Review of Communication (SPECIAL ISSUE)

Deadline for Abstracts: August 31, 2021

Invited Manuscripts: October 15, 2021

Special Issue Editors:

• Giuliana Sorce, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, giuliana.sorce@uni-tuebingen.de
• Delia D. Dumitrica, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Dumitrica@eshcc.eur.nl

This themed issue of the Review of Communication aims to map international perspectives on transnational processes in digital activism and protest. Against wider claims that social movements and citizen activism are shifting from the logic of spatial organization to networked flows (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Mercea, 2020), this themed issue seeks to illuminate how the global and local come together in networked public spheres. Recent transnational movements such as #MeToo or Black Lives Matter yield the importance of interweaving digital communication, pre-existing activist collectives, and citizen activation on a seemingly global scale. The policing of physical protests during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have intensified reliance on digital technologies among activists and grassroots collectives (Sorce & Dumitrica, 2021), further enhancing the appeal to create transnational ties and globalize movement appeals.

We ask how political causes circulate globally, what role digital technologies play, and ultimately, what “transnational” means for seemingly universal causes, global collective identity, and activist practice. In reflecting how activists across the globe employ digital media to construct a civic imaginary of a transnational polity, attention must be paid to the dialectical nature of transnational processes that simultaneously magnify the importance of locality while normalizing hybridity (Roudometof, 2016; Kraidy, 2005; Pieterse, 2015).

Where previous scholarship has drawn attention to the diffusion of political causes (della Porta & Mattoni, 2014) or cultural references (Dumitrica, in press) across national borders, this themed issue focuses on how digital technologies mediate and shape transnational processes in global organizing. This includes how transnational causes move across cultural contexts and how global appeals or activist vocabularies traverse (local) initiatives, considering the ways transnational organizers create collective identities among dispersed adherents, and what digital tactics of action work for global movements.

Possible contributions might examine, but are not limited to:

• transnational activism as shaped by digital action

• (re) direction of transnational flows in digital contention

• transnational circulation of protest causes, identities, symbols, and vocabularies

• formation of global dissent in networked contexts

• (digital) activism, campaigns, and protest on “global” issues

• global values and transnational appeals in border zone, migration, First Nation, diasporic, environmental, queer, or gender rights protest communication

• roles and affordances of new media technologies in transnational organizing

• digital network(ing) practices in transnational activism

• narrative and rhetorical strategies in forging transnational activist alliances

Submission Instructions

Authors should submit an extended abstract for Guest Editors’ review (max. 750 words) by August 31, 2021. Invited manuscripts should be submitted by October 15, 2021 for peer review.

Extended abstracts should include the research problematic, theoretical angle, methodology, and key findings. The extended abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors, who will subsequently invite a selection of authors to submit full papers.

Authors should identify which themed call their paper is responding to by selecting the relevant drop-down option in ScholarOne.

The full call can be retrieved at: https://bit.ly/TransnationalDimensions