Congratulations to Moshe Karabelnik for passing his dissertation defense on Monday, April 15th, 2024!
Title of Dissertation:
THE VISUAL SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVISM PRACTICE OF OPPONENTS TO COVID-19 VACCINE MANDATES
Abstract:
In recent years, digital images from smartphones and other networked cameras shared on social media have largely replaced video recording devices which social activists commonly used to document protest practices. Networked cameras’ ubiquity has fundamentally changed the practices of political protest, activism, and social movements. This research brings to light how visual social media activism overlaps with practices of protest and social movements such as solidarity, cop-watching, mobilization, and information sharing. In this dissertation, I explore visual social media activism as practice, using various social media accounts of opponents to the COVID-19 vaccine mandates. I then connect these online practices to offline protest practices related to visual social media performed by activists in Hawai‘i and Israel.
Following the practice approach to cultural studies, and the practice approach to media studies, I reveal and unpack the ways in which practices of protest are connected to the practice of Visual Social Media Activism (VSMA) used by vaccination mandate opponents. My research poses the question: What do COVID-19 vaccine mandate opponents do in relation to visual social media, and how do these practices contribute to the production of symbolic power and the battle for control over public discourse against state and media institutions?
For this purpose, I use a practice-oriented methodology in two ways: first, by using Visual Cross-Platform Analysis (Pearce et al.,2018) to analyze visual social media shared by vaccination mandate opponents across different social media platforms. I complicate this analysis by observing visual social media activism online and offline, followed by interviews with the creators and audiences of anti-vaccination visual social media. By combining these methods, I will show how visual social media activism functions in the everyday making of the social discourse around COVID-19 and civil liberties.
Committee Members:
Dr. Jenifer Winter – Chairperson
Dr. Colin Moore
Dr. Elizabeth Davidson
Dr. Wayne Buente
Dr. Seungoh Paek – University representative.