This study aims to examine participation in the digital campaign #BlackoutTuesday to gain an understanding of the campaign's impact on university students’ awareness and participation in Black Lives Matter. Based on this, the study has two research questions: How have the students experienced that the #BlackoutTuesday campaign has affected their awareness of Black lives matter, and, for what reasons did the students feel that they participated in #BlackoutTuesday? With the help of slacktivism, networked publics, collective and connective action as the study's theoretical framework, we hope to gain a good interpretation of the results. To gather data, the study has used semi-structured interviews and to interpret the data, a thematic analysis has been used. The results that the study came to were that the students did not experience that their awareness was effected by #BlackoutTuesday. However, they still believed that they made a difference and that other people in their surrounding were affected in regard to awareness about Black Lives Matter. An unexpected discovery was also that many of the students connected Black Lives Matters, as an movement, solely to USA and not Sweden. The reasons for participation varied, but in this study, three main reasons were noted for the students participation. The reasons for participating were about the collective power, dissemination of information and taking a stand. With the results of the study we hope to create a better understanding of participation in similar campaign's and its effect on movements possibly society. However, more research is needed in this area to get a more thoroughly view of the field.

Thesis advisor: Lyndon Garrett / Coinciding with the upsurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement in the Summer of 2020, collegiate and professional sports teams have exhibited increased involvement in social issues. Existing research primarily analyzes the platform and visibility that athletes have to promote social agendas, but there is a gap in knowledge regarding how a sports team forms a collective identity around a social movement. This study seeks to fill this gap in research by utilizing qualitative surveying and interviewing to examine how Boston College athletes engage in the Black Lives Matter Movement. Processes of grounded theory and inductive analysis are used to understand how the Boston College Women’s Rowing Team values contribute to the team’s shared mental model to fulfill the conditions of social movement emergence and further promote team value adoption and team success. Evaluation of student-athletes across different Boston College teams through this study also offers insights to the controversy over sports teams engaging in social issues. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Sociology.

Denna uppsats undersöker diskursen kring Black Lives Matter-rörelsen och rasism i svensk nyhetsmedia. Uppsatsens syfte är att undersöka hur Black Lives Matter rörelsen i samband med George Floyds död har framställs i nyhetsartiklar i Dagens Nyheter och Svenska Dagbladet under det senaste året. Uppsatsen syftar även till att undersöka hur artiklarna kan skapa ett narrativ om rasism. Undersökningen har använt sig av textanalysen ur Norman Faircloughs kritiska diskursanalys för att analysera vårt material och utforska våra frågeställningar. Faircloughs kritiska diskursanalys har använts som både metod och teori, och tillsammans med Stuart Halls teori om the other har undersökningen analyserat artiklarnas språk. Den tidigare forskning undersökningen lyft fram fastslår att press och media kan reproducera rasistiska narrativ, samt systematiskt tillskriva antirasism negativa egenskaper förknippade med bland annat brott, konflikt och intolerans. Genom att undersöka hur nyhetsmedia framställer Black Lives Matter-rörelsen och de narrativ om rasism som kan skapas så vill vi öppna upp för diskussion kring hur media kan påverka hur vi som konsumerar texterna därefter tolkar och skapar förståelse kring dessa ämnen.

Denna studie undersöker hur svensk och brittisk tidningspress rapporterade om ländernas inrikes Black Lives Matter-demonstrationer under sommaren 2020. Syftet är att jämföra ett urval av artiklar från respektive land samt undersöka i vilken utsträckning protestparadigmets karaktärsdrag återfinns i artiklarna. Metodologiskt kombineras kvantitativ innehållsanalys och kvalitativ textanalys. Den kvantitativa delen ger en överblick över rapporteringen i artiklarna, medan den kvalitativa delen bidrar med en mer djupgående analys. Det teoretiska ramverket grundar sig i gestaltningsteorin. Mer specifikt tar uppsatsen avstamp i teorin om protestparadigmet, som föreslår att medier tenderar att vinkla rapporteringen mot våld, konflikt och polisingripanden under demonstrationerna snarare än orsak, syfte och mål med en demonstration. Även teorin om aktivistdilemmat används, en teori som menar att demonstranter ofta tar till våldsamma handlingar för medial uppmärksamhet, vilket i sin tur kan bidra med en risk till att rörelsen framställs ofördelaktigt i medierna. Resultatet av studien visar att paradigmets karaktärsdrag tydligt syns i de svenska artiklarna eftersom de till stor del fokuserar på våldsamheter i samband med demonstrationerna, samtidigt som demonstranternas budskap ofta undermineras. Medan paradigmets karaktärsdrag generellt sett nyanseras eller inte förekommer i de brittiska artiklarna eftersom stort utrymme ges till demonstranterna att uttrycka sitt budskap och mål samtidigt som en tydlig distinktion mellan provokatörer och fredliga demonstranter oftast görs.

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This comparative analysis explores the state repression experienced by The Black Panther Party, which was active mainly during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the currently biggest movement for racial equality in the US, the Movement for Black Lives. Using Conflict Theory and Critical Race Theory the research asks two research questions: How has state repression changed from the Black Panther Party to the Movement for Black Lives? and What are possible explanations for this change? This thesis aims to shed light on state repression in relation to movements focused on black rights and equality. The findings of this research are in line with conflict theory, and supportive of racial threat perspective as a theoretical framework. The thesis concludes that state repression of black dissent has changed in multiple aspects, such as police violence, legislative measure, surveillance, and media framing, yet is still prevalent and harmful to social movements.

This diploma thesis deals with the framing of the Black Lives Matter movement and related protests in the Czech news media. The aim of this work is to reveal the way in which the Czech media informed about the Black Lives Matter movement with the help of quantitative content framing analysis. The theoretical part of the thesis deals with the theory of social and media construction of reality by Berger and Luckmann, which plays the role of an overarching theory. It also deals with the agenda-setting theory, which it expands with the concept of framing. The agenda-setting theory describes the ability of the mass media to influence the significance of topics in the eyes of the public. The theoretical part also describes a brief history of the Black Lives Matter movement and the events that led to its emergence. Furthermore, the relationship of the mass media to racism is introduced and the concept of the protest paradigm is introduced. The work then describes the previous findings of the protest paradigm, which are then used in the analytical part. The methodological part then presents the research goal, questions and hypotheses, defines the sample set and the research method used, including the characteristics of individual variables. The analytical part of the thesis presents the results of the...

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During 2020, the human rights movement Black Lives Matter, BLM, gathered new momentum after the eight minute recorded murder of George Floyd by an American police officer caught widespread global attention. By the end of the year the BLM protests had spread internationally, with a purpose to most of all bring the issues of structural racism in their own country to the surface. This sparked a debate in Sweden and earlier research show that the dominant understanding of racism is that of racism as individual, caused by certain deviant individuals. The structural understanding of racism, the one where racism is a global power structure, has been on the outer margins of the Swedish debate since the 90’s, but gathered more spread from 2012 and forward thanks to academics and journalists studying post-colonialism, but the individual understanding of racism is still the dominant one. This study aims to analyze and gain a deeper understanding of how ideas are constructed around the understanding of racism in Sweden in relation to BLM and to analyze main arguments and patterns to see if gaslighting is exercised. With structural racism and gaslighting as theoretical frames together with Norman Faircloughs critical discourse analysis as method, the study finds that the debate was still in those two different understandings; questioning discourse and reproducing discourse. Within the questioning discourse, postcolonial ideas and theories were being made, while the reproducing discourse would admit to structural racism in America, but denied its existence in Sweden. They denied structural racism by accusing BLM and the antiracists of importing American “race ideas”, importing a “made up history” to Sweden which are all patterns aligned with gaslighting. Which one of these discourses that will “win” will have an impact on our view of racism and will thus have political, judicial, structural and social consequences along with changes for systems of knowledge and meaning.