![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In Ferguson, Missouri, Palestinian activists and black protesters created a transnational collective identity defined by what some scholars call a “community of feeling” following the murder of Michael Brown in August 2014. This paper focuses on the transnational politics of the Ferguson Movement through a textual analysis of digital media discourse and interviews with local community activists. Findings reveal that activists generated a transnational collective identity based on their shared experiences of oppression and resistance, which activists made visible across various digital platforms, including social media, blogs, and livestreaming. Informed by the literature on social movements, collective identity, and affect, the authors move beyond theoretical analyses that emphasize activists’ communicative practices as strategic; instead, this article underscores the affective linkages that led to the development of a transnational collective identity within the movement.
Notes
1 Roni Jackson, “If They Gunned Me Down and Criming While White: An Examination of Twitter Campaigns Through the Lens of Citizens’ Media,” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 16, no. 3 (2016): 313–9. doi:10.1177/1532708616634836.
2 Peter B. Kraska and Victor E. Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” Social Problems 44, no. 1 (1997): 1–18. doi:10.2307/3096870; Catherine Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 723–35. doi:10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.723.
3 Michael Geyer, “The Militarization of Europe, 1914–1945,” in The Militarization of the Western World, eds. Micheal Geyer and John Gillis (Newark: Rutgers University Press 1989), 79.
4 Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1983); Joshua Inwood and Anne Bonds, “Confronting White Supremacy and a Militaristic Pedagogy in the US Settler Colonial State,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2016): 1–9. doi:10.1080/24694452.2016.1145510.
5 Angela Davis, Freedom is A Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).
6 Paolo Gerbaudo and Emiliano Treré, “In Search of the ‘We’ of Social Media Activism: Introduction to the Special Issue on Social Media and Protest Identities,” Information, Communication & Society 18 (2015): 865–71. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2015.1043319.
7 “Profile: Hamas Palestinian Movement,” BBC, May 12, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-13331522 (accessed December 1, 2018).
8 Joshua Levitt, “IDF Seizes Hundreds of Weapons in Nablus, as Operation ‘Brother’s Keeper’ Enters 5th Day,” The Algemeiner, June 17, 2014, http://www.5tjt.com/idf-seizes-hundreds-of-weapons-in-nablus-as-operation-brothers-keeper-enters-5th-day-video/ (accessed December 1, 2018).
9 Jodi Rudoren and Somini Sengupta, “U.N. Report on Gaza Finds Evidence of War Crimes by Israel and by Palestinian Militants,” The New York Times, June 22, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-report.html (December 1, 2018).
10 Mairav Zonzein, “Israel Killed More Palestinians in 2014 Than in Any Other Year since 1967,” The Guardian, March 27, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/27/israel-kills-more-palestinians-2014-than-any-other-year-since-1967 (accessed December 1, 2018).
11 Lizzie Dearden, “Israel-Gaza Conflict: 50-Day War by Numbers,” The Independent, August 27, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-gaza-conflict-50-day-war-by-numbers-9693310.html (accessed December 1, 2018).
12 Harriet Sherwood and Peter Beaumont, “Gaza Violence Spreads to West Bank with Six Palestinians Reportedly Killed,” The Guardian, July 25, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/25/palestinian-protests-continue-israel-considers-ground-operation-ceasefire (accessed December 1, 2018).
13 Ibid.
14 Rebecca Leber, “Ferguson’s Police Force Is 94 Percent White—And That’s Basically Normal in the US,” The New Republic August 13, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/119070/michael-browns-death-leads-scrutiny-ferguson-white-police (accessed December 1, 2018).
15 Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States,” American Ethnologist 42 (2015): 4–17. doi:10.1111/amet.12112.
16 Ibid.
17 Delinda C. Hanley, “From Ferguson to Palestine: ‘Hands up, Don’t Shoot!’,” Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, September 16, 2014, https://www.wrmea.org/2014-october/from-ferguson-to-palestine-hands-up-dont-shoot.html (accessed December 1, 2018).
18 Imani J. Jackson, “How Palestinian Protesters Helped Black Lives Matter: Column,” USA Today, July 1, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/spotlight/2016/07/01/how-palestinian-protesters-helped-black-lives-matter/85160266/ (accessed December 1, 2018).
19 Ibid.
20 Alberto Melucci, “The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements,” Social Research 52 (1989): 781–816. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40970398; Alberto Melucci, “The Process of Collective Identity,” In Social Movements and Culture, ed. Hank Johnson and Bert Klandermans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 41–63.
21 Cristina Flesher Fominaya, “Collective Identity in Social Movements: Central Concepts and Debates,” Sociology Compass 4, no. 6 (2010): 393–404. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9020.2010.00287.x.
22 Gerbaudo and Treré, “In Search of the ‘We’ of Social Media Activism,” 867.
23 Anastasia Kavada, “Creating the Collective: Social Media, the Occupy Movement and Its Constitution as a Collective Actor,” Information, Communication & Society 18, no. 8 (2015): 872. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2015.1043318
24 Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 6.
25 Stefania Vicari, “Networks of Contention: The Shape of Online Transnationalism in Early Twenty-First Century Social Movement Coalitions,” Social Movement Studies, 13, no. 1 (2013): 92–109. doi:10.1080/14742837.2013.832621; Todd Wolfson, “From the Zapatistas to Indymedia: Dialectics and Orthodoxy in Contemporary Social Movements,” Communication, Culture & Critique 5, no. 2 (2014): 124–43. doi:10.1111/j.1753-9137.2012.01131.x.
26 Catherine R. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (2002): 446–68. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2002.tb00278.x; Joanna Brookes, “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic,” The William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2005): 67–92. doi:10.2307/3491622; Cristina Mislán, “An ‘Obedient Servant’,” Journalism History 39, no. 2 (2013): 115–25.
27 Gerbaudo and Treré, “In Search of the ‘We’ of Social Media Activism,” 865.
28 Maria Bakardjieva, “Do Clouds Have Politics? Collective Actors in Social Media Land,” Information, Communication & Society 18, no. 8 (2015): 8. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2015.1043320.
29 Jeffrey S. Juris, “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation,” American Ethnologist 39, no. 2 (2012): 260. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01362.x.
30 Ibid.
31 David Snow, “Collective Identity and Expressive Forms,” University of California, Irvine eScholarship Repository, 2001, https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt2zn1t7bj/qt2zn1t7bj.pdf.
32 Vicari, “Networks of Contention.”
33 Chris Atton, Alternative Media (London: Thousand Oaks, 2002), 30.
34 Ibid.
35 Tova Benski et al., “From the Streets and Squares to Social Movement Studies: What Have We Learned?” Current Sociology 61, no. 4 (2013): 541–61. doi:10.1177/0011392113479753.
36 Liz Bondi, Emotional Geographies (Routledge, 2016).
37 Benski et. al., “From the Streets and Squares to Social Movement Studies,” 546.
38 Iván Arenas, “The Mobile Politics of Emotions and Social Movement in Oaxaca, Mexico,” Antipode 47, no 5 (2015): 1121–40. doi:10.1111/anti.12158; James M. Jasper, “Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research,” Annual Review of Sociology 37 (2011): 285–303. doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-081309-150015.
39 Jodi Dean, “Affective Networks,” Media Tropes 2, no. 2 (2010): 22. Retrived from: https://mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/11932
40 Zizi Papacharissi, “Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling: Sentiment, Events and Mediality,” Information, Communication & Society 19, no. 3 (2015): 5. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2015.1109697.
41 Ibid., 2.
42 Ibid.
43 Raymond Williams, “The Analysis of Culture,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: a Reader, ed. John Storey (New York: Routledge, 1994), 36.
44 Ibid., 36.
45 Cristina Mislán and Amalia Dache-Gerbino, “The Struggle for ‘Our Streets’: The Digital and Physical Spatial Politics of the Ferguson Movement,” Social Movement Studies 17, no. 6 (2018): 676–96. doi:10.1080/14742837.2018.1533810; Cristina Mislán and Amalia Dache-Gerbino, “Not a Twitter Revolution: Anti-neoliberal and Antiracist Resistance in the Ferguson Movement,” International Journal of Communication 12 (2018): 2622–40. Retrieved from: http://ijoc.org
46 Bruns, Axel and Jean Burgess, “The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics.” In Proceedings of the 6th European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference 2011, University of Iceland, Reykjavik.
47 Jason, personal communication with authors, St. Louis, February 26, 2016.
48 Robert Mackey, “Advice for Ferguson’s Protesters from the Middle East,” The New York Times, August 14, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/world/middleeast/advice-for-fergusons-protesters-from-the-middle-east.html (accessed December 1, 2018).
49 Kristian Davis Bailey. “Towards Justice: Deepening Black–Palestinian Solidarity & Global Struggle,” Blackforpalestine.com, July 5, 2016. http://www.blackforpalestine.com/blog/towards-justice-deepening-black-palestinian-solidarity-global-struggle (accessed December 1, 2018).
50 “2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine,” Blackforpalestine.com, 2015. http://www.blackforpalestine.com/read-the-statement.html (accessed December 1, 2018).
51 Due to the sensitive nature of the study, we have kept tweets anonymous to protect the authors.
52 “Script,” BlackPalestinianSolidarity.com, n.d. http://www.blackpalestiniansolidarity.com/script.html. (accessed March 8, 2018).
53 Helen Haste, “Constructing the citizen,” Political Psychology 25, no. 3 (2004): 413–39. doi:10.1111/j.14679221.2004.00378.x.
54 Malcolm, personal communication with authors, St. Louis, October 7, 2016.
55 Badr, personal communication with authors, St. Louis, October 7, 2017.
56 New York Times. “Michael Brown’s Shooting and Its Immediate Aftermath in Ferguson,” NYTimes.com August 25, 2014 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/12/us/13police-shooting-of-black-teenager-michael-brown.html#/#time348_10366 (accessed March 8, 2019).
57 “2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine”
58 Papacharissi, “Affective Publics,” 7.
59 Dean, “Affective Networks,” 22.
60 Badr, personal communication.
61 Papacharissi, “Affective Publics,” 8.
62 Constance, personal communication with authors, St. Louis, December 19, 2016.
63 Badr, personal communication.
64 Ibid.
65 Malcolm, personal communication.
66 Badr, personal communication.
67 “2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine.”
68 Badr, personal communication.
69 Audrey, personal communication with authors, St. Louis, May 26, 2016.
70 Ibid.
71 Malcolm, personal communication.
72 Ibid.
73 Malcolm, personal communication.
74 Black–Palestinian Solidarity. “Press Release: New Video Featuring Black and Palestinian Artists and Activists, Including Ms. Lauryn Hill, Cornel West, Alice Walker, and Danny Glover Highlights Connections Between Communities’ Struggles,” BlackPalestinianSolidarity.com, October 14, 2015 http://www.blackpalestiniansolidarity.com/release.html (accessed March 8, 2019).
75 Kristian Davis Bailey and Khury Petersen-Smith. “Press Release: 1,000 Black activists, scholars, and artists sign statements supporting freedom and equality for Palestinian people,” BlackforPalestine.com http://www.blackforpalestine.com/blog/archives/08-2015 (accessed March 8, 2019).
76 Badr, personal communication.
77 “Who We Are,” Blackforpalestine.com, 2015, http://www.blackforpalestine.com/who-we-are.html (accessed December 1, 2018).
78 Dean, “Affective Networks,” 24.
79 Stefania Milan, “From Social Movement to Cloud Protesting: The Evolution of Collective Identity,” Information, Communication & Society, 18, no. 8 (2015): 887. Retrieved from: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2882067
80 Natalie Fenton, Digital, Political, Radical (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016), 134.
81 Ibid., 130.
82 Ibid.
83 Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess, “The Use of Twitter Hashtags.”
84 Ibid., 134.
85 Miriyam Aouragh, “Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions,” TripleC 10, no. 2 (2012): 518–36. doi:10.31269/triplec.v10i2.416; Zeynep Tufecki, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); Marwan M. Kraidy, “The Body as Medium in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, no. 2-3 (2013): 285–90. doi:10.1080/14791420.2013.815526; Marwan M. Kraidy and Marina R. Krikorian, “The Revolutionary Public Sphere: The Case of the Arab Uprisings,” Communication and the Public 2, no. 2 (2017): 111–19. doi:10.1177/2057047317717499.
86 Cristina Mislán and Amalia Dache-Gerbino, “Not a Twitter Revolution.”
87 Kavada, “Creating the Collective: Social Media, the Occupy Movement and Its Constitution as a Collective Actor”; W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics,” Information, Communication & Society 15 (2012): 739–68. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661; Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, The Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (New York: itbooks, 2012); Kevin M. Deluca, Sean Lawson, and Ye Sun, “Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement,” Communication, Culture & Critique 5 (2012): 483–509. doi:10.1111/j.1753-9137.2012.01141.x.