THE VISUAL SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVISM PRACTICE OF OPPONENTS TO COVID-19 VACCINE MANDATES

Abstract

In recent years, digital images from smartphones and other networked cameras sharedon social media have largely replaced video recording devices that were commonly used by social activists to document protest practices. Networked cameras’ ubiquity has fundamentally changed the practices of political protest, activism, and social movements. This research brings to light how visual social media activism overlaps with practices of protest and social movements such as solidarity, cop watching, mobilization, and information sharing. In this dissertation, I explore the visual social media activism as practice using various social media accounts of opponents of the COVID-19 vaccination mandates, as well as the offline protest practices related to visual social media performed by these activists in Hawai‘i and Israel. Following the practice approach to cultural studies and the practice approach to media studies, I reveal and unpack the ways in which practices of protest are bundled into the practice of Visual Social Media Activism (VSMA) used by vaccination mandate1 opponents. My research poses the question: What do COVID-19 vaccination mandate opponents do in relation to visual social media, and how do these practices contribute to the production of symbolic power and the battle for control over public discourse against state and media institutions? For this purpose, I use a practice-oriented methodology in two ways: first, by using Visual Cross-Platform Analysis (Pearce et al., 2018) of visual social media shared by vaccination mandate opponents across different social media platforms and, in parallel, observation of VSMA online, and offline followed by interviews with the creators and audiences of anti-vaccination visual social media. By combining these methods, I show how VSMA functions in the everyday making of the social discourse around COVID-19 and civil liberties.