Beyond Boundaries
Asynchronous - Online Only
How Do Online Social Networks Help Spread Anti-xenophobic Sentiments?: A Comparative Analysis of Anti-xenophobic Campaigns and Social Movements During the Time of COVID-19 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gaveal Fan
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a rise of xenophobia in online communities has triggered scapegoating behaviors against Asian groups. Negative connotations along with xenophobic sentiments in public opinion have placed them in a vulnerable position to suffer from social inequalities, discrimination, and hatred. How is this xenophobic sentiment counteracted online and what can the online social networks do to efficiently spread the anti-xenophobic sentiments? This study explores the two different approaches in the online social media platforms to achieve this anti-xenophobic purpose: campaigns organized by authorities and decentralized social movements. To explore and improve the efficacy of both anti-xenophobic campaigns and movements, this study requests data from Twitter, constructs and visualizes the sentiment spreading networks, and quantitatively analyzes their structures and contents. By referring to the “I Am Not A Virus” movement and “I Still Believe In Our City” campaign, this study discloses the patterns behind network outreach, discusses the uses of technology affordances in building social networks, identifies catalyzing factors for both approaches, and finally explores the potential capacity of online collective actions. The study finds that opinion leaders are essential in promoting anti-xenophobic sentiments, while individual involvement sustains and stabilizes the spread. Additionally, external events to cause responses from online communities also trigger more outreach to a larger audience. This study is concludes with a detailed and comprehensive technical review on how to combine the beneficial factors to improve the anti-xenophobic sentiment spreading of campaigns and movements online.
Featured Colonialism Never Left: Perpetrators and Sexual Violence in the Ambazonia Freedom War View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Womai Song
Throughout Africa’s historical and contemporary experience, women have wielded political influence and distinguished themselves at the service of their communities as constituencies and/or individual actors. But they have also been pawns in conflicts. Although sexual violence against women and girls is acknowledged globally as a ubiquitous and atrocious flouting of human rights, this abhorrent phenomenon remains incontrovertible in postcolonial African authoritarian democracies in the throes of internal frictions. This has particularly been the case in the plethora of civil wars that have threatened to derail the destiny of the post-colonial African state. The evolving “Anglophone Cameroon” crisis has again accentuated the plight of women in political wrangles. While warring factions bear some proportion of culpability, available evidence points overwhelmingly to French Cameroon soldiers as the greatest perpetrators of the inhumanity of sexual violence on Anglophone Cameroon women and girls. Employing the indigenous/Native feminist and internal colonialism theories, this paper makes a historical analysis of the psychology of the perpetrators as a counterpoise for the much studied and documented female victims of sexual violence in the Ambazonia war. In the context of this analysis, it argues that the malefactors of this violence constitute for the most part the legacy of Eurocentric patriarchal colonialism in Africa.
Pan-Indianism and Urban Spaces : Refusing Colonial Borders View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sydney Beckmann
The term “pan-Indianism” is recognizable, yet the concept itself is unstable and remains undertheorized. The term has been associated with different time periods, geographic locations, movements, organizations, and practices. Despite this ambiguity, pan-Indianism remains consistently associated with urban spaces. This association is no accident but rather the result of a particular area of scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s known as Acculturation Studies. In its effort to gauge the levels of assimilation within Indigenous communities, this scholarship reinforced assimilationist policies at the time. I argue that the uncritical association of pan-Indianism with urban spaces leaves unexamined colonial ideologies which not only constructed the concept of pan-Indianism but continue to reinforce assimilationist policies and colonial borders that erase Indigenous presence in urban spaces. By critically examining pan-Indianism’s association with urbanization and assimilation, we refuse this erasure and the associated assimilationist rhetoric, and it provides the opportunity to more thoroughly engage the inter-tribal decolonizing work being done contemporarily in urban Indigenous communities.
Artificial Intelligence and the Military Profession: The Impact on Diversity and Inclusion View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Krystal Hachey, Tamir Libel
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) to force development and force employment activities of Western armed forces have the potential to impact the expertise, norms, and behavior of the officer corps in fundamental ways. While the officer corps has been derived from hegemonic masculinity, changes in social and cultural norms have been slowly influencing Western armed forces. As we move to greater uses of AI – and increasingly rely on hi-tech companies and programmers to build, deploy, and maintain these systems – these modest advancements in diversity and inclusion in the military could be impacted. For example, there are notable gender and ethnicity gaps in the employment of AI programmers. Additionally, AI systems have demonstrated limitations due to data problems in accounting for racial and gender differences in their analysis, resulting in discrimination against minorities in many of their recommendations. Therefore, the more the military relies on AI, the higher the risk that these existing diversity and inclusion gaps will be exacerbated. We explore these concerns and provide considerations on the use of AI in the military as it relates to diversity and inclusion.
Romani Nationhood in a Post-Communist Eastern Europe : Situating Roma Political Subjectivities Beyond European Universalism View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Antonia Stan
Eastern Europe’s transition to a neoliberal economy has brought forth new challenges for the integration of the region’s diasporic Romani communities. My work, alongside The Romani Women’s Movement, seeks to conceptualize a national belonging that resists the androcentric and absolutist structures of the modern nation-state. Romani nationhood, tied to an international women’s movement, is a rupture to European universalism because it cannot consolidate the political imaginary of the ideal male subject; a subjecthood whose power is “founded only upon itself,” which in turn naturalizes the exchange of cheap labor power (Balibar, 2016). My project emanates from this rupture, as I aim to circumvent the EU’s appropriation of Romani women’s national efforts within the discipline of cultural studies. Following Cerasela Voiculescu’s ethnographic work with Roma communities in Romania and her theoretical interrogations of neoliberal social integration, this essay intervenes in the epistemic regime of liberal institutional inclusivity to suggest that current methods of social inclusion perpetuate the epistemological recolonization of subaltern voices. I situate the Roma Women’s Movement to provide historical contexts of Balkan Roma navigating the tokenization of their minoritized identities in transnational organizations. I suggest that the granting of liberal citizenship to Roma subjects vis-à-vis neoliberal initiatives of social inclusion secures Euro-colonial hegemony over subaltern subjectivities, effectively silencing Roma scholars from actualizing a heterogeneous, emancipatory political framework. Through this re-interpretation, one can therefore conclude that the fixed and homogeneous representation of Romani women’s vulnerability in human rights discourses helps obscure the necessity of migrant labor in Western European nation-states.
