Stefania Vicari's research while affiliated with The University of Sheffield and other places

We investigate the relationship between platform visibility and meaning making. Drawing on a quanti-quali investigation of hashtag practices in a cross-platform dataset, we explore how hereditary cancer is constructed, as an issue, on social media. Our findings provide strong evidence of significant variations across Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, with hashtag practices on these platforms tapping into platform-specific understandings of hereditary cancer: a pink ribbon issue on Instagram, the opportunity for non-normative exposures of bodies, pain and acceptance on TikTok and a scientific matter on Twitter. Platforms do not dictate choice, but their encounter with user interpretations, given similar material constraints (hashtag technology), lead to very different affordances. These affordances shape practices and, ultimately, meaning making. While raising concerns on the impact platform visibility might have on experiences and understandings of hereditary cancer, our work suggests broader implications for how we imagine and respond to the issues we care about.

We investigate the interplay of platform mechanisms and user tinkering in relation to invisible health conditions and ultimately challenge approaches that picture platforms as either hegemonic or liberating. We draw on initial findings from a project focused on social media uses relevant to hereditary cancer syndromes. These conditions are invisible in at least three ways. Cancer genetic risk is evidence-based and embodied, but not bodily visible. General health practitioners rarely know about hereditary cancer syndromes. Overall, hereditary cancer syndromes have not yet entered the wider collective imagination. Existing research provides evidence that individuals with these conditions turn to social media to seek, learn, produce and share information. However, little do we know about how these practices form at the intersection of embodied experiences, everyday social media uses, and platform mechanisms. In this paper we explore these dynamics drawing on a social media analysis that incorporates data from Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram and combines computational and ethnographic techniques. When it comes to invisible health conditions, the voice of ordinary social media users easily overcomes that of traditional elites. Local platform mechanisms differently shape how information is shared and who and what become more visible and credentialed in these sharing practices. They also influence how and which personal experiences are more curated and shared. These initial findings suggest that social media platforms are essential in making the invisible visible but raise questions on how participating in one or more platforms’ “local worlds” might affect the lived experience of those who embody this invisible.

On 15 July 2016, Turkey faced a military coup attempt against the government. Most Turkish citizens learned about the coup attempt from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who contacted a television channel using FaceTime and urged citizens to go into the streets to resist it. Social media platforms, such as Twitter, were used heavily by Turkish citizens, with hashtags such as #TurkeyCoupAttempt, #darbeyehayir, #NoCoupInTurkey and #TurkeyCoup all trending during this period. This paper focuses on one of the most important anti-coup hashtags, #darbeyehayir (NoCoup), to examine how it was used during the anti-coup protests. By applying a mixed methods approach for Twitter content under the hashtag, the aim of the study is to unveil motivational frames used to call for action and provide a rationale for those participating in anti-coup protests. Results demonstrate that the framing dynamics emerging in the hashtags publics in which pro-Erdoğan supporters were dominant and used this process to provide support to the government during the ‘coup’. The hashtag was mainly used as a tool for government propaganda rather than encouraging civic discussions and participation, and ultimately democratic acts in authoritarian countries.

After navigating conceptual and empirical developments in frame analysis research, I reflect on cornerstones and weaknesses in its elaboration of a rigorous analytical prism. In the reflection, I discuss how combining the frame analysis conceptual toolkit with linguistics work on semantic grammars can perhaps help heal some of these weaknesses.

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This book centres on questions about being human that are raised by the current pandemic and addresses these through a series of short, accessible, and thought-provoking essays that range across disciplinary boundaries. The Covid-19 crisis poses massive challenges for citizens, businesses, policy makers and professionals around the globe. The pandemic has highlighted the deep divisions and inequalities that already existed, whilst at the same time opening-up new fissures and fractures in society. However, the crisis also presents an opportunity to fundamentally rethink many aspects of social, cultural, and economic life. Three key issues have emerged in this context that are fundamentally concerned with the experience, meaning, and understanding of being human. These are at the core of this collection. Firstly, the marginalisation of many groups of people, most notably members of BAME communities, disabled, young, older, and displaced people and how they are de/valued in the response to the virus. Secondly, the role of new scientific knowledge in these processes of inclusion and exclusion. Little attention has so far been paid to the central role of science in shaping our understanding and experience of the pandemic. Thirdly, the remaking and reordering of society as a result of the pandemic and the opening up of new futures for work, the environment, culture, and daily life. Consideration of how we might better make the future are still missing from public discussion of the post-Covid world. In addressing these critical issues this collection makes a valuable contribution to one of the most pressing issues of our time.

Social media platforms are increasingly looked at as means to investigate social phenomena like collective events, issues or causes. Digital methods – techniques exclusively focused on online data and shaped by the environment hosting these data – have become part and parcel of these investigations, often approaching platforms as hybrid assemblages of users, infrastructures, and algorithms. In its ‘online groundness’, this type of digital methods research, however, often tends to skim over the socio-cultural, contextual dimension of both wider social phenomena and social media uses and practices. In this paper, we advance a threefold contribution aimed at both sparking future efforts to address this limitation and aligning digital methods inquiry with contemporary epistemological debates that counter universalistic views of platforms and data. First, we question the degree to which digital methods can inform social investigations of collective events, issues or causes. Second, we advance a digital methods paradigm that addresses platforms as socio-cultural artifacts rather than hybrid assemblages. Finally, by reflecting on how we accessed, handled, and explored 9,000 Instagram visuals and around 400,000 Facebook comments to understand influences on middle class understandings of food consumption in Brazil and South Africa, we illustrate a way to design culturally sensitive digital methods research built on ‘quanti-quali’ practices.