between countries, and concerns over the role of human rights protection. The advantages and limitations of linking social work’s global agenda to the new UN priorities will be assessed.     

Narratives of generationality in 21st-century North American Jewish literature: Krauss,Bezmozgis, Kalman

ABSTRACT

The article explores prominent contemporary texts by David Bezmozgis, Nadia Kalman, and Nicole Krauss to juxtapose the narratives of generationality they produce. I argue that these narratives depend on intersecting notions of family, genealogy, and (procreative) heterosexuality and on various formal temporal modes that these texts employ. Generationality, in recent Holocaust literature, as represented here by Krauss, seems to give rise to and rely on different familial/genealogical narratives than recent post-Soviet immigrant fiction. Krauss in The History of Love works with more traditional notions of temporality and history which, I claim, are linked with both exceptionalist and diachronic narratives of the Holocaust, and normative notions of romantic love and reproductive sexuality. Bezmozgis, in Natasha and Other Stories, among others, deconstructs the notion of a synchronic transnational Jewish community and critically deals with the centrality of Holocaust memorialization and also with concomitant sexual normativities. Finally, Kalman in The Cosmopolitans critically approaches diachronic generationality: she plays with genealogy modifying the representational conventions of the genealogical diagram and thereby enters into a productive dialog with Krauss’s text. Kalman also broadens the social setting to include other ethnicities, people of color, and queer sexual practices. What is at stake in the comparison proposed here is exposing key features of contemporary North American locations of Jewishness. Reading these texts along the narratives of generationality suggests that post-Soviet Jewish American writers, and especially the women writers of the subgenre, project a vision of community that is quite open and make us question various hegemonic coordinates of Jewishness.     

Quirky kids: fathers’ stories of embracing diversity and dismantling expectations for normative play with their children with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Anchored in critical disability studies, we used a narrative methodology to study fathers’ stories of play interactions with their children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Three narratives convey how father–child interactions unfold and how patterns of interaction respond to, redefine and resist societal norms. Narratives of action demonstrate fathers’ responses to societal norms, while narratives of adjustment depict how fathers have redefined expectations of their children in the context of play. Narratives of acceptance demonstrate fathers’ attunement to, and acceptance of, their children’s preferred play interests and a resistance to play norms. We argue that fathers’ stories represent a step towards emancipating play for children with ASD in that fathers’ appreciation of their children’s quirky play accentuates the relational and social capabilities of children, thus countering deficit interpretations of the abilities of children with autism more broadly.     

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism,Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

Abstract

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular.     

Acquired disability in young women: a challenge for identity?

ABSTRACT

Youth can be described as a transitional phase for the formation of identity. As young people often hold taken-for-granted assumptions regarding their future, disability may pose a challenge for their identity development. This paper analyses the retrospectively written autobiographical narratives by three young women who became disabled during their adolescence. The structure of the narratives is approached with sociologist Arthur Frank’s typology of illness narratives and identity through data-driven content analysis. This paper suggests that chaotic stories may hinder the development of identity, as the identity is described as delayed, hidden, silenced or neglected.     

Moving Ahead,Falling Apart,Losing Power: Three Narratives to the Development of Human Services

Scholars agree that we live in a society in which the lion’s share of human needs is supplied by formal organizations. This article deals with how society reached this situation and the challenges embedded in it. We will postulate that there are three basic narratives of human services, which we have named the progress, the social disintegration, and the power narrative. The narratives will be demonstrated through examples from the field of juvenile and adolescent mental health services. We claim that meaningful professional training in human services must expose students to the interpretations, insights, and possible directions for practice in light of each of the narratives.     

Tomorrow,things will be different Qiu Zhijie’s concept of keeping alive life through art

Abstract

The paper examines Qiu Zhijie’s multi-layered project A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (since 2008) and asks what is at stake when art literally and metaphorically is assigned with life-saving functions. Based on the artist’s assumption that today’s social and political reality as well as its subjects are historically constructed the article conceives of the Nanjing Bridge as an embodiment of a historically constituted contemporary Chinese reality. Through close readings of the works as well as analyses of theoretical writings by Qiu Zhijie the article scrutinises the relationship Total Art assumes between the social and the aesthetic realm and examines the premises and strategies the artist adopts in order to produce socially and aesthetically effective art that keeps ‘alive’.     

Assembling life history narratives from quantitative longitudinal panel data: What’s the story for families using social work?

Abstract

Embedded within quantitative longitudinal panel or cohort studies is narrative potential that is arguably untapped but might enrich our understanding of individual and social lives across time. This paper discusses a methodology to assemble the life history narratives of families using social work by drawing on quantitative data from the British Household Panel Survey. It explores whether this person-centred approach helps us to understand the counter-intuitive results of a parallel multivariate analyses, which suggest that families using social work fare worse than similar others over time. Our findings are tentative, due to the experimental use of this narrative method and the limits of social work information in the data-set. Nonetheless, the life histories presented bring to light complexities, diversity and the non-linear pathways between families’ needs, support and outcomes that the aggregates obscure. We conclude that reconstructing families’ lives in this way, especially in the absence of complementary longitudinal qualitative data, affords the wider opportunity to interrogate and better understand the findings of quantitative longitudinal studies.     

The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights: frame contestation and the exploitation of disability

Nonhuman Animal rights activists are sometimes dismissed as ‘crazy’ or irrational by countermovements seeking to protect status quo social structures. Social movements themselves often utilize disability narratives in their claims-making as well. In this article, we argue that Nonhuman Animal exploitation and Nonhuman Animal rights activism are sometimes medicalized in frame disputes. The contestation over mental ability ultimately exploits humans with disabilities. The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights activism diminishes activists’ social justice claims, but the movement’s medicalization of Nonhuman Animal use unfairly otherizes its target population and treats disability identity as a pejorative. Utilizing a content analysis of major newspapers and anti-speciesist activist blogs published between 2009 and 2013, it is argued that disability has been incorporated into the tactical repertoires of the Nonhuman Animal rights movement and countermovements, becoming a site of frame contestation. The findings could have implications for a number of other social movements that also negatively utilize disability narratives.     

The Politics of Conversion: Religious Change,Materiality and Social Hierarchy in Central Upland Borneo

Contrary to the assumption that religious conversion is strongly influenced by the hegemony of global forces (colonialism and modern state formation) over local communities, this paper argues that internal class antagonisms and material conditions also play an important role in the dynamics of adoption of or resistance to Christianity. By taking narratives of inter-class contestation between aristocrats (paren) and commoners (panyin) and ritual changes among the Kayan-Kenyah in upland Central Borneo during periods of religious conversion, this paper shows the significance of social hierarchy on people’s decisions to change or retain their religious practices.     

After the ‘APIcalypse’: social media platforms and their fight against critical scholarly research

ABSTRACT

In the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica controversy, social media platform providers such as Facebook and Twitter have severely restricted access to platform data via their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This has had a particularly critical effect on the ability of social media researchers to investigate phenomena such as abuse, hate speech, trolling, and disinformation campaigns, and to hold the platforms to account for the role that their affordances and policies might play in facilitating such dysfunction. Alternative data access frameworks, such as Facebook’s partnership with the controversial Social Science One initiative, represent an insufficient replacement for fully functional APIs, and the platform providers’ actions in responding to the Cambridge Analytica scandal raise suspicions that they have instrumentalised it to actively frustrate critical, independent, public interest scrutiny by scholars. Building on a critical review of Facebook’s public statements through its own platforms and the mainstream media, and of the scholarly responses these have drawn, this article outlines the societal implications of the ‘APIcalypse’, and reviews potential options for scholars in responding to it.     

Respect for persons

Abstract

The notion of ‘respect for persons’ is a key notion in moral philosophy as well as in social work ethics. The Kantian notion of a person has, together with individualism, liberalism and positivism, given rise to a strange ideological mixture which ‘guided’ social work theory and practice for some time. Gaita's concept of respect for human beings, examined in this paper, contrasts with the poverty of this ideological mixture. Concepts such as ‘goodness’, ‘remorse' and 'sensibility’ explain why Gaita sees the ethical as something that is both sui generis and of the utmost practical importance. They clarify the irreplaceability of human beings, emphasise the need for moral agents to have ‘historical integrity’, and in general show that a moral agent is much more substantial than a res cogitans. This paper attempts to indicate the relevance of these considerations for social work.