Online Deliberation Lived Experiences Of Kānaka Maoli Women

Abstract

Online deliberation has increasingly attracted scholarly attention and stirred the hope for more diverse and actively inclusive public conversations to inform different polities. However, little research has been conducted to understand the realities, opportunities, and risks of people who are voicing their political views online while holding challenging positions in the matrix of power. This study begins to address this gap focusing on the experiences of Kānaka Maoli women who voice their cultural and political sovereignty positions online. The project aims to contribute to the understanding of how common online deliberation platforms (social media, particularly Facebook) support or hinder the expression and the maintenance of diverse perspectives online using a triangulation of interviews, focus group, and discourse analysis. Main findings include socio-technical affordances that disrupt participants' lifeworlds (such as self-branding, reactivity-visibility loop, cultural appropriation, infiltration, surveillance, and online harassment), others that support them (such as remediation, phatic communication, summoning, and steps towards epistemological and spatial redistribution), and most interestingly, complex affordances that require extra agency on the part of participants to appropriate the media for their purposes (such as responsible self-modeling, reframing mainstream discourses, and connected presence of body, mind, and spirit). Such complex affordances present a shared, creative effort that, with the support of both participants’ and scholarly communities, can foster a Hawaiʻi-based, safe and empowering use of communication media.