1. The Digital Solidarity Trap: Social Movement Research,
Online Activism and Accessing the Other’s Others
Theresa A. Hunt
New Jersey Institute of Technology
ESS 2015 DIGITAL SOCIOLOGY MINI-CONFERENCE
NEW YORK, NY
FEBRUARY 28 2015
2. Digital Solidarity? The Other’s Others?
2010-2011 study of youth movements in transnational feminist networks
* Women were leaving established TFNs/ TFOs to form “youth-only” networks – why? Across 5
networks, any consistency with reasons?
* Study participants explained need for “distance from ‘old’ [identity] politics stalling action”; cited
frustration with “youth marginalization” and “assumptions about youth”; cited class-based issues:
“conference-feminism”; “feminism from behind well-guarded offices”; “not street-feminism”
* Cited online spaces as liberating, opening room for marginalized voices, providing access to and
options for “international organizing” or interacting at the transnational level, despite not having
access to resources for travel
◦ Noted digital divide realities, argued digital spaces are still more accessible than the “NGO Conference
Circuit”
Young women used youth strategically as a term to represent how, across class/race/culture difference, they
were “othered” vis-à-vis older generation counterparts. They noted a sort of solidarity being a “young
feminist” creates in this context (global social justice movements)
3. Digital Solidarity? The Other’s Others?
Original plan: snowball sampling, fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, participant observation.
Revised plan, mid-study: participating in/observing digital spaces (a “must” for young women’s
networks, older-gen activists told me… “all they do is online”).
Concerns: (mis)representation; rendering race/class invisible; “solidarity” advanced by younger
generations to confront the marginalization they felt from older women would mask differences
among, within the population
Who were “the other’s others”? As Karima Benoune asserts (2009), we cannot be so caught by
the emergence of a binary (old/young, in this case) that we forget the complexities, the whole
story.
4. Othered Others = Fragmenting the
Solidarity?
Important race/citizenship-based distinctions rendered invisible online; masked by “solidarity”
Two key examples:
Roma activist Alena, working in a largely white, middle and upper class network of young
women activists in Central and Eastern Europe (SRHR group, Astra Youth)
◦ For Alena: feeling like “the shadow” – language barriers, hardware/digital literacy access issues, time
constraints, labor
Ashia, self-identifying as Nubian, working in Egypt on women’s rights in regional organizations
(Young Arab Feminist Network)
◦ For Ashia: feeling like “the messenger” – not contributing, but recording/producing the groups’ site
content
5. Research Methods – Seeking
Intersectionality in Digital Space
My (original) revised plan to conduct research through digital spaces would have masked this.
What set me on the right path, but still wasn’t enough: DePew’s suggestion of triangulating
digital research (2007)
What deepened and thickened the data I could gather: analog fieldwork. DeVault’s “women’s
standpoint” (2004)
![Digital Solidarity? The Other’s Others?
2010-2011 study of youth movements in transnational feminist networks
* Women were leaving established TFNs/ TFOs to form “youth-only” networks – why? Across 5
networks, any consistency with reasons?
* Study participants explained need for “distance from ‘old’ [identity] politics stalling action”; cited
frustration with “youth marginalization” and “assumptions about youth”; cited class-based issues:
“conference-feminism”; “feminism from behind well-guarded offices”; “not street-feminism”
* Cited online spaces as liberating, opening room for marginalized voices, providing access to and
options for “international organizing” or interacting at the transnational level, despite not having
access to resources for travel
◦ Noted digital divide realities, argued digital spaces are still more accessible than the “NGO Conference
Circuit”
Young women used youth strategically as a term to represent how, across class/race/culture difference, they
were “othered” vis-à-vis older generation counterparts. They noted a sort of solidarity being a “young
feminist” creates in this context (global social justice movements)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)