The dead pig's photo album: Affective visual rituals in collective identity formation

Abstract

Recent research on visually mediated activism has focused on visual practices as forms of political expression. Conversely, this article will demonstrate that visuality is not only used for protest mobilisation, but that it also plays a significant role in solidifying movement-internal collective identity through a set of distinct visual rituals that produce a shared understanding through affect. Based on an ethnography of everyday visual practices and social experiences of visuality (online and offline) in the Save Movement's ‘Pig Save’ protest events, we identify three forms of affective visual rituals: (1) witnessing; (2) mourning; and (3) semiotic rituals. We argue that these visual rituals are not only expressions of shared values, but construct collective political identity through backstage visual emotion work (affect).

Keywords

collective identity collective mourning digital activism digital witnessing vegan activism visual rituals

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Adams

(2010) Why feminist-vegan now? Feminism and Psychology 20(3): 302–317.

Aiello

Kennedy

Anderson

et al. (2022) Generic visuals of COVID-19 in the news: Invoking banal belonging through symbolic reiteration. International Journal of Cultural Studies 25(3-4): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779211061415.

Allen

(2009) Martyr bodies in the media: Human rights, aesthetics, and the politics of immediation in the Palestinian intifada. American Ethnologist 36(1): 161–180.

Askanius

(2013) Protest movements and spectacles of death: From urban places to video spaces. In: Doerr

Mattoni

Teune

(eds) Advances in the Visual Analysis of Social Movements. Bingley: Emerald Group, 35, 105–133 https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-786X(2013)0000035009.

Askanius

(2016) Online video activism and political mash-up genres. Jomec Journal 4: 1–17. http://doi.org/10.18573/j.2013.10257.

Askanius

Keller

(2021) Murder fantasies in memes: Fascist aesthetics of death threats and the banalization of white supremacist violence. Information, Communication & Society 24(16): 2522–2539.

Askanius

Uldam

(2011) Online social media for radical politics: Climate change activism on YouTube. International Journal of Electronic Governance 4(1–2): 69–84.

Bennett

Segerberg

(2012) The logic of connective action. Information, Communication & Society 15(5): 739–768.

Boulianne

Lalancette

Ilkiw

(2020) ‘School strike 4 climate’: Social media and the international youth protest on climate change. Media and Communication 8(2): 208–218.

10.

boyd

Crawford

(2012) Critical questions for big data. Information, Communication and Society 15(5): 662–679.

11.

Bryman

(2015) Social Research Methods, 5th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

12.

Carey

(2008) Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203928912.

13.

Chouliaraki

(2015) Digital witnessing in conﬂict zones: The politics of remediation. Information, Communication & Society 18(11): 1362–1377.

14.

Chouliaraki

Al-Ghazzi

(2022) Beyond verification: Flesh witnessing and the significance of embodiment in conflict news. Journalism 23(3): 649–667.

15.

Debray

(2000) Transmitting Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

16.

de Certeau

(1993) Walking in the city. In: During

(ed) The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 151–160.

17.

Della Porta

Tarrow

(2005) Transnational Protest and Global Activism: People, Passions. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.

18.

DeLuca

(2012) Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. London: Routledge.

19.

Diani

Bison

(2004) Organizations, coalitions, and movements. Theory and Society 33(3): 281–309.

20.

Diani

McAdam

(2003) Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199251789.001.0001.

21.

Ebbrecht-Hartmann

(2021) Commemorating from a distance: The digital transformation of Holocaust memory in times of COVID-19. Media, Culture & Society 43(6): 1095–1112.

22.

Ebbrecht-Hartmann

Divon

(2022) Serious TikTok: Can you learn about the Holocaust in 60 seconds? MediArXiv 43(6): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.33767/osf.io/nv6t2.

23.

franzke

Bechmann

Zimmer

Ess C and the Association of Internet Researchers (2020) Internet research: Ethical guidelines 3.0 . Available at: https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf (accessed 21 April 2023)

24.

Facebook (2018) Facebook group badges. Facebook.com. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/community/education/blog/badges (accessed 13 April 2022).

25.

Gerbaudo

(2015) Protest avatars as memetic signifiers: Political profile pictures and the construction of collective identity on social media in the 2011 protest wave. Information, Communication & Society 18(8): 916–929.

26.

Gibbs

Meese

Arnold

et al. (2015) #Funeral and Instagram: Death, social media, and platform vernacular. Information, Communication & Society 18(3): 255–268.

27.

Giraud

(2021) Veganism: Politics, Practice, and Theory. London: Bloomsbury.

28.

Goffman

(1959/1978) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

29.

Goggin

Hjorth

2014) The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media. London: Routledge.

30.

Gray

(2019) Data witnessing: Attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s decoders project. Information, Communication & Society 22(7): 971–991.

31.

Haßler

Wurst

Jungblut

et al. (2021) Influence of the pandemic lockdown on Fridays for Future’s hashtag activism. New Media & Society: 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211026575.

32.

Hautea

Parks

Takahashi

et al. (2021) Showing they care (or don’t): Affective publics and ambivalent climate activism on TikTok. Social Media + Society 7(2): 1–14.

33.

Hayes

O’Neill

(2021) The Greta effect: Visualising climate protest in UK media and the Getty images collections. Global Environmental Change 71: 1–11.

34.

Hjorth

Hendry

(2015) A snapshot of social media: Camera phone practices. Social Media + Society 1(1): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115580478.

35.

Hynes

(2013) Reconceptualizing resistance: Sociology and the affective dimension of resistance. British Journal of Sociology 64(4): 559–577.

36.

Jacobsson

Lindblom

(2013) Emotion work in animal rights activism: A moral-sociological perspective. Acta Sociologica 56(1): 55–68.

37.

Jenzen

McGarry

(2017) Gezi Park: How did visual communication between protesters help create a movement? OpenDemocracy. Available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/performance-of-protest-gezi-park/ (accessed 12 April 2022).

38.

Kavada

(2015) Creating the collective: Social media, the Occupy Movement and its constitution as a collective actor. Information, Communication & Society 18(8): 872–886.

39.

Kuhn

(2010) Memory texts and memory work: Performances of memory in and with visual media. Memory Studies 3(4): 298–313.

40.

Lekakis

(2017) Culture jamming and Brandalism for the environment: The logic of appropriation. Popular Communication 15(4): 311–327.

41.

Lockwood

(2018) Bodily encounter, bearing witness and the engaged activism of the global save movement. Animal Studies Journal 7(1): 104–126. https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol7/iss1/6/.

42.

Mai

(2022) What happens on the backstage? Emotion work and LGBTQ activism in a collectivist culture. Emotions and Society 4(2): 181–198.

43.

Mattoni

Teune

(2014) Visions of protest: A media-historic perspective on images in social movements. Sociology Compass 8(6): 876–887.

44.

McGarry

Jenzen

Eslen-Ziya

et al. (2019) Beyond the iconic protest images: The performance of ‘everyday life’ on social media during Gezi Park. Social Movement Studies 18(3): 284–304.

45.

Melucci

(1989) Nomads of the Present. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

46.

Melucci

(1995) The process of collective identity. In: Johnston

Klandermans

(eds) Social Movements and Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 41–63.

47.

Nissenbaum

(2004) Privacy as contextual integrity. Washington Law Review 79(1): 101–158.

48.

Özkula SM (2021) The unmaking of collective action: changing organizing logics in civil society organizations through social media activism culture. International Journal of Communication 15(19): 1984–2002.

49.

Özkula SM, Reilly PJ and Hayes J (2022) Easy data, same old platforms? A systematic review of digital activism methodologies. Information, Communication & Society: 1–20.

50.

Parry

(2019) #Moreincommon: Collective mourning practices on Twitter and the iconization of Jo Cox. In: Veneti

Jackson

Lilleker

(eds) Visual Political Communication. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 227–245. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18729-3

51.

Pearce

Özkula

Greene

et al. (2020) Visual cross-platform analysis: Digital methods to research social media images. Information, Communication & Society 23(2): 1–20.

52.

Pink

Horst

Postill

et al. (2016) Digital Ethnography, 1st edn. London: Sage.

53.

Ristovska

(2016) Strategic witnessing in an age of video activism. Media, Culture & Society 38(7): 1034–1047.

54.

Shifman

(2015) Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

55.

Sørensen

Rigby

(2017) Frontstage and backstage emotion management in civil resistance. Journal of Political Power 10(2): 219–235.

56.

Trillò

Hallinan

Shifman

(2022) A typology of social media rituals. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 27(4): zmac011.

57.

van Dijck

(2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

58.

Vicari

Iannelli

Zurovac

(2020) Political hashtag publics and counter-visuality: A case study of #fertilityday in Italy. Information, Communication & Society 23(9): 1235–1254.

59.

Wignell

Tan

O’Halloran

(2017) Violent extremism and iconisation: Commanding good and forbidding evil? Critical Discourse Studies 14(1): 1–22.

60.

Williams

(1958) Moving from high culture to ordinary culture. In: McKenzie

(ed) Convictions. London: MacGibbon & Kee, pp. 5–14.