Introduction

Introduction

In the communicative spaces of digital media with their expanded base of user participation, emotions or the social circulation of feelings play a crucial role in the manner in which political positions are articulated and everyday negotiations with politics are performed. The articles in this Special Issue stem from an international workshop held in July 2017 at the University of Amsterdam titled ‘Emotions, political work and participatory media’, where participants working on diverse regions spoke about social media and the role of affect and emotions in the facilitation of politically engaged publics. In this Special Issue, politics emerges in community networks as well as in networks based on an abiding interest in matters of national interests. Both kinds of networks are affective (bound by sentiments of solidarity and belonging) and do deeply political work, in that their performances and interactions concern matters of community building but also identity formation.

The role of feelings, affect and emotions in politics has been acknowledged over the years in scholarship on the subject. Eric Shouse succinctly described the difference between the three as such: ‘Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal’ (Shouse 2005). Affect drives the intensity of participation in the communities and networks and is abstract, non-conscious, unrealized, while emotions are the conscious display of specific feelings shaped in equal measure by the social media setting. We participate in networks sustained by empathy, solidarity, moral outrage, aversion or a sense of euphoria and anticipation. Affect and emotions are vital to political life, as they can inspire and sustain political participation and serve as a prism for political subjectivity.

The pervasiveness of media, the ‘everydayness’ that stems from their accessibility, has dramatically changed the scope, the scale, and the nature of such political participation. Much of the articulation of political subjectivity in everyday media, in the form of memes, micro-blogs, or tweets and social networking, is pervaded with affect that drives mobilization and network formations and underpins political agency. Digital media foster spaces that witness the emergence of affective publics, which are ‘networked publics that are mobilized and connected, identified, and potentially disconnected through expressions of sentiment’ (Papacharissi 2016, 311).

The articles in this special issue ask, explicitly and implicitly: What forms of affective engagement, conversations, or interactions can be considered political, and what makes social networks and other online communities act like ‘publics’? How do emotions or affective engagement render the personal political in all such instances, and how do they actively produce styles of political interaction and engagement? What kinds of topics and issues of common interest become rallying points for people’s participation, and what vocabularies and discursive tools become available to them? What research strategies, qualitative and/or quantitative, allow us to access and accurately read people’s affective involvement in political cultures?

The reader will acquire an affinity with the subject material, based on perspectives drawn from The Netherlands, Canada, Ukraine, Venezuela and Romania, reinforcing the argument that digital platforms can provide publics with platforms across political cultures but also lend themselves to both progressive politics and conservative or regressive political and social sentiments.

In the first article ‘Tracing Cultural Citizenship Online’, Joke Hermes addresses the centrality of affective work, among online communities, to the practice of cultural citizenship in the Netherlands. Reflecting on methods of media ethnography and discourse analysis, her article at first foregrounds the ways in which the Marokko.nl site became an affective community in which young Dutch-Moroccans negotiated their hyphenated identities in the context of rising discrimination in Dutch society. Her subsequent analysis of Dutch alt-right sites, in their vigorous defence of ‘Black Pete’ in the Dutch Sinterklaas tradition, addresses the prevalence of sentiments of victimhood and loss (among other emotions) in online discourse, attesting to the intensity of affect in these public forums. Together these indicate the significant role of affect-based groups in promoting and challenging restrictive notions of citizenship in the Netherlands today.

Questions of approach underpin the article by Frederik Lesage, Tara Mahoney, & Peter Zuurbier, ‘Probing elections: digital methods for political affects’. Their article stems from a probe-based research project where researchers worked with artist-facilitators involved in a community engagement initiative called ‘Creative Publics: Art-Making Inspired by the Federal Election’, centred around the 2015 Canadian Federal Election. The authors skilfully compare research assemblages that reproduce the myth of the mediated centre with an alternative probe-based research assemblage (using text messages) that is participatory, in order to understand how participation transforms the affective dynamics of media events. Their participatory method undercuts the idea of a mediated centre and foregrounds social interactions that are realized through digital media as a constituent part of the political. This method speaks to an ‘ontology of anticipation’ rather than expectation (which suggests passivity on the public’s part) with regard to electoral outcomes.

In a thorough analysis of the visuality and memoricity of memes that circulated around the Maidan events of 2013–2014, and the Venezuelan election of 2019, Mykola Makhortykh and Juan Manuel González Aguilar demonstrate the capacity of memes to generate affect, both positive and negative. In ‘Memory, politics and emotions: Internet memes and protests in Venezuela and Ukraine’, the authors examine memes posted among two communities on a social media platform in Ukraine and across platforms in Venezuela. These memes show a striking spectrum of discursive tools, both visual and textual. In Ukraine, Euromaidan and anti-Maidan memes, and in Venezuela, pro- and anti-Maduro memes do affective work in their strategy of ‘digital persuasion’, as they mobilize online publics around their various political causes. The authors’ methods are a combination of quantitative content analysis and intertextual discourse analysis.

The ongoing digital struggle in Romania between the government and opposition groups is examined by Adrian Stoicescu in ‘When the Online Backs the Street – The Making of Digitized Political Emotion: A Case Study of the Romanian Anti-Government Protests’. Stoicescu employs a methodology relevant to media epidemiography to examine the online contest between the ‘native emotions’ of specific peer groups and the ‘allogenous emotions’ of outsiders. How are such ‘native’ groups formed digitally, how do they coagulate their target publics, and how does their emotional content viralize and produce additional, ‘allogenic’ reactions? These are among the questions explored in the context of the digital battles waged around the Romanian anti-government protests.

These authors focus on participatory media as a cultural space that mediatizes affect and emotions in these acts of everyday politics. This means that affect and emotions are not simply ‘reflected’ in digital media participation. Emotions are produced, shaped, transformed and managed by the affordances of digital media platforms, and affect sustains and pervades their participation. This affective and emotional participation bears tremendous significance as the routine political talk that underpins democracies or, at the very least, citizen participation in political processes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sudha Rajagopalan

Sudha Rajagopalan is Senior Lecturer in East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam and has research interests in Soviet cultural history and new media cultures. She is on the editorial board and steering committee of the pioneering international journal Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Central European and Eurasian New Media. Her pioneering ethnohistorical study of Soviet moviegoing was published by Indiana University Press in 2010 (‘Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: the Culture of Moviegoing after Stalin’). Her work on digital media and participatory cultures can be also seen in publications such as International Journal of Cultural Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Celebrity Studies, Transformative Works and Culture, South Asian Popular Culture and Journalism Studies, among others.

Krisztina Lajosi

Krisztina Lajosi is Senior Lecturer in the Department of European Studies at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Her main research interest is nationalism studies. She holds a Ph.D. in cultural history and has mostly published on the role of music in shaping national identity in nineteenth-century Europe. Her most recent publications include The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe (Brill, 2020), Staging the Nation: Opera and Nationalism in 19th-Century Hungary (Brill, 2018), Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe (Brill, 2015). Her current research explores the impact of technological developments on nationalism, with a special focus on digital citizenship and the influences of cyberspace on national cultures.