Reading Justice Claims on Social Media

Perspectives from the Global South

Phillip Santos, Cleophas T. Muneri

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9783031538490
• eBook ISBN:
  9783031538506
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how unresolved questions of social justice shape the character of the political terrain and political actors, through the lens of social media. It treats communication as the medium through which social issues and processes are made visible. Given the rise and spread of populist politics, the views of ordinary people on social issues have never mattered more. One platform through which these voices can be studied extensively is social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter now X, YouTube, and Instagram, among others, afford ordinary citizens—often marginalized by traditional mainstream media—space to vent their opinions, engage in discussions of whatever topic, share information and ideas, and explore various kinds of information as well as data, links to which are often provided through various macro and micro discursive spaces therein. Arguably, therefore, social media have become a quintessential platform for studying contemporary sociality. Social media mustbe studied not just as a communication platform, but one through which the social world, social processes and social issues are made visible and, in some cases, enacted. With rich case studies from the Global South, and a particular focus on Africa, this collection does just that.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Challenge of Social Justice in Contemporary Society
• 2. Theorizing Promise and Pitfalls of Social Media and its Implications to Social Justice and Democratization
• 3. Decolonizing Identitarian Essentialism in Asian American Social Media Activism
• 4. Memorial Museums in Guatemala: Social Media and the Notion of ‘Never Again’
• 5. A Decolonial and Social Justice Reading of the #ZimbabweanLivesMatter Cyber Protest: Or When Black Lives Should Matter to Our Selves
• 6. Role of Social Media in Indian ‘Nationalism’ and ‘National Identity’ in Twenty-First Century: Case Study of India
• 7. A Discursive Struggle Triggered by the ‘Arrival’ of the ‘Other’ and the Insecurity of the ‘Mainstream’ as Played Out in the Ethiopian Digital Media Sphere
• 8. Twitter, Social Justice and White Land Compensation Discourses in Zimbabwe
• 9. Female Voices against ‘Femicide’ in South Africa and Nigeria: Facebook and Twitter (now X) as Hubs for Social Justice
• 10. Twitter Deliberations on Justice in the Aftermath of the Deaths of Perpetrators of Mass Atrocities in Zimbabwe
• 11. ‘I am Tyler Perry, I endorse the #EndSARS protest’: An Examination of the Use of Parody Accounts in the Fight for Social Justice in Nigeria
• 12. Critical Realism, Truth and the Journalistic Mediation of Social Justice Issues
• Back Matter