Thesis advisor: Josh Seim / In this thesis, I examine what motivated individuals to join the movement against the expansion of the Line 3 pipeline in Northern Minnesota and to stay in the movement even after the pipeline was successfully expanded in 2021. Drawing from a digital ethnography and semi-structured qualitative interviews with 11 members of the Line 3 movement, I find that individuals joined the Line 3 movement because they had relationships with members of the movement and because they were concerned that the Line 3 pipeline expansion would harm the environment and Indigenous people in Minnesota. Moreover, while many people were disappointed that the movement failed to stop the expansion of the Line 3 pipeline, I find that people stayed in the Line 3 movement even after the pipeline was expanded because they believed the movement was capable of success and because they felt that they needed to monitor and shut down the Line 3 pipeline and other pipelines in the area. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Sociology.

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How does one get re-elected in times of crisis? According to research on nationalism, praising the nation doesn’t hurt – in fact, nationalistic discourse can contribute to creating a “rally-round-the-flag” effect that benefits the ruling party. This study examines how the Swedish Social Democratic Party uses nationalistic framing in two election campaigns: in 2018, and – after a period of historic economic, health- and security-related crisis – in 2022. Has the party’s framing of policy become more nationalistic, after a period of substantial hardship and growing threat from a nationalistic party attracting working-class voters? Using a combination of inductive and deductive framing analysis approaches, the study finds that a significant nationalistic reframing has indeed taken place, primarily taking focus from a humanistic narrative that was prominent in 2018. The results shed light on what researcher Michael Billig calls the “banal nationalism” of contemporary society, and on how political communication can be – purposefully or unknowingly – changed depending on the context. Finally, the results raise questions about (1) to what degree the Swedish Social Democratic Party strategically changed their communication, and (2) what the consequences may be. These questions may serve as inspiration for future research.

This book chapter indicates a further application of theories of multimodal communication applied to naturally occurring text, in this instance to documentary film making. Instead of producing a model of genre the intention here was to perform a descriptive analysis of composition in the documentary form as a whole and applied to a specific film, Godfrey Reggio¿s Koyanisquatsi. The analysis here was intended to establish further low-level spatial attributes that could be applied to visual and multimodal texts. Framing is a particularly powerful yet often transparent feature of multimodal texts and this chapter was an attempt to develop a rigorous application of many aspects of composition to the critical analysis of film. This is another natural progression from the previous publication as the intention here was to embed the use of framing as a technique in the construction of multimodal texts, such as film, within the critical discourse of representation in film. In doing so the chapter draws from many different `flavours¿ of semiotic theory, from theories of visual design, linguistics, and theories of `spectacle¿. This book chapter is one of the first extended applications of framing from the perspective of multimodality to the documentary film genre. It also brings together important critical approaches to film into a unified theory of representation in the documentary form.

Emerging groups such as the involuntary celibate (incel) subculture are finding new ways of reproducing real-world harm and violence against women making international headlines. Media portrayals of gender-based violence (GBV) are often problematic and at times inaccurate representations of the phenomenon. This qualitative content analysis of incel depictions in news articles published in Canada, the US, and the UK demonstrates that news media framing of the incel subculture is varied and multidimensional. The findings indicate four salient incel frames: "humanized" incels, "debilitated" incels, "sinister" incels, and "cyber" incels, each constructed using distinctive scripts that capture particular elements and describe both incel members and the subculture as a whole. More broadly, these frames can be organized into two distinct interpretations, the personalized and the politicized approach. The findings of this analysis reveal a tendency for the media to frame the incel subculture as a group of strange outcasts and 'weirdos', as well as potentially dangerous individuals. Pathologizing incel members as deviant others, distinct from ordinary men, can be problematic as it suggests that explicit sexism is confined to these small groups rather than being symbolic of wider societal perspectives and behaviours.

A small island nation near Australia was invaded and occupied by the Indonesian military regime in 1975, which lasted until 1999. This dissertation examines the global solidarity movement, whose success was due to the skill of its leaders, the collective agency transnational mobilization, effective social movement framing, which helped to create, act upon, and transform important critical junctures throughout the conflict. The East Timorese resistance movement against the Indonesian occupation took an ethnically and politically fragmented society and transformed it into a powerful transnational resistance movement that brough together military, clandestine, diplomatic, and global civil society actors together in supporting East Timor’s right to self-determination. Social movement frames punctuate the severity, immorality, and injustice of conditions. However, existing accounts on claims-making, framing trajectories, and outcomes tend to downplay the influence of contingency and indeterminacy in social movements. Indeed, as social constructionists contend, collective constructions are historically produced and culturally contingent. As claims-makers advance public claims developed within institutional realities, this underscores the range of contingencies and uncertainties actors manage in mobilizing their agendas. With East Timor's case, this sandwich thesis contends that understanding social movement framing and trajectories requires keeping institutional, discursive, and geopolitical contexts intact. Movements are embedded in histories, institutions, or fields that shape the outcome of framing trajectories and the outcome of social movement claims-making. However, social constructionists help us understand that resources, frames, and opportunities are perceived and constructed by actors. Therefore, the theoretical perspective provides substantial credence to the roles of contingency and human agency in social movement mobilization. Ultimately, objective structures, such as political/discursive opportunities or legal texts, are not enabling but generate social movement action insofar as moral agents perceive them. Often, this work is discursively constructed. This reality underscores the dimension of contingency in social action and social movement framing and mobilization because objective structures do not automatically determine what actors will select as a specific course of collective action or framing strategies. Frame and framing trajectories are particular to, and instantiated in, the contexts and develop over time as moral agents mobilize meaning by interacting with targets, sensitive to local conditions, emergent contingencies, and competing interests. By focusing on the social framing process, I show how framing or collective action frames emerge and are diffused in different ways across national contexts. The emphasis is not to address the broader institutionalized logics, such as political/discursive opportunities and geopolitics, but to understand how these aspects are incorporated in the framing practices of moral agents as strategic action as “endogenous to a field of actors” (Lounsbury et al., 2003:72), whose interests and national, not only transnational, but embeddedness also influence the interactional dynamics of their framing actions and trajectories. In this way, framing practices can be understood as struggles over audiences' minds and hearts, where actors compete in moral politics to secure symbolic power and political legitimacy. The macro-level logic indeed impacts the structure of frames. The diffusion and acceleration of claims within historically contingent events depend simultaneously on pre-existing, strong cultural framing and an influential social movement culture rooted in the abstract ideals of human rights that are transnationally dispersed but integrated. Strategic framing choices depend on various logic. Firstly, expanding political and discursive opportunities is crucial in accelerating mobilization. Moreover, the diffusion of frames and public claims can further propel mobilization and help to build convergences across sociopolitical allies. Agency and structure are often interpenetrating. Namely, depending on the choices made by actors at specific ‘critical junctures,’ they can either propel the social force of mobilization or hamper it, depending on perceived choices (agency). Social movements, especially transnational advocacy networks, prove more effective in frame diffusion when they build solidarities around shared meaning and international norms (human rights) that allow them to converge effectively around shared purposes and sustain collective mobilization across extended periods. Transnational networks of solidarity (the global solidarity movement) harnessed collective mobilization at the global level by converging the diffusion of their frames and claims around human rights talk. The thesis also considers various logics such as path dependency, contingency, historical events, and geopolitics in shaping the national and global movement mobilization and claims-making field. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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