The vitality of social media for establishing a research agenda on black lives and the movement

ABSTRACT

Social media provides scholars with important portals into the lives of marginalized communities and the movements organized to combat issues of race and racism in society. However, how to incorporate the seemingly unwieldy amount of social media data for research in our fields can pose challenges to further clarify how people navigate our social world and the issues with in it, but also how they organize to push for social change and equality. In what follows, the authors discuss how social media data can be used to enhance our studies of black lives in reflection of the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement on issues such as gun violence, public health, and higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Black Lives Matter
• social media
• Twitter
• criminal justice
• public health
• education

Acknowledgements

Authors contributed equally to this essay and are listed alphabetically. The authors would like to thank Rashawn Ray, Melissa Brown, Wendy Marie Laybourn, Kris Marsh, and Patricia Hill Collins for the opportunity to contribute to this important conversation as well as the feedback from two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.