Narrating Stance, Morality, and Political Identity: Building a Movement on Facebook 2020054730, 2020054731, 9780367895587, 9780367776411, 9781003025085

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NARRATING STANCE, MORALITY, AND POLITICAL IDENTITY

This book offers unique insights into the use of Facebook after the 2016 US presidential election, interrogating how users in private groups draw on individual experiences in movement building and identity construction while also critically reflecting on ethnographic practices around social media. The volume draws on the author’s own involvement in a specific Facebook group focused around activism and community organizing in Texas following the 2016 US presidential election. Chapters draw on the frameworks of “small stories” and “stance” to unpack the ways in which group members use parts of their individual stories to signal beliefs to others, present themselves in relation to the group, and signal virtues of moral authority on various pressing political issues. Building on these analyses, Zentz goes on to address ways in which the scales of politics are being navigated and modified at the grassroots level in our highly networked world. This book contributes to ongoing conversations about the realities of internet use within linguistic anthropology and new media studies, and how researchers might seek to account for social media use and access to this data as these technologies develop further. This book is key reading for students and scholars in linguistic anthropology, media studies, and activism and social movement studies. Lauren Zentz is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Houston, USA.

ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN NARRATIVE, INTERACTION, AND DISCOURSE

A Narrative Approach to Social Media Mourning Small Stories and Affective Positioning Korina Giaxoglou Narrating Stance, Morality, and Political Identity Building a Movement on Facebook Lauren Zentz

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Narrative-Interaction-andDiscourse/book-series/RRNID

NARRATING STANCE, MORALITY, AND POLITICAL IDENTITY Building a Movement on Facebook

Lauren Zentz

First published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Lauren Zentz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zentz, Lauren, author. Title: Narrating stance, morality, and political identity : building a movement on Facebook / Lauren Zentz. Identifiers: LCCN 2020054730 (print) | LCCN 2020054731 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367895587 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367776411 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003025085 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Facebook (Electronic resource) | Social media--Political aspects--United States. | Internet--Social aspects--United States. | Community organization--United States. | Presidents--United States--Election--2016. Classification: LCC HM743.F33 Z36 2021 (print) | LCC HM743.F33 (ebook) | DDC 302.23/1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054730 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054731 ISBN: 978-0-367-89558-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-77641-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02508-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

This book represents several acts of persistence. And way too many hours of YouTube Kids.

CONTENTS

List of Images List of Tables Preface: Some Context Acknowledgments Timeline Abbreviations 1 Biographies, Stance, and Moral Politics: Analyzing Stories in an Era of Destabilized Politics and Communication

x xii xiii xxi xxii xxiii

1

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

A New Era 1 Democracy and the Internet 3 Chronotopes, Scales, and Critical Junctures 13 Identity Work in Chronotopes 18 Pantsuit Republic Houston 28 Pantsuit Republic Texas and the Beginning of a Research Project 31 1.7 Focal Participants 33 1.8 Layout of the Book 36 2 Challenging Ethnography: The Ethics and Relationships of Online Research 2.1 “There hasn’t been anything good enough to replace Facebook”: An Approach–Avoid Relationship With Facebook 47

47

viii

Contents

2.2 Methodological Considerations 49 2.3 Navigating Interactions on Facebook 63 2.4 Seven A’s: Authorship, Audience, Acknowledgment, Alignment, Affiliation, Amplification, Algorithms 71 2.5 Bringing It All Together: A Framework for the Analysis of Stories and Stances on Facebook 84 2.6 A Summary of Methodological Approach and Analytical Tools 90 3 “Our newfound optimism in democracy”: Small Stories of Moral Inspiration, Epistemic Authority, and Affective Appeal

100

3.1 “Our newfound optimism in democracy” 100 3.2 Small Stories and Stances in the Formation of a Moral Political Mission 102 3.3 “It’s being the change you wish to see in the world”: Setting a Moral Tone 104 3.4 “I AM HERE AND I MATTER”: Demographic (Dis-) Alignment through Epistemic Stance 110 3.5 “I will personally escort him”: Affective Stance in Portraying Investment in Others 119 3.6 Compelling Stories: Stances and Virtues on Facebook 124 4 “You are a beautiful, talented, brilliant, powerful musk ox”: Alignment, Collaboration, and Bonding in the Formation of a Group Identity Online 4.1 Dona is 100% Authentic 129 4.2 Stories and Stances in the Formation of a Group Identity 130 4.3 “If you decide to show up and be a part of this fight, then I welcome you”: Collaboratively Entextualizing an Event Online 132 4.4 “I know that Joseph speaks honestly”: Collaboratively Formulating a Group Stance 141 4.5 “This group is here to support and uplift females first”: Controlling Discourse 147 4.6 “Metamorphosis”: “Becoming” Together 154 4.7 Constructing a “With”: Alignment and the Presentation of a Unified Moral Political Stance 159

129

Contents ix

5 “25 doors please”: Keeping Boots on the Ground and Fingers on the Phone in a Networked Nation

164

5.1 “25 doors please” 164 5.2 Nationalized Politics, Localized Activism, Translocal Collaborations: A Re-Scaling Is Afoot 165 5.3 Localizing Action 168 5.4 A Nationwide Community of Localized Resistance 171 5.5 Moral Indexical Figures: Bonding around National Icons 176 5.6 Scale and Scalability: Local Meetings, Translocal Networks, National Politics 186 5.7 Resist! A Moral Political Project of Re-Scaling the Nation 192 6 Biographies, Stance, and Moral Politics: Saving the Nation in the Social Media Age

199

6.1 Destabilized Communicative and Participatory Structures 199 6.2 A Framework for Analyzing Stories and Stances on Facebook 203 6.3 Saving the Nation in the Social Media Age 206 6.4 Resistance as a Lifelong Moral Commitment 207 Epilogue Appendix A: Data Coding and Collection Information and Examples Appendix B: Presentation of Data Index

214 218 233 238

IMAGES

Map of Texas 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1

Blocked out comments/names in secret group posts Blocked out comments/names in personal Wall posts A pinned post in PSRH Anatomy of a Facebook post Tagging in a header Creating a post on a mobile device In-text tags Attending Candidate Forum Watching ... Black Girls Matter #November #CALLTOACTION #DontSayNothin Facebook reaction buttons Bumping a post Amazing turnout of ultranationalists Afraid of getting wet Dona’s “bathrobe meditations” The “Jello girls” I thought I was the only one I AM HERE AND I MATTER “I will personally escort him” Image of L in video Abbott’s response

xx 60 61 66 69 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 79 81 83 87 89 102 105 112 114 120 121 134

Images xi

4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1

A.1 A.2

A.3 B.1 B.2 B.3

#WeChooseHouston “pushing back against the TEA” “I have two families” “y’all aren’t listening” He does not make this post lightly I know that Joseph speaks honestly #LadiesWeGotYou Thanks, Jessica! “Good morning Re-sisters!” Snowflakes No, Ted Cruz doesn’t deserve peace Walk with me Send us well wishes Do not allow these atrocities to die with the news cycle My just-turned-one-year-old daughter at the March for Black Women, Emancipation Park, Houston, March 16, 2019 An original post from Dona. Original posts were coded in Atlas.ti Screenshot containing the one response to Dona’s original post (Image A.1 above). This was not coded but instead kept for reference The webpage that Dona linked to in her original post. This was not coded but instead kept for reference Tagging other participants Nested brackets I thought I was the only one

136 137 138 142 145 145 149 150 168 178 182 188 189 191

211 221

222 223 234 235 236

TABLES

1.1 2.1 A.1 A.2 A.3 A.4 A.5 A.6 A.7

Language scales in time and space Types of communicative groupings on Facebook Coded screenshots per participant, by location and quantity Final codes used in analysis on Atlas.ti Number and type of interviews conducted per focal participant Generic Interview 1 form for all participants Joseph Interview 2 questions, sent November 24, 2019, completed November 28, 2019 Lucy Interview 3, sent August 13, 2019, completed August 15, 2019 Dona, Interview 4, conducted June 13, 2019

14 65 220 224 227 228 229 229 230

PREFACE Some Context

Did I Miss Something? I spent almost a full calendar year away from the United States from 2009 to 2010, conducting my fieldwork for my dissertation in Indonesia. While I steadily followed US news from afar, via both social media and news sites, something out of the ordinary hit me when I came home. I remember distinctly being out and about after landing back in Tucson, and seeing a sign containing a name that was curiously new to me: the Tea Party. It was immediately clear that this was some sort of right-wing movement, but I had absolutely no idea where it had come from, and how, after having been gone for only a year, something entirely new like this could already be captivating certain Americans’ attention or political ideals. Had I missed something that was going on before I left? Perhaps. But it turns out that basically the entire notion of a Tea Party did indeed arise during that exact year that I was gone. As Skocpol & Williamson (2016) describe, the movement was born when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli proclaimed from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange the day after the federal government announced their “Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan” to help millions of homeowners avoid foreclosure that the government was making a mistake in subsidizing “the losers” and instead foreclosure buyouts should be made by people who “might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water” (The Heritage Foundation 2009). When he stated this, the stock-market employees behind him cheered his commentary, with one sarcastically proclaiming “What a novel idea!” Santelli went on to state: “You know, Cuba used to have mansions and, and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective, now they’re drivin’ ’54 Chevies, maybe the last good

xiv Preface

car to come out of Detroit.” And then, “We’re thinkin’ of having a Tea Party in Chicago in late July. All you capitalists who’d love to stop by Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.” And finally, “Listen alls I know is, is that there’s only about 5% of the floor population here and I talk loud enough they can all hear me. So if you wanna ask ’em anything let me know, these guys are pretty straightforward and my guess is, a pretty good statistical cross-section of America, the silent majority1.” The camera pans out to, from what I can see in this now pixelated video, a sparse group of young-to-middle-aged White men working the stock exchange (ibid.). The broadcast switches back to the studio anchor, where also present is none other than Wilbur Ross, the United States Secretary of Commerce under Donald Trump, who states: “Rick I congratulate you on your new incarnation as revolutionary leader.” Notably, that the “losers” Santelli mentioned (recipients of “subprime mortgages”) were at the root of this crisis was a theory disproved by later economic analysis. The root cause had actually been what were considered “prime” loans—loans to people considered secure debt risks. These were the people who presumably could, in Santelli’s words, “carry the water”—who had invested heavily in buying and flipping residences as or before they were being built, to inflate the prices and sell off the properties before they had ever lived in them (Albanesi, De Giorgio, & Nosal 2017; Subprime mortgage crisis 2020). Regardless of the veracity of Santelli’s victim blaming, as Skocpol & Williamson write: “Across the country, disgruntled conservatives perked up” (2016, p. 6). The Tea Party symbolism was perfect patriotic indexing for a subset of people who felt that “the United States as they have known it [was] slipping away.” The authors go on: When Santelli issued the call for “Tea Party” protests, web-savvy activists recognized this rhetorical gold. Operating at first through the online socialnetworking site Twitter, conservative bloggers and Republican campaign veterans took the opportunity offered by the Santelli rant to plan protests under the newly minted “Tea Party” name. Right-wing radio jocks and bloggers started circulating information on how would-be Tea Partiers could hook up with local and regional organizers to “take back” the country. (Ibid.) After the 2008 election of Barack Obama and Santelli’s 2009 Tea Party moment, not only were right-wing grassroots movements awakened and formed, but the Fox News media juggernaut was there and ready to capitalize on their foundation. National organizations and think tanks designed to place candidates at state and federal seats, often organized by “ultra-free-market” and generally ultra-right-wing groups and singular billionaires, most notably the Koch brothers, of the very opaque fossil fuel conglomerate Koch Industries (Dickinson 2014), had been

Preface

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waiting for this moment and immediately capitalized on it. Translocal and nationwide organizations that were not connected with local Tea Partiers directly formed in order to take advantage and spread their own ideologies, which were certainly related to many of the ideologies held by Tea Partiers but were not necessarily as diverse as the ideologies represented among its grassroots cohorts. These larger organizations in turn pushed candidates who fell well to the right of the until-then GOP platform and capitalized on low turnout elections as well as White middleclass anger at Obama’s win in order to gain legislative seats. As the movement grew, politicians themselves at the federal (national) level were happy to make use of the Tea Party label in order to grab attention and votes. A prominent example is Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann appointing herself the chair of the House “Tea Party Caucus.” The likes of the Kochs capitalized on this Tea Party wave and funded much of this unseating of the GOP’s more centrist infrastructure. In fact, as Skocpol & Williamson (2016) point out, the Koch empire is indeed by now more powerful than the GOP (Dickinson 2014) —and Fox News has been happy to follow their lead, with an enormous audience ripe for the convincing. Throughout this period of far-right growth, it seemed the left-wing grassroots had fallen dormant. CNN and MSNBC, Fox News’s 24-hour media competitors on the “center” and “left,” respectively, did not come near competing with the numbers of Fox’s viewership. And the left writ large, while no stranger to big donors and covering a much wider array of political ideologies than the right, had nothing like the Koch brothers to fund and consolidate a singular message and political platform. Under Obama’s 2008–2016 presidency, and with specific reference to the ideological and moral perspectives of the group of progressive activists represented in this book, we might say that despite any criticisms we (I include myself as a member of this group) may have had for our various levels and systems of government during that time period (and there were many), we had felt that there was a certain security in place; a certain surety that our ever faulty democracy (or already “post-democracy,” Spencer-Bennett 2018) would stay in place and that movements toward equality were stable if not improving. The “long arc of history” indeed seemed, to many of us, to be bending toward justice. However, the rise of Obama and the accompanying empowerment of non-White voices throughout the country in 2008 and the campaign season running up to it had been, for Tea Party activists, subsequently congressional members of the House “Freedom Caucus” (DeSilver 2015), and then supporters of the candidacy of Donald Trump, a deep threat (Klein 2020, Skocpol & Williamson 2016). As Tea Party activists and politicians, Fox News anchors and commentators, and then Trump gave this resentment a platform (Terrill 2017), and as Trump’s voice grew stronger throughout the presidential primaries in 2016, this, in turn, posed a deep threat to the sense of security in our future and in democracy that the members-to-be of Pantsuit Republic had had prior. With Trump’s electoral victory along with the election of many far-right Republicans down-ballot (in federal, state, and local

xvi Preface

elections), it was clear to us that White supremacy had been officially mainstreamed again (cf. Meyer 2018), and that whatever our criticisms of the Obama administration and the state of American democracy and government had been prior, this was truly something that we could not let stand. All of a sudden, in the wee hours of the night of November 8/morning of November 9, 2016, we transitioned from a critical confidence in the condition and future of our nation and our society to a feeling of “red alert”—a moral panic (Cameron 1995; Cohen 1972; Kong 2006)—as we faced an ugly and very threatening new reality that had been officially mainstreamed with Trump as figurehead. As CNN commentator Van Jones described it on election night, this was a “‘whitelash”2 (Ryan 2016).

What This Book Is About Says Tilly regarding social movements, “History helps … because it calls attention to the shifting political conditions that made social movements possible” (2004, p. 3; see also Baym 2009). I include this here because this book is not about the Tea Party. It is about a left-wing, “progressive,” and “intersectional feminist” grassroots movement called Pantsuit Republic that was born after Donald Trump was elected president on November 8, 2016. I start our story here, though, with a story about the Obama era, the Tea Party, and its networked growth because this recent historical context that laid the groundwork for Trump’s rise3 both frames the movement I document in this book in terms of the local, translocal, and nationally networked nature and strategies of their movement, and frames the sociopolitical chronotope that led to Trump’s election: one where the American political left got a little too comfortable with Obama at the head of the nation, while a strongly locally, translocally, and nationally networked and funded right-wing movement turned itself into a juggernaut and caught many on the left off guard, sending people like those who formed Pantsuit Republic into “emergency mode” when Trump was officially elected. In the grand scheme of things, this book is about a multiscalar and networked battle for the “moral political” soul of the nation in an era when the “chaotic,” “hybrid” media systems (Chadwick 2013; Karpf 2018) that we all circulate through are simultaneously allowing the powerful to get more powerful and more central in terms of their control of information and politics while also affording many of us opportunities to democratize and decentralize information and politics in new ways. In this book, I a) tell the story of Pantsuit Republic Texas’s and Pantsuit Republic Houston’s (PSR and PSRH) interwoven development from the morning after the 2016 election through the end of August 2019 when I stepped down from my position as Secretary of the PSR State Board; b) examine the narrative stancetaking strategies that participants—leaders in these two organizations—used on Facebook as they wove together salient biographical elements of

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their personal pasts with current events and online and offline activities, ultimately conveying who they were as individuals and as a unified group of activists; and c) examine how this fits into their project of rescaling of national politics within our current information era and nationwide chronotope. It is my aim in this book to weave together a story about people, activism, and our current political moment that speaks to scholars across academic fields and that hopefully draws in some undergraduates who might be more seduced into theory and analysis through stories first. As such, in this book I have chosen to start a majority of chapters with more relaxed ethnographic and autoethnographic narrative vignettes and to then transition to sociolinguistic and discourse analytic examinations in each chapter’s body that simultaneously continue to narrate the story of these activists’ and their groups’ development over time while also engaging in academic conversations around ethnographic methods for social media research, narrative and stance analysis, and grassroots political activism. While by no means structurally identical to any of the following, I find inspiration for this style of presentation in various sources, such as Graeber’s (2004) autoethnographic account of anarchist activists at the turn of the 21st century; Gilmore’s (2016) combination of genres of memoir and various levels of discourse analysis; Lather & Smithies’ (1997) strong reliance on participant narratives; Mendoza-Denton’s (2008) highly skilled combination of storytelling and sociolinguistic analysis; and Skocpol & Williamson’s (2016) ethnographic account of Tea Party activism; as well as my own previous work (Zentz 2017), where stories of people and communities are interwoven with various levels of analysis. I rely on Graeber’s words to describe the approach I take here succinctly: this “ethnographic writing [is] the kind that aims to describe the contours of a social and conceptual universe in a way that is at once theoretically informed, but not, in itself, simply designed to advocate a single argument or theory” (2004, vii). With these goals in mind, I will frequently toggle across various levels of detail in my narrative analyses (cf. Heller 2011)—at times providing line-by-line explanation, at others exploring intertextual and collaborative discourses across speakers, at others simply providing vignettes, as necessitated by the goals of the analysis (see Appendix B for the specifics of how I have chosen to represent the data throughout). If I am at times accused of having sacrificed depth for breadth in pursuing this goal, I plead guilty and promise to continue honing my skills, perfecting my craft—and figuring out how to analyze the quagmire that is language on Facebook. Turning to the activists featured in this book, Keane describes the historical and moral weight of self-conscious political actors’ activities: Morality systems are often shaped by self-conscious people who aspire to stand apart from the taken-for-granted flow of life in order to act upon it…. What these morality systems share is a propulsive movement, as large numbers of people take action in order to transform their ethical worlds. They are expressions of historical agency. (Keane 2016, p. 200)

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November 8, 2016, the night when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, was mostly certainly a propulsive political moment, and the participants featured in this book were all well aware that they were working tirelessly to alter the course of history.

Notes 1 This is, of course, an intertextual reference to Richard Nixon’s setting of the “basic template” of the current Republican Party and particularly of Tea Party values, built upon a self-characterization of a “law-abiding, tax-paying, ‘silent (mostly white) majority’” who demonized “Democrats as the party of liberals and the undeserving (disproportionately minority) poor whose dependence on social programs was taking money out of the pockets of hard-working, overtaxed (white) Americans” (Meyer & Tarrow 2018). 2 Interestingly, Meyer & Tarrow (2018, p. 33) point out that the GOP reaction to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was, similarly, a “white backlash” culminating electorally with the openly racist and populist presidential campaigns of George Wallace in 1964 and 1968 (see also Raines 1998) and Nixon’s 1968 win. Meyer & Tarrow convincingly argue that the racist veins of the current Republican Party are deeply rooted in a long and complicated history that was significantly shaped by reaction to the Civil Rights movement and the Democratic Party’s eventual endorsement of it (see also Klein 2020). 3 Zooming out a bit more, many analysts stated after the election that the numbers of that day—in terms both of how many people voted and how many voted Democrat or Republican—were right on target with many elections prior (Klein 2020). And so despite the massive upheaval that it generated, the election of Trump can still be considered a “normal” election for the era (see also Cohen et al. 2016; McAdam 2018).

References Albanesi, S. DeGiorgio, G., & Nosal, J. (2017). Credit growth and the financial crisis: A new narrative. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 23740. Retrieved 03/23/2020 from https://www.nber.org/papers/w23740.pdf. Baym, N.K (2009). Answer to question six: What constitutes quality in qualitative internet research? In A.N. Markham & N.K. Baym (eds.), Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, pp. 173–189. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cameron, D. (1995). Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge. Chadwick, A. (2013). The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. New York: Oxford University Press. Cohen, M., McGrath, M., Aronow, P., & Zaller, J. (2016). Ideologically extreme candidates in U.S. presidential elections, 1948–2012. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 667, 126–142. Cohen, S. (1972). Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon & Kee. DeSilver, D. (2015). What is the House Freedom Caucus, and who’s in it? Pew Research Center. Retrieved 10/19/2020 from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/ 20/house-freedom-caucus-what-is-it-and-whos-in-it/. Dickinson, T. (2014). Inside the Koch brothers’ toxic empire. Rolling Stone. Retrieved 10/ 19/2020 from https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/inside-the-kochbrothers-toxic-empire-164403/. Gilmore, P. (2016). Kisisi: Our Language. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Graeber, D. (2004). Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Heller, M. (2011). Paths to Post-Nationalism: A Critical Ethnography of Language and Identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Karpf, D. (2018). The many faces of Resistance media. In D.S. Meyer & S. Tarrow (eds.) The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement, pp. 143–161. New York: Oxford University Press. Keane, W. (2011). Indexing voice: A morality tale. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21(2): 166–178. Keane, W. (2016). Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Klein, E. (2020). Why We’re Polarized. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kong, L. (2006). Music and moral geographies: Constructions of “nation” and identity in Singapore. GeoJournal 65(1–2),103–111. Lather, P. & Smithies, C. (1997) Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/AIDS. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. McAdam, D. & (2018). Putting Donald Trump in historical perspective: Racial politics and social movements from the 1960s to today. In D.S. Meyer & S. Tarrow (eds.) The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement, pp. 27–53. New York: Oxford University Press. Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008). Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Meyer, D.S. (2018). Conclusion: Trumpism, the Resistance, and the future of American democracy. In D.S. Meyer & S. Tarrow (eds.) The Resistance: The Dawn of the AntiTrump Opposition Movement, pp. 246–264. New York: Oxford University Press. Meyer, D.S. & Tarrow, S. (2018). Introduction. In D.S. Meyer & S. Tarrow (eds.) The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement, pp. 1–25. New York: Oxford University Press. Raines, H. (1998). George Wallace, segregation symbol, dies at 79. The New York Times. Retrieved 04/07/2020 from https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/14/us/george-walla ce-segregation-symbol-dies-at-79.html. Ryan, J. (2016). ‘This was a whitelash’: Van Jones’ take on the election results. Retrieved 03/20/2020 from https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/09/politics/van-jones-results-disapp ointment-cnntv/index.html. Skocpol, T. & Williamson, V. (2016). The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Updated edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Spencer-Bennett, J. (2018). Moral Talk: Stance and Evaluation in Political Discourse. New York: Routledge. Subprime mortgage crisis. (2020). Wikipedia. Retrieved 03/23/2020 from https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis#cite_note-NBER23740-8. The Heritage Foundation. (2009). CNBC’s Rick Santelli’s Chicago Tea Party. Retrieved 03/23/2020 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-Jw-5Kx8k. Terrill, R.E. (2017). The post-racial and post-ethical discourse of Donald J. Trump. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 20(3), 493–510. Tilly, C. (2004). Social Movements, 1768–2004. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Zentz, L. (2017). Statehood, Scale and Hierarchy: History, Language and Identity in Indonesia. London: Multilingual Matters.

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Map of Texas © Google Maps 2020

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I remain forever indebted to and forever in admiration of the participants in this research project and the folks they collaborated with who worked truly tirelessly to advance the cause of their political movement. I would also like to thank my editor at Routledge, Elysse Preposi, and the editorial board of this series, Anna De Fina, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, and Ruth Page, for their constructive feedback and their gentle, collaborative deadline setting with me. Of course, all shortcomings of the text remain my own. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, my two children, and my dog for all the love and all the lack of sleep in my life. This book was written through a premature birth, potty training, and an uncontrolled pandemic. What a wild ride.

TIMELINE

November 6, 2016:

Dona forms Pantsuit Nation Texas looking to seize on Facebook’s connectivity for the purpose of local and statewide connection and activism. November 8, 2016: Donald Trump wins the United States presidential election November 9, 2016: Jess forms Pantsuit Nation Houston, which will switch to Pantsuit Republic Houston at the same time as the statewide group’s name change Late November 2016: A Houston friend adds me to the secret Pantsuit Republic Houston page Late November 2016: Pantsuit Republic Houston holds its first meeting December 2016: A call is circulated for group facilitators; I apply and am accepted as facilitator for the Committee on Intersectional Human Rights and Religious Tolerance June 2017: I step down from my role as facilitator of IHRRT July 2017: Joseph invites me to be secretary of the board of Pantsuit Republic Texas August 2017: I begin ethnographic research on Pantsuit Republic March 2018: Samantha and Joseph work with local students to put on the March for Our Lives Houston event following a Valentine’s Day school shooting in Parkland, Florida August 2019: I conclude ethnographic data collection on Pantsuit Republic Spring 2019: Joseph and Dona run for local schoolboard positions Winter 2020: Lucy runs for county commissioner seat and goes to a runoff Winter–Spring 2020: Coronavirus arrives

ABBREVIATIONS

ACA ACLU BLM FB GOTV HISD IH IHRRT IRB NARAL PAC PP PSN PSR PSRH PSR/H STAAR

Affordable Care Act American Civil Liberties Union Black Lives Matter Facebook Get Out the Vote Houston Independent School District Indivisible Houston Intersectional Human Rights and Religious Tolerance Institutional Review Board National Abortion Rights Action League Political Action Committee Planned Parenthood Pantsuit Nation Pantsuit Republic Texas Pantsuit Republic Houston both Pantsuit Republic Texas and Pantsuit Republic Houston State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness—Texas’s standardized education tests for K-12 students

1 BIOGRAPHIES, STANCE, AND MORAL POLITICS Analyzing Stories in an Era of Destabilized Politics and Communication

1.1 A New Era On the morning of November 9, 2016, I sat in my cozy hotel room in Depok, Indonesia, on the south end of Jakarta, staring at the television screen set to CNN, unable to move. I did not, in fact, move from the bed for four straight hours, and I skipped the final sessions of the conference that I was attending. In the Eastern time zone of the United States, with a 12-hour time difference, it was still late at night on November 8, and presidential election results were still coming in. I had started the morning with an uneasy confidence about the election—I’d gone downstairs to eat breakfast, read about Clinton and Trump on the front page of an Indonesian national newspaper, and headed to the first conference sessions of the morning. During the sessions, though, I started to see news notifications on my phone, and started to open and close my New York Times and Facebook apps, and whatever confidence I’d had all of a sudden found itself on shaky ground. I found that I was no longer at all able to pay any attention to my in-person context. After the first session of the day I stood in the hallway and checked for some more news, questioning whether or not I should go to another session given my increasing inability to concentrate on anything other than my notifications. I finally decided that I’d prefer to watch the election results roll in alongside my American friends on Facebook and my husband on Google Hangouts, rather than sit in a conference session completely distracted. I went up to my room, turned on CNN, and over the next four hours I watched “too close to call” states flip to red (Trump), again and again and again. Despite my dismay, I thanked the heavens for the existence of the internet and social media, because alone in my room, with few to no other Americans nearby to commiserate with, those affordances allowed me to hop online, post about my

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own internal reactions to what I was seeing, and respond to others’. In all, social media and the internet allowed me to seek social support from an otherwise very lonely place, in a very stressful moment, literally halfway around the world from my friends, family, and loved ones. I did not emerge from my room until the evening, when, having completely lost my appetite, I simply told myself I needed to get out of my cocoon and eat dinner. As I made my way to the mall that was attached to my hotel, I ran into some of the conference organizers, taking down the last tables at the conference venue. In a daze, I spoke with them about what had just happened, and they commiserated, seeming equally baffled and horrified: “I am so sorry.” In my continued mental haze, I quietly ate a chicken katsu in the food court amid Indonesia’s ever youthful and ebullient mall-going population, and then made my way back upstairs. For the remaining days of my week in Jakarta, I barely slept—never overcame my jet lag—managed to give a couple more talks, and then finally made my way home to Houston. A couple of weeks later, a local friend added me to a secret Facebook group called Pantsuit Republic Houston (PSRH). It was brand new, having formed the morning after the election, and was full of a whole bunch of women and a few men who all seemed to be united in feeling a similar state of emergency. As the group was newly forming and still figuring out who it was, all I knew was that it was a place where people were coming in droves to commiserate about the election results and to also look for ways to quickly and actively join together to resist the political, legislative, and cultural onslaught that we all saw coming down the pipeline. I attended the first in-person meeting of PSRH later that month, a standing-room-only event with around 200 enthusiastic attendees, led by an incredibly quickly formed, brand-new leadership team. Soon thereafter a call came out for “group facilitators”—individuals who would like to assume roles of leadership in specific topic areas and to organize activities around those topics. I applied for the role of facilitator of a group called Intersectional Human Rights and Religious Tolerance, and was accepted. Over the course of the next three or so years, as a peripheral member of the central group of leaders in both Pantsuit Republic Houston and then Pantsuit Republic Texas (PSR) volunteer activist communities, I came to know in varying capacities Dona, Lucy, Jess, Joseph, Samantha, Sarah, and Kara,1 the focal participants of this study, who were also members of the founding leadership teams of both PSRH and PSR. In online and offline spaces during this time, I both witnessed and participated in the two groups’ activities as the leaders acted tirelessly on their local sociopolitical environments and shaped these two organizations toward the goals of their moral and political ideals. As with much of life these days, the primary location of information distribution among PSR groups was on social media, particularly Facebook. It is from this vantage point that I conducted this study, examining how the group members shared individual stories, biographies, and opinions related to their activism, and how the group coalesced over time to form a unified identity that

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represented the moral and political mission of Pantsuit Republic and the larger scale but entirely decentralized, nationwide progressive movement that they became a part of. A brief word on where these organizations’ names came from: Pantsuit Republic Texas was originally founded by Dona as Pantsuit Nation Texas a couple days before election day in 2016. Pantsuit Nation was a secret Facebook group2 that preceded it, having formed during the 2016 campaign period as a place for Hillary Clinton supporters—mostly female and mostly White—who essentially needed a space to vent during the sometimes appalling events taking place as Trump and many who supported him tipped the scales of White nationalist ideologies into the mainstream (cf. Berry & Chenoweth 2018; Meyer 2018). Pantsuit Nation gained some national recognition—they were mentioned subtly by Clinton in her concession speech as members of “secret, private Facebook sites” whom she hoped would step into the limelight and “make sure your voices are heard going forward” (Lecher 2016). The group had millions of members, and as I write this today, in early 2021, it still has over 3 million (of which I am one). After the election, Pantsuit Nation (PSN) began to seek official status as a non-profit organization whose main goal revolved around story-telling, particularly related to women’s stories. As groups branched off from PSN after the election, they maintained a women-led structure, but many, like PSR and PSRH, quickly made clear that their mission and vision consisted of an explicit activist agenda organized around a “progressive” and “intersectional feminist” mission and vision. Here I define “progressiv(ism)” as “a social or political movement that aims to represent the interests of ordinary people through political change and the support of government actions” (Cambridge Dictionary 2020). Intersectional feminism is defined as “the idea that many women are members of other marginalized groups, which affects their experiences … [I]t means paying attention to the ways the gender-based discrimination and oppression a woman may experience can be compounded by her race, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, and more” (Desmond-Harris 2017). At the end of this chapter in Sections 1.5 and 1.6, I will explain more about my involvement in PSR and PSRH (when I refer to the two groups together throughout I will label them as PSR/H) and the advent of this research project, and then I will provide the reader with a proper introduction to the seven focal participants. First, though, an introduction of this book’s key context and concepts.

1.2 Democracy and the Internet In this book it is my aim to explore how a networked group of individuals came to form and grow their progressive activist organization at a “critical juncture” (Sonntag & Cardinal 2015)—a specific and remarkable moment in American politics when the moral political order of the country became, to them, unacceptably unjust. In the chapters to come, I rely primarily on data I collected on

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Facebook in this ethnographic study in order to a) tell the story of Pantsuit Republic Texas’s and Pantsuit Republic Houston’s interwoven development from the morning after the 2016 election through the end of August 2019 when I stepped down from my position as Secretary of the PSR State Board; b) examine the narrative strategies—particularly small stories and narrative stances— that participants used on Facebook as they wove together salient biographical elements of their personal pasts with current ideologies, events and online and offline activities, in order to convey who they were as individuals and as a unified group of activists; and c) examine how their online activities formed part of a networked attempt at rescaling a political and informational chronotope that they saw as inappropriately oriented toward a national scale of politics. In order to arrive at such understandings, we must first take a step back and understand how changes to communication infrastructures and political participation over time have set the stage for political engagement in its current form, reliant as it is on social media communications. In order to engage with these changes, I first discuss, in the subsections below, how our past and present media environments have shaped the nature of political engagement in general and activism more specifically. In Section 1.3 I will discuss the concepts of “chronotope” and “scale” as these help us to understand, in light of the political and technological histories laid out in the present section, the multiply layered and networked contexts that the activists featured in this book both functioned within and concurrently wished to alter in connection with their political mission. This contextualizing conceptual framework will set the scene for a description of the theoretical concepts (Sections 1.3 and 1.4) and methodological and analytical choices (Chapter 2) that I have made in this examination of seven activists’ negotiations of the moral politics of the era that they inhabited, before I move on to three chapters of data presentation and analysis in Chapters 3–5.

1.2.1 The Fall of Techno-Optimism The advent of the internet and later social media3 has generated many utopian discourses of a unified global village, and the perfection or at least great improvement and expansion of democracy everywhere (Barassi 2015; Treré 2019). Van Dijk & Hacker discuss three (overly) optimistic assumptions that were made at the dawn of the social media era: 1.

2. 3.

Digital democracy improves political information retrieval and exchange between governments, public administrations, representatives, political and community organizations and individual citizens. Digital democracy supports public debate, deliberation and community formation. Digital democracy enhances participation in political decision making by citizens. (2018, p. 17)

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In our current, much more jaded era, these optimistic expectations have been challenged, to say the least. While we can most certainly reach each other across borders like never before (cf. Srinivasan 2009), it is also the case that we can harm each other within and across borders like never before thanks to nefarious actors roaming throughout these platforms (and all too often given free roam on these platforms). The 2016 US election made this darker side of social media painfully clear after it was admitted that, aside from the trolls we all encounter in our mundane online experiences, the Russian government and other public and private organizations had quite shrewdly infested US political waters with trolls, bots, data mining and profiling tools, and election machine hacking devices, explicitly engaging in informational warfare (McNair 2019; Resnick 2016; Treré 2019; Van Dijk & Hacker 2018). This is one of countless examples that indicate that though we certainly are more connected, not all of this connection is good connection.4 It is also claimed that despite aspirations of unification, we are actually more siloed, or stuck in “echo chambers,” than ever (Bimber 2003; Eady et al. 2019; Van Dijk & Hacker 2018). That is, while social media and an (over)abundance of information have indeed given us the power to connect with and affect others and to access information across not just overtly defined geopolitical borders but also across sociopolitical divisions of class, race and ethnicity, gender and so on, many claim that they’ve also afforded us the opportunity to silo ourselves in ways that some claim are greater than ever before. With lives increasingly driven by personalization algorithms, we are able to choose what we see, and many of the platforms that we use take these preferences and further narrow our vision (cf. Karpf 2018). As such, there has been much concern in public and academic commentary about the ways in which social media individualizes us all. Such “techno-pessimistic” theories state that by labeling ourselves with a name, a profile picture, and so on, and by being able to modify what we see to a great extent by choosing groups to join and feeding algorithms that limit our feeds to what we already like or want to see, we have become too individualized—too narcissistic, too much labeled, or “branded” as individuals, and too able to choose to see only information that we agree with and filter out what we don’t want to see (Dennis 2019; Juris 2012; Miller et al. 2016; Papacharissi 2010). I approach such views with a great amount of skepticism for two primary reasons. First, while we are in many ways able to pick and choose more these days, this certainly isn’t necessarily worse than having to rely on three major national news programs, produced by very homogeneous newsrooms consisting primarily of middle-class White men, for much of our news consumption as we did throughout much of the 20th century. Jenkins et al. (2013) refer to these as “sticky media”: “centralized media serving steady content to a relatively isolated and passive audience” (cited in Van Dijk & Hacker 2018, p. 17; see also Hindman 2009; Newman 1971; Skocpol & Williamson 2016). Secondly, there is little to no evidence stating that social media are the only places where we get our news, or that our “filter bubbles” actually

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isolate us from incidental exposure to news items that other people are reading, posting, and talking about (Dennis 2019; Eady et al. 2019; Nelson & Webster 2017). It is also worth noting that this is not the first time in United States history that people have sought out their news according to their political persuasion: prior to the sticky media of the 20th century, news distribution was actually organized by political party (Hacker 2018). Much of the political debates that people engage in in our social media infused era in fact remains offline, through wider community discourses, television, radio, and other mass and local media sources (cf. Radsch 2016; Van Dijk & Hacker 2018) and among chosen and familial social groupings. In fact, many of the members of the groups under consideration in this book recounted contentious discussions, or complete exasperation that they were feeling, with family members who were supporters of Trump, politicians like him, and groups that supported him and his principles. These contentious debates with their family members were reported to take place in both online and offline encounters with them. It is worth considering, then, that though we are indeed doing a lot of choosing on our media platforms, and while social media platforms like Facebook, the one under consideration in this book, do a lot of personalizing for us through their algorithmic configurations, it may also be the case that we are seeing more information from more news sources than we ever have before. In this sense, it is arguably the case that sites like Facebook and Twitter actually expand our ability to get information by exposing us to more “word of mouth” shares of news items that we would not otherwise come across in either doing our own news searches or in consulting just one or two mass and/or local media sources. Viewed in this light, the social media contexts that we engage in actually serve to expand the number and type of contexts that we circulate through on a daily basis (Blommaert 2019). I say this not to praise social media corporations nor to claim that social media do not constrain in any way shape or form our information consumption; I simply wish to point out that broad-stroke assessments of social media’s effects on social and political conduct are diverse and difficult to truly understand, and that they have given rise to a plethora of new affordances alongside their numerous and truly problematic downsides. Indeed, others claim that all of the utopian and dystopian visions that accompany rises in new technologies and media form two sides of the same coin, a deterministic one where technologies are fetishized and treated as autonomous parties (Lim 2018). Treré states, Utopian and dystopian discourses exist on a common plane in the sense that they both function on a base of technological autonomy without understanding that all technologies and actors on/with/through technologies are social processes and structures that pre-date the technologies’ new arrival, and that also create their arrival. (2019, p. 109)

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And later: “It is … key to critically assess what technological myths mean to the people who produce them and believe in them, and what they reveal about the society that sustain them” (p. 113). We have in fact seen such mythologies arise with the advent of most new technologies that have changed the nature of communication over time. For instance, when the telephone was invented, techno-dystopians saw the end of face-to-face communication instead of enhanced ability to stay in touch across distances; with texting, some saw the end of language itself instead of creative new manipulations of text that require already relatively advanced literacies (McWhorter 2013; Mosco 2004; Treré 2019). On the flip side, when the telegraph, radio, and television were first introduced, techno-utopians saw a better path to the future and better hope for democracy (Hindman 2009; McChesney 1990; Treré 2019). Social media, too, has been seen as both devil and savior, but Van Dijk & Hacker point out that such dichotomies are lacking in nuance: The use of social media for democracy can be good or bad, but the bad use of these media by ISIS makes them into a quite different tool. Social media can be used for interaction or dialogue and for information, but for ISIS they are only a tool for propaganda and recruiting. Twitter can be used for political expression and dialogue, but President Trump is only using it for expression in the shape of a rhetorical megaphone. (2018, p. 17) That is, while the realities of good and evil uses of any new platform or technology are undeniable, it is more accurately the case that new communication technologies and platforms always work their way into and are products of existing structures of communication, information distribution, political, and social practices. It is in this light that I wish to examine in this study not “whether Facebook is good or bad,” in general or for activists, but rather how it fits within their activism and organizing repertoires: how they use it and interact on it, and how these practices are embedded within the complex and multi-layered political chronotopes that we currently circulate through (cf. Baym 2006, 2009; Dartnell 2006; Treré 2019). Ethnographic research is particularly suited to the exploration of such research questions (Hine 2015, and I will discuss my methodological approach in Chapter 2). In the next section I will explore how recent technologically mediated shifts in our collective communicative capacities are understood to have affected grassroots activism such as the work that our focal participants engaged in.

1.2.2 Social Media and Grassroots Activism Bimber (2003) explores the four major “information waves” that have shaped the United States’ body politic up to now. Beginning at the foundation of the United States with the publication of the Federalist Papers by Publius—also known

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as the collective author James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton— Bimber presents a long and complicated history that I will summarize in brief here for the purposes of contextualizing the informational dynamics that these activists were situated within as they began their activism project. Information structure and along with it political organization have changed over time from more geographical and regional, place-based constellations to more issue- and now event-based organization that is more often than not translocal in scope. News distribution has shifted over a long period of time from hierarchies of limited sources to less centralized, more accessible and greater amounts of information. With this shift in accessibility, hierarchies of information distribution and grassroots organizing have become more “democratized.” By democratized here I am addressing the notion that one leader or a few primary sources of information distribution no longer have to be the sole distributors of information and power. I am not stating that democratic participation (as in voting, primarily) has changed or increased over time because it most definitely has not (Bimber 2003; Hindman 2009; Hine 2015). As Van Dijk and Hacker state, amid the rise of social media platforms, “digital communication has risen dramatically across all age groups while political engagement has remained fairly flat across time, as has political knowledge and faith in the government” (2018, p. 17). Bimber explains that since the Industrial Revolution of the early 20th century shaped life with urbanization and mass migration, social life has been more individualized. In the United States, voting rates have barely exceeded 50% since 1920, due to a syndrome of factors including less political competition after 1896 party realignment, voter disenfranchisement practices and more difficult registration regulations, and increased presentation of information in “rationalized” ways instead of through more mobilizing emotional appeals (e.g., torch rallies, though one can see a return to this currently). In our current information era, this pattern holds. In addition to shifts in the structure of information distribution and access, and the lack of shift in political participation more generally, grassroots political structures and actions since 1920 have shifted from issues-based politics—union organization, issue-specific lobby groups, and the professionalization of those lobby groups over time (Hopkins 2018; Meyer 2018)—to largely event-based organizations whose membership is now expected to turn over at a rate of nearly 100% from flash point to flash point (think, perhaps, of people mobilizing around the inauguration of President Trump but not necessarily staying active in political organizing after that). Because information acquisition and distribution are now cheaper than ever, organizations have become able to procure more information from users in order to target them more precisely, which helps them waste less time and money on non-target audiences, reach out for money more frequently and on the spur of the moment (that is, they can capitalize immediately on major events and also on political scandals—the flash points mentioned above; see Klein 2020; Van Dijk & Hacker 2018), but it also leads, on the consumer side, to

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privacy concerns, information abundance and consequent burnout, and sometimes an inability to decipher “good” information from “bogus” information. For grassroots activists, the de-hierarchization of information structures each time it has occurred has allowed them to organize in new, more flatly structured ways (cf. Berry & Chenoweth 2018; Castells 2015; Graeber 2004). In the last two centuries, radio, telephone, online messaging boards, websites, email and now social media (Bimber 2003; Castells 2015; Graeber 2004; Skocpol & Williamson 2016) have been deployed in the interest of building and nourishing collective action. In the last 15 years, sites such as Twitter and Facebook have become very powerful organizing tools for movements big and small. Among the most famous and frequently discussed examples is the Arab Spring uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, for which a significant amount of organization and collaboration was conducted through Facebook and Twitter, using public groups and “fan pages” in the former and hashtags to make information (tweets) easy to find in a simple search within the latter (Castells 2015; Radsch 2016; Tufekci 2017). Tufekci (2017) discusses how Twitter was used in the Gezi Park Turkish uprising in 2013, Postill (2018) discusses how Spain’s 2011 indignados/15M movement made use of online spaces including their own self-made communication platforms, as do Radsch (2016) in Egypt and Graeber (2004) in the US in earlier moments in the history of information and communication technology (ICT) development. Movements such as Occupy (which is described as modeled off of the indignados/15M movement), in the United States and elsewhere, have made use of Twitter and other platforms such as WhatsApp to organize and to attract the attention of mass media in order to “scale up” (Postill 2018) their movements—to generate the press and attention that they needed in order to make their voices heard as they challenged public opinion about and media portrayals of government actions and status quos that contradicted their political wishes and beliefs. The various grassroots movements described above were coordinated among local, regional, national, and sometimes international networks of participants, as people local to the situation being protested often relied on support online and offline from friends and acquaintances not present in these specific geographic locales, over various social media platforms, and often, again, with little hierarchical structure (cf. Radsch 2016; Tufekci 2017). Unable to contact spokespersons for many of these leaderless movements, journalists have had to find new ways to get information from them by sifting through Twitter feeds and joining the protests on the ground (Bennett & Segerberg 2012). Additionally, Graeber (2004) and Radsch (2016) point out that many activists themselves become “citizen journalists” for each other, using “alternative media” (Atkinson 2019) such as blogs, independent news sites, and Facebook and Twitter feeds to recount experiences that they have personally witnessed but that would likely not make it into newspapers or news shows at any larger scale, or that they expected to be (or witnessed to be) portrayed in a light contrary to their own points of view. Van Dijk & Hacker (2018) describe

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such acts of citizen journalism as “narrowcasting” instead of the “broadcasting” conducted by mainstream news sources. Focal participant Joseph once put it a bit more colloquially: “Dude, my circle of goonies can break any story before anyone else. I love them to pieces” (Joseph, Personal, April 10, 2019; see Appendix B for an explanation of data citation practices throughout this book). Despite these novel affordances that have genuinely helped people to organize when their rights were being violated and their voices were being otherwise silenced, there is generally great skepticism that social media have any sort of power to generate long-term investment in movements (cf. Bimber 2003; Castells 2015; Olson 1971/1965; Tufekci 2017). According to Dennis (2019), however, contemporary online activism simply consists of new and different forms of participation. However small one’s acts are, they still constitute a part of the whole body of activist activities. That is, with the shifts in communication media that we have seen of late, activism does not always mean showing up at one place and time to rally or protest; in fact, it doesn’t always mean that one has to show up in a physical location at all, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.

1.2.3 Slacktivism Many people worry that participation in online political debates or activities of whatever sort, whether inside of “secret” groups such as those I will discuss in this book, or on one’s own Facebook “Wall” or Twitter “feed,” amounts to nothing more than “slacktivism.” Slacktivism is the notion that although we type, record, or live-stream highly emotive, sometimes even rhetorically powerful, commentaries on those in power and the agendas that they represent, we are really doing next to nothing, in making these posts, to actually change the situation (cf. Dennis 2019 for a lengthy foray into this topic). I am not quite so cynical that I am ready to fully accept the doctrine of slacktivism (and neither is Dennis, nor Van Dijk & Hacker 2018). In fact, I see this cynicism, as with the techno-dystopian theories discussed in previous sections, in light of Bimber’s statement that “dichotomies such as on-/offline tend to be artifacts of historical transition rather than useful for analysis” (2003, p. 9). That is, to claim that activism is only “really real” when it is face to face, and only “slacktivism” (read, simply not activism) when it is online, is a view colored by an ideological lens that sees online and offline worlds as separate, one as fake and the other real (Hine 2015). Such a treatment fails to see the integration of every communicative technology ever made, including social media, of course, into our “real” lives after similar periods of discomfort upon their arrival (Baym 2006, 2009; Dennis 2019). It also fails to see that people who post about politics online have been found to be more generally engaged with politics overall, as well (Johnson et al. 2010, Smith 2013). Among criticisms of the slacktivism variety, I have been unable to locate explanations of whether or not the number of people who invest themselves

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personally in any movement has changed over time and with changes in communication structures. In fact, I have not encountered data on whether and how active political participation in activism and social movements has really changed over time in terms of numbers and longevity of participants, and so I treat any commentary as more ideological (of a techno-dystopian hue) than factual in nature. As Skocpol & Williamson assert: In any political formation, true activists are just a tiny fraction of wider circles of sympathizers. The core activists are surrounded by an intermediate circle of attentive supporters—people on email lists, perhaps, who occasionally send a check or drop in on a well-publicized event. Both activists and attentive supporters are, in turn, surrounded by a ring of mostly passive sympathizers, the ‘couch potatoes’ of the movement. (2016, p. 22; see also Brooker 2018) Participation in politics and activism is in fact not even well defined in the first place. As Postill puts it, a more fundamental problem [regarding grassroots political participation is] the inherent human ambivalence towards participation … participation is like Wittgenstein’s ‘duckrabbit’ optical illusion: depending on what we focus on, we can see either a duck (real participation) or a rabbit (phony participation), but never the two at once. (2018, p. 42, citing Kelty 2017) The internet writ large and the Facebook social media platform as I approach it in this book have generally enabled people to have a wider scope of membership in momentary protests, and it has also allowed us to participate in smaller-scale ways that do not include always “being there” in a body-to-body sense (cf. Blommaert 2019; Dennis 2019; Treré 2019). However, we don’t see if such platforms have changed the fundamental nature or effectiveness of grassroots activism with respect to the basic number of and investment among people who involve themselves in social movements in the long and short terms. Regarding what changes have actually occurred in activist movements thanks to the internet and particularly widespread and easily accessible social media platforms, Micó & Casero-Ripolles (2014) point to two different schools of thought regarding the real or potential role of social media in organizing. One side states that social media only reinforce existing connections and therefore don’t really change the nature of activism per se; the other claims that online communications allow for new communication frameworks that allow for greater “extra-representative” communication (p. 860). By doing so, they change the nature of protest away from more traditional forms. It seems that there is clearly an argument for both—the landmark movements named in the previous section

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largely made use of social media in order to amplify in-person, on-street protests; but they also provided new paths for attracting large numbers of participants into their actions, and they allowed for new ways of communication with their own followers as well as members of the news media, who could follow the protests on the ground in person, but who were better informed by also following the groups in their online activities. In sum, single technologies do little to change the nature and structure of political participation (Bimber 2003; Van Dijk & Hacker 2018): if we do not examine sociopolitical systems and participation in them holistically, then we are missing out on how communicative ecologies work in what can now be considered technopolitical spheres of action (Treré 2019).

1.2.4 PSR, Facebook, and Investment in the Movement PSR and PSRH leadership relied on Facebook to form their movement, inform each other, and advertise events. This is not to say that they all even liked Facebook and it is certainly not to say that they trusted Facebook, as scandal after scandal about Facebook’s management made its way through the news cycle. However, they also found the power and scope of Facebook (its “affordances,” cf. Eisenlauer 2014) so great that they simply couldn’t take their movement elsewhere. For large group organizing, maintaining a group of movement members over time, creating events and having spaces for both “frontstage” and “backstage” communications, it simply was the best tool available (Treré 2019 found the same for Mexico’s #YoSoy132 movement). Other platforms the participants used to try to reach out to their groups on a large scale consisted of non-profit, activist-produced platforms such as Action Network and Amplify. They also tried moving the group over to a new and adfree (at least for its initial stages) platform called MeWe, and really very few members of the larger groups that they led paid attention to these attempts. The members of leadership agreed that this was essentially because people were already used to frequently logging on to Facebook for information, socialization, and activism if/when they partook. The leadership teams who dispersed their broader messages to the whole groups of PSR and PSRH communicated with each other in various types of interactions ranging from individual communications to groups of five to twenty people, and for these communications they relied on numerous platforms—really, the number of platforms was overwhelming. Among them were Slack, Messenger, Signal, text messaging, email, GroupMe, WhatsApp, Discord, and more. Individual participants also engaged independently on various other social media platforms like Twitter and Medium, and both PSR and PSRH had their own Twitter accounts, but the majority of communications within PSR and PSRH and by these participants individually happened on Facebook, and so that is where the focus of this study takes place.

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In the remainder of this chapter, I will describe how the group was situated amid their national and networked sociopolitical chronotopes, and how they communicated their moral political goals on their own Walls and their private group platforms within Facebook. I then close the chapter with a more detailed introduction of the organizations and the research participants in order to set the stage for the materials presented in subsequent chapters.

1.3 Chronotopes, Scales, and Critical Junctures Building from Bakhtin’s use of the term “chronotope,” literally “time-space,” linguistic anthropologists have come to define any context as consisting of numerous, complex and multilayered chronotopes (cf. Blommaert & De Fina 2017; Kroon & Swanenberg 2020). Kroon & Swanenberg write: all interactive events can be seen as chronotopically organized: situated in timespace, occurring as here-and-now while indexing a myriad of ‘historically configured and ordered tropes’ (citing Blommaert 2015: 111). These tropes, or culturally recognizable systems of meanings and values, are applied and made understandable through genres, by means of ideologized, normative and enregistered features and styles that index and codify specific timespace relations. Each chronotope installs its own discursive frames and orders of indexicality (and of authenticity). Each invocation of timespace also constitutes ascription of specific genres, registers, indexicals and other chronotopically relevant norms, and, as such, enactment of specific intentions, behaviors and effects. (2020, p. 15) Chronotopes are systems of meanings, practices, moral values, and material elements that condition our lives and that we also act upon in order to change the conditions of our lives. The systems of meaning and practice within any given chronotope consist of scales of social and political organization and evaluation that reside along different organizational planes, also conceived of in “spatiotemporal” terms (Carr & Lempert 2016). These levels and types of organization and meaning distribution shape the chronotope over longer- and shorter-term time scales, and “macro,” “meso,” and “micro” level geospatial configurations. I have begun this book by framing the participants and the story I tell about them within the nationally defined chronotope—“the United States of America”— depicted in the immediate past by a “critical juncture” (Sonntag & Cardinal 2015): the momentary and momentous change from the Obama presidency to the election of Trump on November 8, 2016. This recent, seemingly singular moment, at a macro or translocal level, though, inherits a certain set of sociohistorically shared indexicalities—the “way of life” of the nation, based in a certain, though dynamically contested, history (cf. Anderson 2006/1983). The translocal and “longue durée” historical time scale that the inhabitants of the United States inherit pertains to certain

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political borders, configurations of media and communication, a singular Constitution, and governmental structures organized hierarchically at national, state, and local levels. These borders, configurations, and hierarchies have changed over time, due to technological developments that have changed the communicative, transportational, and other infrastructures that connect members of the nation (cf. Bimber 2003), due to political expansion over time, and due to social and political movements that have changed the laws and sociopolitical norms of the nation. With all of these changes, indexical links pertaining to orders of meaning, identities, and morals have changed (Baynham & De Fina 2016; Blommaert & De Fina 2017; Sinatora 2019), as have the scales of interaction at which people operate. Blommaert (2010) refers to chronotopic configurations of scale as temporally “timeless” and “momentary,” and spatially “locally situated” and “translocally widespread,” shown in Table 1.1. I draw on this table and the discussions in this chapter in defining the spatially and temporally scaled chronotopes that I will be referring to in this book, which are: Temporal scales: Long term (e.g. the 244-year history of the United States that has reified the political establishments of our time); medium term (recent several years, e.g. the time frame in which the Tea Party was formed and came to national prominence, as discussed in the Preface); short term/momentary (present or singular moments in time, e.g. Trump’s election and the activities that have taken place since) Geospatial scales: National/federal (the United States; the federal government, consisting of the President, the Senate, and the House of Representatives); state (Texas; Texas state government, consisting of the Governor, the State Senate, and the State House of Representatives); local (Houston; local government, consisting of the County Judge, the Mayor, City Council representatives, and so on).

1.3.1 Networked Chronotopes I have described above the temporal and spatial/geopolitical contexts that we circulate through, particularly with an eye to the national chronotope. But it is now more clear than ever that we also inhabit networked contexts which, thanks to the internet and social media, allow us to cut across space and time like never before (Castells 2015; Van Dijk & Hacker 2018). That is, while Miller et al. TABLE 1.1 Language scales in time and space

Time Space

Lower scale

Higher scale

Momentary Local, situated

Timeless Translocal, widespread

Source: Blommaert (2010, p. 34); see also Zentz (2017)

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(2016) contest the newness of seeing social organization in “network” terms, we can still say the internet not only allows for newly conceived networked contexts, but in so doing it also allows us to bend notions of space and time—to reshape the scales of time and space at which we operate. As Blommaert & De Fina explain it: There are specific timespace challenges raised by online culture: Contrary to the social imagination of classical sociology and anthropology, the social practices developed online involve no physical co-presence but a co-presence in a shared “virtual” space of unknown scale-dimensions5, involve often an unknown number of participants (also often of unknown identities), combined with a stretchable time frame in which temporal co-presence is not absent but complemented by an almost unlimited archivability of online communicative material. (2017, p. 13) As Castells points out, The ongoing transformation of communication technology in the digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customized in an ever-changing pattern. (2015, p. 6). And Van Dijk & Hacker describe (relying on Van Dijk’s own prior words): The concept of the network society is a formal characterization emphasizing a particular social (infra)structure and organization of contemporary societies. Van Dijk (1991, 2012) has defined the network society as “a modern type of society with an infrastructure of social and media networks that characterizes its mode of organization at every level: individual, group/organizational and societal” (van Dijk 2012, p. 24). He compares this classification of society with the mass society that is built on an infrastructure of groups, organizations and communities (‘masses’). (Van Dijk & Hacker 2018, p. 17) All of this new networking and the technological affordances that allow for it deeply affect both the temporal and spatial scales that are now available to us in evaluating and acting upon the ideas and structures that weave through our daily lives. This brings us to the point where instead of a mid-20th-century notion of a singular and centralized public sphere consisting of “rational” debate and distinct public private divides (cf. Bimber 2003; Habermas 1991; Zentz 2021), now we find ourselves situated within both the more traditionally structuralist

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ideas of public spheres and private spaces, of hierarchical, fractally nested (Gal 2002; Gal & Irvine 2000), global/national/statewide/local contexts, “thick communities” (Blommaert 2019; see below) and “translocal and timeless” scales (Blommaert 2010) that align around mass communication and governmental hierarchies; and—and often with a substantially larger amount of choice— mediated social networks based on who we know personally, and who we can connect to in various interest-based online groups that span and transcend various geopolitical boundaries. The latter are variously called “affinity” spaces, communities of practice, and (more and less) “light” communities (Blommaert 2019; Gee 2000; Leppänen et al. 2017). I will revisit the notion of light and thick communities and identities below in Section 1.4.2.

1.3.2 Expanding Repertoires, Stable Centralizing Forces Ultimately, as I have argued, social media serve as an expansion of the amount of contexts that we circulate through (Blommaert 2019). It is arguably the case, as I stated above (Section 1.2), that sites like Facebook and Twitter often expand our ability to get information by exposing us to more “word of mouth” shares of news items that we would not otherwise come across in either doing our own news searches or in consulting just one or two mass and/or local media sources. So, even if it is the case that we have become more individualized (an assertion that I am, again, skeptical of, and that this book will substantially refute) and siloed, in other ways we have become much more able to access much more information at a much faster and cheaper rate, and to actually see more news and information than we would without these media (cf. Bimber 2003; Hindman 2009). This, in the end, is an advantage, though with expanded media that are mostly for profit come information fatigue; little penalty for distributing false information as long as one can get views and advertisements; the consequent necessity, more than ever, of strengthened information literacy skills on the part of consumers or “prosumers”6 on social media (cf. Tagg & Seargeant 2017); as well as calls for the assumption of more responsibility for and censorship of what circulates on especially social media by the owners of those platforms.7 Amid these vast changes in information and participation infrastructures, we also must keep in mind that while all of these changes happen on the ground in activist, organizing, and political party aligned activities, and while politicians have indeed joined in on the social media era with their own official Twitter, Facebook, and now Instagram pages, and by campaigning on newer platforms like the social gaming site Twitch (Serrels 2019) and so on, it is still the case that bureaucratic representative institutions and their deliberative practices remain relatively unchanged. Ultimately, the state remains a “determining force” in people’s lives, alongside the “dominant” forces that various types of media represent (Blommaert 2005; Zentz 2017). So while traditional bureaucratic political structures such as local, state, and national governmental institutions remain intact, our easily accessible and rapid

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communication affordances including internet and social media sites are allowing us to interact in ways never before conceptualized, at least with the scale and speed available to us now. As Dartnell (2006, p. 94) states, “Web activism is one example in which non-state actors alter global power by reshaping perceptions in a mediascape that was formerly a monopoly for the state.” This is far more powerful than what assertions of slacktivism would claim. For this research project, I remain deeply invested in scales that I term local, statewide, and national, pertaining to the Houston area, Texas, and the United States, respectively. Based on the above elaboration, though, I acknowledge that scales of interaction and chronotopic, contextualized structures and meaning making practices are not just hierarchical, or fractally nested, as a local/state/ national categorization might insinuate. They are also networked and continually constructed and reconstructed through social interactions and mundane practices (Billig 1995). I approach the data presented in this book under the premise that, in any given interaction or group setting, especially on social media and Facebook specifically, networked actors—who may be neighbors locally or situated across an entire country and three time zones from each other, and who may be sending messages in real time or answering each other a day apart—still communicate and politically organize with respect to the longer-term and traditionally established institutions and mediascapes that have organized our country in a local/statewide/ national arrangement. The actions of Pantsuit Republic Texas and Pantsuit Republic Houston aimed— using novel connections across space and time and new types of networked interaction that crossed, transcended, and interacted with the more stable and traditional organizing forces that structure “the nation”—to reimagine American, Texan, and Houstonian politics in an era where the far right in particular had by then spent ample time navigating locally, translocally, and mass mediated networks and shaping them to their political and electoral advantage. Relating all of these larger-scale political organizational conceptualizations to ethnography, we as ethnographers have an obligation to include such complexity—the structure and agency and networks and hierarchy that condition our participants’ interactions—in our analyses. We must take into account both the grandiose “imagined community” (Anderson 1983; Gal & Irvine 2019) and the small-scale “banal” or “everyday” (Billig 1995; Fox & Van Ginderachter 2018) acts that ensure its survival amid all the networks and acts of mediatization (Agha 2011) and political structures in between, through which people, groups, corporations, and governments shape communities, networks, and access to information. All of these chronotopes and scales of interaction, evaluation, information distribution, and “ways of seeing things” (“ocular lenses,” see below)—the national, the statewide, the local; short-, medium-, and long-term histories; the networked, polycentric, and translocal; the micro and personal political belief and individual experience—are elements of the social and political chronotopes that existed prior to the night of November 8, 2016 and that abruptly changed

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afterwards, throwing all of them up for debate in both old and new ways. The leaders of PSR/H dove head first into these debates. I will now proceed to the theoretical frameworks that I rely on in this book in order to understand such activities. As they were acting upon and actively re-shaping the chronotopes and scales that I have described above, participants deployed stories and performed stances that unified them around their moral political mission.

1.4 Identity Work in Chronotopes Bakhtin (1981) wrote that “the image of man is always chronotopic.” Agha, building on Bakhtin’s ideas, states that “A chronotope is a semiotic representation of time and place peopled by certain social types” (2007a, p. 31), and later that “chronotopic depiction formulates a sketch of personhood in time and place; and, the sketch is enacted and construed within a participation framework” (Agha 2007b, p. 321). Blommaert & Varis (2015, p. 5) state that identity practices are “discursive orientations towards sets of features that are (or can be) seen as emblematic” (cited in De Fina 2020, see also Brubaker & Cooper 2000; Leppänen et al. 2017). boyd claims that in online interactions we write ourselves and our communities into being (2006, 2010; see also Tagg & Seargeant 2014), and Blommaert (2019), in a discussion of Garfinkel’s deeply empirical symbolic interactionist work, reminds us that we build a story of who a person is based on what they do, describing “identity effects” and social order as “achieved moment by moment.” In Keane’s words, in moments of societal shift, “[i]t is not merely the case that two worlds collide and that eventually, one will triumph over the other. More than that, the clash induces new forms of self-awareness …” (2016, p. 184). And Blommaert clarifies that these identities and forms of self-awareness are borne out through interactional conduct: It is when a situation emerges of which we can recognize (or believe to recognize) the sociocultural status that we can shift into the modes of interactional behavior that ‘make sense’ in and of such a situation. … … ‘making sense’ of interaction in actual situations is evaluative and refers not just to the linguistic codes of expression but to a broader complex of rules for social conduct, ultimately precipitated in identity judgments. (Blommaert 2020, p. 34) Indeed, Blommaert describes that at such critical junctures as the one that happened in the US on the night of November 8, 2016, “nothing can be said anymore in the way it could be said before” (cited in Sinatora 2019, p. 3; cf. Baynham & De Fina 2016; O’Connor 2018). Chronotopes, though, are inhabited differently by different groups of people. This is to say that while all Americans share in inhabiting the national, 244year-old context of “the United States,” as well as the chronotopic contexts of their

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states and localities, not everyone has experienced, or has acted upon the ideas and political structures and activities of “America,” in nearly the same way. We can refer to groups’ unique points of view as their “ocular power” or ocular lens. Green defines this notion as the ability of different groups of people to interpret what they see and hear in different ways (2009, cited in SpencerBennett 2018). Relying on the words of Agha (2007b), we might say that such differential interpretations actually lie in different groups of people simultaneously inhabiting contrasting chronotopes and even acting on differing scales or scalar models (in this book, as I have stated, we will focus on those pertaining to interconnections among local, state, and national level political configurations) that align with ideological perspectives and agendas (see also Gal 2016). PSR/H membership’s ocular lens and those of other political progressives nationwide most certainly contrasted, though, with the social worlds of Trump’s supporters. For quite some time, the nation’s two major political parties (Republican and Democratic), who dominate public political discussion, had been polarizing around race and related issues (Klein 2020; Olson 2008; Webster & Abramowitz 2017); White racial resentment had been and continued to be on the rise and was only fast-tracked during Obama’s presidency; and the right had been actively building a movement to counter all progressive (or “left-wing”) advances that were taking hold, and infiltrating the Republican party in order to turn their views into mainstream policy positions (see Preface). And so, when a chronotopic reality undergoes a stark and rapid change as we saw on election night in 2016, people are forced to consider themselves in new lights. Social constellations and political allegiances are disrupted, and new ones are forged. This is to say that here—as in all of reality, but with the election of Trump in specifically stark terms and in combination with the readily available technological affordances of the era—we are able to witness the creation of new modes of interactional behavior and the forging of new group and individual identities as PSR/H members took agency together to act consciously and critically upon their new sociopolitical world, to author themselves anew within it, and to reconfigure the scales within which and the ideals upon which American politics operated. In the following sections I will explore the theoretical framework that I have constructed in order to analyze the data that I collected. I will move on to describe data-collection decisions and practices, as well as present a framework for approaching interactions on Facebook specifically, in Chapter 2.

1.4.1 Group Identity Construction Castells writes, for a social movement to form, the emotional activation of individuals must connect to other individuals. This requires a communication process from one individual experience to others. For the communication process to

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operate, there are two requirements: cognitive consonance between senders and receivers of the message, and an effective communication channel. (2015, p. 14) Flesher Fominaya (2010) states that collective identity has long been used as a key term and factor driving social movements to stay together and active. Collective identities can form around sociopolitical formations (“our” state, city, nation, etc.) or around interests or shared activities (knitting, being an activist); they can “carry different kinds of ideological value” (one might say that knitting would generally carry less, or at least less controversial, ideological value than being an activist does); and they can be signaled more and less explicitly through visible interactions, thereby more and less forcefully delineating in-groups and out-groups (Page 2018). Furthermore, collective identity is an “open-ended process” in which people’s interactions through a network of relationships enable a group to constitute itself “as an actor that is distinct from its environment and that has a certain agency” (Melucci 1996, cited in Kavada 2015, p. 875). Baym (2006) claims that online communities emerge as participants “create and codify group-specific meanings, socially negotiate group-specific identities, form relationships … and create norms that serve to organize interaction and to maintain desirable social climates” (p. 62, cited in Gnach 2018, p. 193; see also Herring 2004; Knight 2010; Martin & White 2005; Zappavigna 2014). Micó & Casero-Ripolles (2014, p. 861, citing Lomicky & Hogg 2010) state that “[t]echnology allows people to come into contact with social movement networks and create a sense of collective identity based on common interests and a shared agenda.” In these affinity group formations on these socially networked platforms, people develop shared practices (“shared repertoires,” Androutsopoulos 2014; Gnach 2018), which enregister (Agha 2003, 2007a) their activities in “communities of knowledge” (Blommaert 2017, cited in Sinatora 2019, p. 2) through their repetition and amplification of their ideas and their togetherness (Milan 2015). Leppänen et al. (2015) point out that for “groupness” to occur, a “particular social constellation” must believe that they actually share something in common, and further, “in social media activities, it is the semiotic constructions and processes of indexing … commonality, connectedness and groupness which are available for investigation” (p. 6). Page (2018), from an interactional pragmatic and social psychological point of view, points out that specific lexico-grammatical choices are involved in such affiliative (or disaffiliative) acts. On Facebook more generally, one’s identity also becomes indicated through their visible social connections as well as through the ways in which they select what to post about and how they position themselves regarding that information (Seargeant & Tagg 2014). In addition, these socialized meanings and practices do not just take place online—they are entextualized and re-entextualized, their meanings and intentions reinforced, as groups toggle between online and offline interactions.

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Not only is much of the semiotic work of “identization” (Melucci 1996) done in the semi-public spaces of one’s own Facebook “Wall”; Treré (2019) also demonstrates that “backstage” social media spaces—chat threads and private groups—are essential contexts in which a group may reinforce their shared identity. In these spaces, the simple back-and-forthing of day-to-day interactions ranging from play to discussing serious issues and making serious plans all enregister the group as a “with” (Goffman 1971; Scollon & Scollon 2003) as they socialize each other “into the use of … linguistic resources and their intended meanings, histories, and ideologies” (Leppänen et al. 2015, citing Bauman & Briggs, 1990, p. 76).

1.4.2 Light and Thick Communities and Identities Many authors point out that some of the links within social networks are quite weak without the mediation of face-to-face activity (Blommaert 2018 calls these “light communities”). Others point out that groups like those on Facebook have quite “porous boundaries” (Kavada 2015, citing Gerlach & Hine 1970), particularly due to the fact that many Facebook groups can be joined— and unjoined—through just a simple click. So people can come and go as they see fit, and participate in more and less peripheral ways both on and offline within these groups. It was generally clear to me that at a larger scale, the wider PSR and PSRH groups, with 20,000-plus and 10,000-plus members, respectively, though they still enregistered a distinct type of socialized discourse within their spaces, operated under weak links. One can say that there was an identity community formed across the two groups’ vast numbers, but it was a light one to be sure, and consisted of fluid movements among members, and more and less participation (and agreement) across them. The most consistent actors within these larger groups were of course their core members, who numbered no more than 20. This core of the movement had also formed very strong bonds through face-to-face and backstage interactions, and as such, their interactions on Facebook both in and outside of the secret Facebook pages were perhaps “supplementary” (Micó & Casero-Ripolles 2014, citing Vegh 2003) to, and reinforcing of, the in-person bonds that they had formed. The combination of these activities allowed for Facebook to be a place where the group members wrote their group identity into being (boyd 2010) in front of others. For the core group of leaders, much of this writing built upon bonds and objectives formed in face-to-face and backstage relations. It can be said that over time the group came to speak a “cluster of stances” (Georgakopoulou 2013) that served to unite their statements in a broad sense, presenting a relatively clear identity that aligned with the moral frameworks of “progressivism” and “intersectional feminism.” The main focus of my analyses in this book is participants’ stances taken within narratives and conversations that took place on Facebook. The participants in this book regularly performed stances related to their political beliefs, opinions, and

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identities as grounded in their personal experiences. In the next two sections, I describe the types of stances I have mainly focused on in their utterances, the resources that they drew upon in order to take those stances in both individual narratives as well as in group interactions (Section 1.4.3), and the moral political goals that the participants expressed in engaging in such behaviors (1.4.4).

1.4.3 Small Stories, Stance and Identity Work on Facebook In Facebook posts especially (as with other microblogging platforms), we rarely see prototypical narratives—people do tell stories, but as others have pointed out, something like “commentary,” or even “header” + image/video/link preview (Bezemer & Kress 2017), or “breaking news” (Georgakopoulou 2007) is a more prototypical post structure than a narrative. Posts on this platform consist of entextualizations of online or offline activities, ideas, articles, and so on (cf. Androutsopoulos 2014; Bauman & Briggs 1990; Giaxoglou & Georgakopoulou 2020; Leppänen et al. 2015) and they are generally dripping with stances taken, ideologies and attitudes asserted, and often small and shared stories of varying lengths that are used to justify the commentaries that posters make. Thus they are full of stance-laden identity work (Barton & Lee 2013; Georgalou 2020). Barton & Lee state that when we engage on Facebook, we construct “an auto-biography, a narrative of who we are and what kind of person we want others to see us [as]” (2013, p. 84, cited in Theodoropoulou 2015, p. 3). That is, the narratives we tell on Facebook, just like in analogic storytelling, is dialogic (Bakhtin 1981; Hymes 1975; O’Connor 2018). The choices that we make when we engage on Facebook—what we write, who we write it for, who responds to us and in what ways, and how we build on that to author more, less or differently, all reveal elements of “who we are” and what social and, particularly for our purposes here and as I will describe further below, moral characteristics we wish to perform. Our autobiographies and narratives revealing who we are at any given point in time, though, are not always constituted through canonical, “fully-fledged stories” (Georgakopoulou 2006, p. 123). Perhaps more often than telling a canonical narrative, we employ “small stories” that sort of “fill in the blanks”—they give us justifications to assert our opinions, explain why we were at a certain place at a certain time, why we currently believe what we believe, and so on (Bamberg 2006; Georgakopoulou 2006, 2013, 2015, 2017). In short, they are acts in which we co-construct our world and ourselves in relation to others instead of attempting to step back and represent it (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008). Georgakopoulou (2006) defines the term as the following: small stories … are employed as an umbrella-term that covers a gamut of under-represented narrative activities, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, shared (known) events, but also allusions to

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tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell … the term locates a level and even an aesthetic for the identification and analysis of narrative: the smallness of talk, where fleeting moments of narrative orientation to the world (citing Hymes 1996) can be easily missed out on by an analytical lens which only looks out for fully-fledged stories. (p. 123) As such, small stories (and “shared stories,” Page 2018) do not tend to have the prototypical story elements described in a Labovian (1972) structural analysis or even a Hymesian (1996), situated narrative analysis (cf. Georgakopoulou 2007; De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2012; Page 2018). Generally, they may start or stop without completion, they don’t necessarily carry a full plot line, rising action, denouement. They are the stories we use in order to accomplish conversational work related to who we are at a specific moment in time and what authorizes us to make certain claims and do or say certain things. As such, small stories online are heavily laden with stance work. Du Bois (2007) relates the notion of a speaker’s stance to theories of dialogicality, intersubjectivity, and the mediating frameworks of social values that enable social interaction in the first place (Keane 2016). Stances, as evaluative of and situated within moral and ethical commitments (Keane 2016), are ubiquitous in conversation, though always relative and generally generated within specific contexts and conversations (cf. Keane 2011; see also Bamberg 2006; Drew 1998). Through the multiple layers of identity and context available to speakers, stance is always “emergent” (Agha 2007a; Jaffe 2009; Keane 2016; Lempert 2009); that is, it “is not transparent in either the linguistic or the sociolinguistic, but must be inferred from the empirical study of interactions in social and historical context” (Jaffe 2009, p. 4; cf. Du Bois 2007; Goodwin 2007). In situ, stances that invoke a whole spectrum of light and thick identities are regular and overlapping, and deeply embedded in the context, positionalities, and ethical frameworks (Keane 2016; Spencer-Bennett 2018) that interlocutors work conversationally to situate themselves within. Jaffe describes a sociolinguistic approach to stance as one interested in exploring “how the taking up of particular kinds of stances is habitually and conventionally associated with particular subject positions (social roles and identities; notions of personhood), and interpersonal and social relationships (including relations of power) more broadly” (2009, p. 4). She goes on to describe that stance is expressed in the content (topic, beliefs) and form (deictics such as tense, person; affect words, and so on) of an utterance, in order for authors to position themselves in relation to their audience (imagined or real) and to the context that they simultaneously find themselves in and actively co-construct with interlocutors. Describing stance’s emergent nature, Jaffe goes on to state that in interaction with not only immediate audiences but also with social and contextual histories, examinations of stance constitute a “crucial point of entry” in examining speakers’

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reflexive identity management in interaction with the changing reactions of their interlocutors and audiences (see also Agha 2007a). The idea of reflexivity is particularly pertinent to Facebook and much of social media as they serve as spaces where authors have time to think and reflect about how they would like to present themselves and their ideas—with respect to Facebook as a “microblogging” platform (which I will explain in more depth in Section 2.3), one might conceive of the “time” one has to reflect on what they are posting as less than in a blog or a written narrative in another context, but still more than in oral conversation. Lempert (2008, 2009) refers to such reflexive identity management also in terms of Bakhtinian addressivity. As posters design their audiences, they are regularly a) considering how they will be seen or understood, as well as b) constructing their statements in order to design their audiences and their audiences’ interpretations of their texts. This is an iterative process that continues into the comments threads below posts and also across posts (Jaffe 2009; Lempert 2009; Spencer-Bennett 2018). I will further elaborate on this in Chapter 2 when I discuss the pre-textual structure of Facebook posts in general. Georgalou (2020, citing Barton & Lee 2013, see Jaffe 2009 for a similar list) explains that there are four components to any expression of stance: 1) the stancetaker—the speaker or author of the statement; 2) the stance object—the person/ idea/activity being discussed; 3) stance resources—linguistic resources used to express the stance—from lexical items, grammatical constructions, to “caps lock,” to emojis, memes, gifs, and so on; and 4) the addressee—this may be those directly addressed or those linguistically constructed as “ratified overhearers” (cf. Goffman 1979). Lempert (2008, 2009) further points out that stances are also taken across utterances, and they are thus interdiscursive with prior utterances that both the individual and other entities have made.

1.4.4 Virtue Signaling and “moral political goals” Keane writes that “ordinary exchanges” are “saturated … with the ongoing business of establishing one’s ethical worth in the eyes, or ears, of others, the everyday task of giving an account of oneself” (2016, p. 138). We can also relate the idea of virtue signaling back to Goffman’s notion of “idealization”; that is, when a person puts on a public performance they present an idealized version of themselves—this performance does not necessarily conform to the whole of their daily behaviors, but it conforms to a combination of what (at least certain segments of) society deem(s) valuable (Baker & Walsh 2018, citing Goffman 1959). O’Connor (2018) states that it is already quite well established that narratives are common loci for the assertion and negotiation of such moral values. A new, but frequently used, term for this negotiation as it is conducted in social media spaces is “virtue signaling.” Virtue signaling, as I have researched the term, has not yet been an academic one—or perhaps, on the other hand, it was actually one of the earliest academic terms in Western thought: Keane (2011)

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cites Aristotle, stating that “if stance links ‘the good or the true’ to the experiences of a particular group, it verges on Aristotelian notions of ‘virtue’” (citing Aristotle 1941 and Kockelman 2004; see also Spencer-Bennett 2018). “Virtue signaling” as a term in current popular culture, though, seems to have begun as a remarkably negative one. That is, to claim that someone is virtue signaling is to claim that they are demonstrating, or even advertising, a behavior or belief of theirs that they want passersby to adopt, and that they are either doing so hypocritically (they advertise but do not practice the behavior), or those who come across said signaling don’t want to see it/don’t want their friend or acquaintance to suggest anything about what they should do with their own behaviors and beliefs. This is a term of recent coinage that seems to line up with the rise of another quite popular derogatory term that we have already seen, “slacktivism.” Dennis’s (2019) objections to “techno-pessimistic” accusations of slacktivism as discussed in Section 1.2.3 can also be applied to accusations of “virtue signaling.” As Dennis points out, online interactions related to political issues—what he deems, in the political realm, “micro-activism”—do not necessarily detract from other, “traditional” forms of activism (and in addition, even some of those, such as “postcarding” or placing bumper stickers on one’s car merit equal criticism to any notion of online slacktivism [p. 202, endnote 1]). They instead form a part of an expanded repertoire of political activity and communication, and actors act on them along a “continuum of participation,” the least of which consists of informing oneself and formulating one’s political identity through the use of multiple media sources, including those found through social media platforms. Despite its derogatory use in most exemplars I have found of the term “virtue signaling” so far (Christina 2017; McClay 2018; Saltman 2017), I argue here that the term represents what is actually a powerful social activity related to peer pressure, group identity formation, and “moral stancetaking.” (In fact, in his second interview, Joseph mentioned that leadership often tried to get people involved through peer pressure on social media; Joseph, Interview 2, November 24, 2018.) As such, I see it as no more negative an activity than any other type of pressure to conform to a moral set of norms in the realm of human behavior. Particularly among the focal participants in this study, virtue signaling demonstrated an ideal for what a member of their movement or social group should believe, act like, and so on, and these largely related to “big picture” moral types and ideals that situated them within the national political chronotope. Spencer-Bennett (2018, p. 97, citing Austin 1975; Sidnell 2017) states that some moral talk is a performance that people want to be seen, as they take a stance and/or make a commentary on some state of affairs (see also Goodwin 2007 above, and Keane 2011). Relating this back to identity work, the “ethical characterization” of self and other, here in online talk, constitutes “little scenes in which one gives an account of oneself, something undertaken for an addressee or witness” (Keane 2016, p. 154). Dennis claims that

26 Biographies, Stance, and Moral Politics

These forms of personalised communication can raise awareness of political issues amongst wider publics, form bonds between the geographically dispersed and ideologically disparate membership, and under certain conditions, they can represent a form of digital activism in their own right. (2019, p. 97) Elsewhere, he calls the actors who perform such moral rectitude “civic instigators”: citizens who actively share political material on social media and express their opinion by way of challenging others … this provocation is not done with any ill intent (citing Coleman 2012: 110), but as a way of generating attention, awareness, and understanding for political issues that they deem to be important. Ultimately, they feel that their actions fulfil an educative function … (2019, p. 158) Keane (2016, p. 198) points out “consciousness-raising” activities in prior eras of activism: “its proponents recognized that the fact of giving something an explicit verbal formulation, rendering it cognitively available, could have consequences for people’s relationships and actions well beyond the moment of the group’s own meeting.” To engage in moral talk online—to signal virtues—is to engage in a reflexive act of evaluating or taking a stance on some behavior performed by self or other (Spencer-Bennett 2018). It is to engage in a conversation with others, to conform to and/or interrupt others’ notions of social facts and the moral values that accompany them, with varying social consequences ranging from agreement, to changing minds, to eye rolls, and loss of friendships or relationships. The reasons that I single out the concept of virtue signaling in this book and treat it separately from just a general conversation on stance, though, are twofold. First, it is a term symptomatic of the “social media age”—Peters (2015) in a Boston Globe op-ed cites one of its earliest known uses in a 2004 online message board. Second, I will specifically address its use in the next few chapters as a salient type of stance-taking in which these participants, as leaders of a movement, modeled behaviors and beliefs that they desired for the movement at large—their shared “moral political goals,” as I have come to call them. As the group collectively relied upon and supported each other’s virtue signaling (assumption of moral political stances), they actively constructed their own group identity as the leaders and organizers of the structure and moral political framework of PSR/H leadership. This collaborative construction, I argue, was further meant to influence and set the moral guidelines for PSR and PSRH’s larger group identities/community members as well as their groups of Facebook Friends8 beyond these circles. Based on the above, I provide here my definitions of the stances that I will predominantly describe in the coming chapters, complementing the definitions with some examples from the coming texts that exemplify each type of stance:

Biographies, Stance, and Moral Politics 27

1.

2.

3.

Epistemic—positioning interlocutors to understand the relevant features of a text, through the use of features/terms that position the speaker as possessing authentic or authoritative knowledge on the matter (Biber et al. 1999; Georgalou 2020; Goodwin 2007; Martin & White 2005). Examples: “motifs are basically ways that our brains reduce the energetic costs of learning new information …”; “I don’t identify as Hispanic I identify as Latinx.” Cooperative/alignment—a display of alignment between oneself and others toward shared goals (Goodwin 2007). I will frequently refer to this simply as a “bid for alignment” or a “stance of alignment.” Examples: “I know that Joseph speaks honestly”; “#LadiesWeGotYou.” Evaluative or attitudinal—“a broad category of stance concerned with affect, judgements and personal aesthetic preferences” (Georgalou 2020, p. 178). Within this category I will specifically highlight: a

b

4.

affective—displaying emotional alignment toward story elements, interlocutors, and self (Giaxoglou & Georgakopoulou 2020; Goodwin 2007). This includes the use of emotion words (treacherous, desperate, distraught) and semiotic textual devices such as caps lock (“BE POWERFUL”). moral—positioning the self in relation to culturally shared values (Goodwin 2007; Ochs & Capps 2001; Page 2018)—I also refer to these as “moral political” stances in this book, but often I just shorten this into “moral” in order to align my analyses with these prior texts on the topic. I will also relate the idea of moral political stance to the internetbound concept of “virtue signaling” as explained above. Examples: “Profound and sustainable change comes from grassroots efforts, grown organically at home”; “I will personally escort him…”; “It is important for all allies to put ourselves into the shoes of others.”

Motivational—I add this here as a category of stance that is specific to many of the statements made by participants in their posts as they tried to motivate the members of PSR/H to get their “boots on the ground” and do active organizing work. Examples of these range from imperatives like “own this, y’all” and “Resist!,” to first-person plural inclusive modal constructions such as “we should.”

Ethnographic explorations of narratives in small group settings allow us to examine the contextualized nature and contingency of narratives—their intertextually constructed natures as group members socialize each other into shared vocabulary, stances, and storytelling structures, and the roles that they play within specific communities (Georgakopoulou 2007, Heath 1983). To close this chapter, therefore, I return to the beginning of this group’s shared identity construction, on Facebook the morning of November 9, 2016, before proceeding to a description of how this research project came to be and who the focal participants in it were.

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1.5 Pantsuit Republic Houston On the morning of November 9, 2016, Jess posted: Welcome to the Houston Chapter you guys!9 (Jess, PSRH, November 9, 2016) Later, she posted: 380 members in one hour! You beautiful women are amazing! Let’s keep it going! (Jess, PSRH, November 9, 2016) And later: 5029 STRONG! Let’s do this Houston! (Jess, PSRH, November 9, 2016) And still later: Oh my goodness you incredible women!! Let’s keep this momentum going, shall we?? As your admin for this group-know that I’m super passionate not only for women coming together but women working with each other to create great change in the world. So many of you have great ideas on how to make this group work to the best of our ability! Also, we have several #nastyhombres in this group which we are so happy to have! Thank you for supporting this much needed change. We welcome your feedback and thoughts as well. Just a reminder, this group is about supporting one another, lifting each other up, and loving one another in fierce and beautiful ways. Please refrain from posting any content that does not support that bigger goal. Memes (even if they are funny), anti-Trump, etc. I will remove them from the feed.❤ We will have more updates on meet ups and organization soon. So please stay tuned. I’m super proud of us. ❤ Jess (Jess, PSRH, November 9, 2016)

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And still later: Hi you guys! Before we pick a meeting spot to get all of you beautiful (and fired up) souls together in one spot physically, we need to see who would be coming! If you are seriously interested in meeting up, lets take attendance by clicking the LOVE button (cause, you know that’s what we’re all about). For my fellow mom’s in the group-don’t worry about the kiddos..bring them if you have to! From there we can narrow down a spot to hold all of us! Much love! ❤❤❤ (Jess, PSRH, November 9, 2016) 528 people liked or loved the post, and the comment thread was 96 comments long. PSRH was formed as a local version of Pantsuit Republic Texas (PSR) by Jess the day after the election, and leadership teams were formed immediately in both groups (there were local branches of PSR that formed in almost all big cities of Texas; Austin’s had the highest number with nearly 25,000 members of their own). The first PSRH meeting later that month was held at a local bar/restaurant, and the house was packed, standing room only—perhaps 200 people were there. The leadership team presented themselves to the audience and they already seemed like old friends. Among the focal participants of this study, Jess was the leader of PSRH, Kara was the coordinator for neighborhood-based groups, and Joseph was the tech guy, also lovingly-slash-jokingly referred to as “that guy,” I assumed as a tease for being the only male around on the leadership teams. Around the beginning of December, a call for “group facilitator” positions was released and I saw this as my chance to be more of an agent of change than I had previously felt I was able to accomplish in both my personal and professional lives. This was an itch that had needed scratching well before the 2016 election, but the opening in PSRH felt like a good chance to put myself out there and try, and it also felt all the more urgent given the political stakes at hand. The interest groups that the facilitators would assume leadership over were formed based on discussions on both the PSR and PSRH pages, where polls were put out by the very quickly formed leadership teams, asking about what types of groups should be formed and what types of issues should be addressed as the organizations formed their mission and identity. Based on these polls and ensuing very elaborate discussion threads, the PSRH leadership team assembled ten different groups and put out a call for “group facilitators”—these were to be essentially leadership teams of one, two, or three people who would rally others interested in topics under their specific group’s interest area. I applied for the position of facilitator for the group on Intersectional Human Rights and Religious Tolerance (IHRRT), and I was accepted for the position after filling out and submitting an application form and then having a brief phone interview with

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Jess. The other groups were: Education; LGBTQ/Marriage Equality; Immigration Reform; Climate and Environmental Racism; Women’s and Reproductive Rights; Gun Control; Healthcare/Mental Health; Local Candidates/Voter Registration; and Redistricting/Gerrymandering. At the next (December) PSRH meeting, with attendance holding strong, we the new facilitators all introduced ourselves on stage and stated our goals for what we wanted to do in our groups. We then all sat at separate tables in the back and sides of the room, with tablets that people could sign up on to join our groups. We gathered emails there, then went home and scheduled initial meetings for our own committees and also began attending various leadership meetings. We were all assigned liaisons from the leadership team—these were people who would join us at our meetings, bounce ideas back and forth with us, and report back to leadership on our activities. As with any new organization, though—and especially one that is political in nature and volunteer run—there were transitions in the membership of leadership. As such, I lost my liaison and was assigned another by about the end of my second IHRRT meeting. In my IHRRT meetings, we started strong in January with a group of 20–25 people from all over Houston who had mostly joined the group with an interest in religious tolerance. Intersectionality is hard to define, after all—I mostly took it to be an interest in everything and how it all overlaps, and this essentially made my group’s topic area overlapping with every single other group. At that time, though, the most obvious intersection of issues had to do with immigration and religious rights particularly as it pertained to Muslims and Muslim immigrants, due to the new administration’s first executive action in January 2017, banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries and all refugees from entering the country (No Muslim Ban Ever 2019). At our first committee meeting, we met outside on (Houston’s version of) a chilly night in winter. We introduced ourselves, shared why we were present, and then broke into small groups to discuss what we wanted from the group. We formulated some ideas, talked about them, and then dispersed for the evening. There were tasks assigned, but none seemed all that tangible and there was little follow-through. By the second meeting our numbers maybe reached ten, and by the third meeting I was down to three including myself. I organized one successful event, a “refugee information night” in March 2017 in collaboration with Lucy, the facilitator for the Immigration Reform committee (see Section 1.7 below for an introduction to the focal participants). We invited leaders from various refugee aid organizations throughout the city to come speak to an audience that numbered perhaps 50 people. But that seems to have been the peak of my group’s activity. As my numbers and ideas dwindled, I was feeling frustrated, useless, and unsure how to attract more attention and build more activities. As new people continued to join the secret Facebook group that I had formed for our committee, I decided it would be best to try to meet them one on one so that I could find out about

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them personally, try to establish a connection, and learn what they wanted from the committee. These were great meetings with lovely new acquaintances, but again they didn’t result in much activity. In and among these meetings I had connected with a local rector at an Episcopal church, the leadership of Houston’s branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), attended events at Interfaith Ministries, at local mosques, and so on. I would post announcements of events within our group and within the wider PSRH secret Facebook page, with little response. I also visited with a woman who specialized in professional coaching, who had volunteered her services to us in the leadership group in order to help us flesh out our ideas on how to enable our groups to be active and effective. But nothing really got me the momentum I was looking to build. By June 2017, I found out I was pregnant with my first child and so I decided it was time for me to step down from my attempt at a leadership role. After I left, the committee was not revitalized; but I did leave on good terms with leadership, and this would serve me well for future participation in the organization and for the development of this research project. Simultaneous with what I felt to be my failed committee attempt, meeting attendance for the PSRH general meetings was also fast deteriorating. The meetings eventually stopped, perhaps not long after Hurricane Harvey wrought havoc and destruction on the entire metropolitan area in August 2017. But leadership and a few active members continued to connect with other organizations throughout the city such as Indivisible Houston, United We Dream, Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood, local transgender alliances, gun control groups such as Moms Demand Action, and many, many more, as they carried forward their primary mission and vision of supporting progressive causes across a spectrum and intersectionally.

1.6 Pantsuit Republic Texas and the Beginning of a Research Project Not long after I stepped down as IHRRT facilitator for PSRH, Joseph, who was a member of both state and local boards, invited me to take the position of secretary for the state (PSR) board. I saw this as a good opportunity to negotiate a research project into my work with PSR. This idea did not just come out of the blue: I had also been brainstorming about following the online activities of a Cuban pro-democracy activist group in which my husband was a member of the leadership team (this project did not come to fruition for various reasons that are not relevant here). When I offered to Joseph and Dona the idea of researching PSR while acting as secretary, they were very receptive. By the time I met with them in person in August 2017 to discuss what I would like to do for the project, I already had my IRB consent form draft on hand, and they were enthusiastic about the work.

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My role as secretary for the board was to take notes on (mostly remote) meeting conversations and to archive them in a private shared folder in Google Drive, and, via our communication channels on Slack, then Facebook Messenger, then Signal, then Slack again, to call and tally votes that the group needed to make decisions on. We would make decisions on items such as quarterly goals, which communication platforms to use (as indicated in the previous sentence, this was not an easy decision due to privacy concerns and frustrations with the number of platforms that people were using across leadership groups), and actions or protests led by other organizations that we wanted to endorse as allies. The initial premise of my research from this position was that I would explore how the state board communicated with each other online and across platforms. Particularly, based on my experience with the Cuban activist group I had been following, I assumed that we would be holding our meetings on a video chat platform such as Google Hangouts. But Dona and the group seemed much more inclined towards group phone calls, and I believe the primary reason for this was that it could be done while multi-tasking, whether that was driving, cooking, etc. Between our limited textual communications, which took place at the time on Slack, and what became our telephonic conference calls using a platform called FreeConferenceCall.com, I was very much unable to gain the trust of members of this group—who were at the time located in various cities across the state—enough to recruit research participants (cf. Geertz 1973 and boyd 2015 for the foundational necessity of trust in any ethnography). Additionally, the turnover rate in the group was high—this was a women-led organization, all volunteer, and it was very hard for people with children, full-time jobs, etc., to stay aboard. So I quickly saw my idea of focusing on state board activities cave in, but I continued in my role as secretary and I finally landed on the idea of following the Facebook activities of some of the people I had already developed personal connections with over my time as a member in both PSRH and PSR (see Hine 2015 for discussion of the ethnographer’s continual need to adapt, and for the ethnographic context’s continual evolution over time in any given project). I recruited among people I had had personal contact with at some level, and out of approximately 15 people contacted, seven accepted (including Dona and Joseph). Among these seven, there were varying levels of activity in PSR/H and I had had varying levels of interaction with them all, and so my pursuit of data collection regarding their individual social media activities became quite personalized to each. This personalization was not only related to their activity levels, but also to the fact that data collection became quantitatively overwhelming. I will pick this conversation regarding methods and data collection back up in Chapter 2. Before we advance any further it is necessary to introduce the focal participants in more detail.

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1.7 Focal Participants Below I describe in more detail this project’s focal participants—all of them a part of the “handful of persons … at the start of a movement” (Castells 2015) who started PSR and PSRH—and their relationships to/roles within these overlapping organizations. The age range of all of us at the time of data collection was between late twenties and mid-forties, and to my knowledge, all but Sarah and myself were from the Houston area, meaning that the others had grown up there and still lived there, or had left and returned. As with the macro-level histories that pre-date Trump’s rise to power, these activists’ narrations of their personal journeys showed that they had clear dispositions toward progressive causes before 2016. So while November 8, 2016 represented a massive turning point in the national chronotope and in their personal lives and their identity trajectories (cf. Wortham 2005), it was situated within myriad micro-contexts and personal histories that led to the formation of these groups, by these particular individuals. 1.

2.

Dona: As I mentioned above, Dona was the founder of Pantsuit Republic Texas. In her non-organizing life she had an MD-PhD in neuroscience, and she had participated in various community-building activities throughout her life before forming PSR. She was married to a moderate conservative husband with whom she had two adolescent/early teen children. She lived in Pearland, a suburb of Houston, worked flexibly from home doing medical consulting, and referred to herself alternately as a first-generation and second-generation Korean-American. As leader and founder of the organization, she developed a reputation among board members for being indefatigable—always “on,” always making connections, always speaking out on issues or organizing events and actions. Her primary interests outside of leading the organization generally were the intersections of immigration and healthcare. With the flagrant human rights abuses that took place under the Trump administration with family separation and imprisonment, and many of the centers that the migrants were held in being in Texas and even in Houston, she had plenty of pressing issues to act on and speak out against. After rolling off of her leadership role in PSR in November 2018 after a two-year term, Dona ran, along with Joseph, for a Pearland ISD schoolboard position in spring 2019. Joseph: Joseph was among the founding members of both PSR and PSRH. He was “the tech guy” for both, scouting out platforms for us all to communicate, make announcements, and collect information on. Joseph identified as Asian, from his father’s side, and Latinx, from his mother’s side. He worked for a tech company in cybersecurity, and had an MA in History. Joseph had leaned Republican until he became disillusioned with the party after 9/11 (in 2001), and then as he began to read more and learn about

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3.

4.

issues, he had moved pretty far across the spectrum to “progressive,” and was, during the course of this project, accused of becoming a “social justice warrior” by some of his center- and right-leaning friends (to note, this is a derogatory term coming from the right and often the center, while the left/ progressives tend to wear it as a badge of honor). Joseph had close family ties in town with his mother and siblings, and he shared a home with a number of them. Lucy: Lucy originally joined PSRH at the same time as I did, as the group facilitator for Immigration Reform. She identified as Latinx. Her mother immigrated to the US from Mexico when she was pregnant with Lucy, and Lucy was raised not to speak Spanish due to her mother’s desire that she fit in and succeed in this country. In the time that I knew her, Lucy was intent on trying to speak Spanish here and there in an effort to reclaim the language that she had lost, but she also expressed an understanding that her mother had been trying to do what she thought was best for her child in a new country. Based on my own interactions and collaborations with her, Lucy had great charisma and energy as a leader and an activist. Over time Lucy also became a leader within Indivisible Houston (IH),10 eventually renaming her PSRH Immigration Reform group the Houston Rebel Alliance as she transformed it into a group that operated across PSRH and IH. She was nominated by Dona and others to become the co-chair of PSR once Dona stepped down in November 2018 after two years as chair. She, like Dona, generally seemed to always be being an activist outside of work hours, and she was very vocal on Facebook about these activities, posting about them often multiple times daily. She made multiple claims that she wished she had been more active in political life/as an activist before November 8, 2016. In her professional life, she was an educational diagnostician. She was married and had one child who she sent off to college as data collection for this project came to an end in summer 2019. She decided to run for local office—a county commissioner seat—in the November 2020 election. The overwhelming time commitment that this campaign necessitated caused her to take a leave of absence from her position as PSR co-chair. Jess: Jess was the founder of PSR Houston and a single working mother, and was White. She came into her leadership role through a bit of coincidental personal connection with Dona before the election, but she threw herself quickly and immersively into the job. Like Dona, she stepped down after just over two years of leadership, in January 2019. She claimed to have been not very politically active or aware, and to have tended to vote only in presidential election years prior to the 2016 election. She did of course vote in the 2016 election, and was grief, fear, and motivation stricken when the election results came in. She cried over it the next morning with her elementary-school-aged son and formed the PSRH Facebook group that same day. After stepping down from her PSRH leadership role at the outset of 2019, she continued to

Biographies, Stance, and Moral Politics 35

5.

6.

7.

pursue her interest in racial justice as a member of another related group called Houston Rising, and by assuming leadership within PSRH of a group led by and for White women to discuss issues surrounding race and White women’s role in addressing and combating racism. Samantha: Samantha joined PSRH also at the same time as I did, as a co-facilitator for the group on LGBTQ rights. She was White, identified as bisexual, was married and was an arts teacher in a local school, and she was also active in spring of 2018 in the same group as Joseph as they coordinated with local high schoolers to orchestrate a very large March for Our Lives Houston protest against gun violence and for gun control, which over 15,000 people attended (Walker & Cochran 2018). She frequently expressed her insecurities in Facebook threads among activists that she was not “as much of” an activist as some of her other friends, including some of the names above; however, she was frequently called out by these same people for suffering from imposter syndrome. Sarah: Sarah joined PSRH also at the same time as I did, as the facilitator of PSRH’s Education Committee. She was White. Through the level of activity of her posts on Facebook and in her one interview response to me, I felt that she and I had the most similar experiences as facilitators of PSRH groups. That is, we both seem to have felt frustrated and a bit baffled that we couldn’t really gain any momentum or any more than passive interest in generating group activities, and so we both eventually moved on from these positions. While my stepping down from my original position was due to a combination of my frustration as well as becoming pregnant for the first time, Sarah had two young children and a husband at home, and worked full-time in education, and so these commitments in combination with her frustration with lack of activity among her committee led her group to go dormant as well. Samantha picked up leadership of the Education Committee’s Facebook group page in early 2019 with the transition in PSRH leadership (after Jess stepped down), at which time new leadership decided that they would like to try to revitalize some of the committees that had gone dormant in the first try. Among all participants, Sarah most certainly won the award for most entertaining Facebook posts (Lucy came in strong second). She was a hobby writer and a masterful conveyor of wit in her social media posts within and outside of PSRH. Kara: Kara was an original founder of PSRH alongside Jess, fitting her PSRH work in alongside a husband, two teens, and a job. She was also White. She coordinated across local neighborhood groups and hosted activities such as postcarding campaigns, for which events were created where PSRH members could go meet each other and socialize at bars/ restaurants while writing postcards to potential voters, in the interest of generating more active voting specifically among female “millennials.” At

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the end of 2018 she decided to step back from her role in PSRH as she felt it had become little more than an online venting space. As the reader will see, the primary focus of this book lies in my analysis of Dona, Lucy, and Joseph’s activities, with frequent inclusion of posts or commentaries by Jess and Samantha. Sarah and Kara (except for in one tag) will not reappear after this chapter. The reason for this varying representation is based on a mix of factors including the nature and frequency of my interactions with each of these individuals in combination with the types of activities that they engaged in with the PSRH and PSR groups and the nature of their online presence in general. Having introduced the participants and my relation to the field site, I will now preview the remaining chapters of this book.

1.8 Layout of the Book In the Preface and the current chapter, I have introduced the broader era that we all live in in the United States, regarding information structures and political activities; generally, how we have arrived at this political and technological, historical moment. In Section 1.3 above, I have provided the larger theoretical frame for this book—that is, chronotopes and scales. These terms were meant to frame the more detailed theoretical conversations that ensued, introducing theories of narrative and stance. Chapter 2 is a chapter on method/ology. It consists of two parts. In the first part, I will discuss some of the methodological and ethical issues I confronted and choices I made regarding the research conducted in this study (which is part of a broader project titled The Discourses of Internet Political Organization), including the place of technology and social media in ethnographic fieldwork; challenges to the execution of ethical research under these conditions; and also, a topic that I have found quite rarely discussed when we discuss methodologies in our field: the role of familyhood (motherhood, parenthood, partnerhood) in the ethnographer’s life. This latter theme is particularly relevant in this project as it overlaps very much with the various considerations many participants in PSR/H—largely women— had to take into account when deciding how to participate in the movement. In order to analyze the multimodal texts and interview narratives that I collected during this research project, in the second half of Chapter 2 I continue to situate this project’s tools of analysis within what Leppänen et al. call “a sociolinguistic and discourse-ethnographic approach to digital discourse” (2017, p. 6). I introduce a mnemonic—the “Seven A’s” of Facebook posts (authorship, audience, acknowledgment, alignment, affiliation, amplification, and algorithms)—as guiding tools that we can employ in examining posts: who writes them, who sees them, who responds to them and how. I then summarize how my research framework comes together relying on a list of specifications for the study of narrative laid out by De Fina & Georgakopoulou (2012), and provide a sample analysis of how it all comes together.

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The discussions in the above chapters are meant to set up the framework that I will employ for the analyses in Chapters 3–5, where I will explore the focal participants’ deployment of discursive features primarily on Facebook (with a few tweets thrown in in Chapter 5) in order to re-evaluate and re-construct their identities, and to re-scale national politics toward more local recursions where they felt that voices and votes held more direct influence. In Chapter 3, the focus is on individual participants’ posts as they authored themselves “into being” (boyd 2010) by using narratives that provided biographical details about themselves in service of formulating specific stances they took with regard to moral political issues they were invested in. Chapter 4 then examines how the group collaboratively spoke together in ways that delineated their “with-ness” or “group-ness” as they aligned themselves with each other in group conversations in both frontstage spaces (their own Walls) and backstage spaces (the secret PSR/H Facebook groups). In Chapter 5, I examine how the group discursively navigated their nationalized political atmosphere as they operated within a strongly nationally scaled political universe and constantly aimed to re-scale their own and their Friends’ political attention to local and state levels since that was where they felt that they could make more long-lasting and effective change toward inclusive progressive values. The chapters together present a moral political project that the group had undertaken with regard to both political ideologies among themselves and their audiences as well as to the actual material “shape” of politics that they were embedded in with respect to the local, statewide, national, and networked scales of political discourse and action that they and their interlocutors acted upon. Chapter 6 concludes the book with a summary of findings, framework, and theory, and I leave the reader with an Epilogue noting the progression of these activists’ stories since data collection and where they might be headed in the current pandemic era.

Notes 1 The participants in this project chose to use their real names, with the exception of Lucy. 2 I will explain the types and functions of Facebook groups in Chapter 2. 3 Social media, or social network sites (Dennis 2019; boyd and Ellison 2008), are defined here as (generally for-profit) websites where users can communicate directly with each other in various types of groupings, while presenting various types of profiles (this is my broad definition; see Dennis 2019, p. 54 for a discussion of how tricky it is to define such a diverse set of platforms). Some of these sites allow posters to post anonymously, as one might find on Reddit or 4chan/8chan. Some platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, require that a user establish a username and a profile. Facebook “requires” users to establish an account using their real name and identity, but this is policed through “community standards”: a user must report another user that they suspect of posting from a fake account or with a fake name. Facebook does not conduct identity verification when people establish their accounts, and this is in keeping with their “community policing” approach to usership.

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4 In this book I will spend little to no time discussing Facebook and other social media platforms’ controversial practices concerning data privacy, mining, and sociopolitical bias. For information on this please see, among others, Treré (2019) and Van Dijk & Hacker (2018). 5 In fact, Barabási (2010) refers to the Web as simply “scale free.” 6 This term, introduced in 1980 by Alvin Toffler, is most commonly used of late to describe the fact that consumers of sites such as Facebook and Twitter simultaneously produce the very content that earns these companies their income. As such, we consume by producing enormous amounts of data that can be collected and refined for the sake of targeted advertisement (Wikibooks 2019). 7 On this latter point I am referring in part to phenomena such as Facebook’s lack of action in fighting misinformation and disinformation in the 2016 election as well as, in an even more extreme example, Facebook’s lack of action on the spread of misinformation and disinformation during the genocide and mass exodus of Rohingya people in and from Myanmar (cf. Dennis 2019; Hogan and Safi 2018) among many other language policing debacles. Dennis defines misinformation and disinformation differently, where the former is “the inadvertent sharing of false information” and the latter “the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false” (Wardle 2017, in Dennis 2019, p. 146). 8 The reader will note that in this book I differentiate “Friends” on Facebook, with a capital “F,” from “friends” as people refer to their preferred acquaintances more generally. See boyd & Ellison (2008) and Tagg & Sergeant (2017). For the same reason, I capitalize “Wall” when it refers to users’ Facebook pages. 9 See Appendix B for an explanation of how I have chosen to present the data throughout this book. 10 For more on the role of Indivisible in Texas politics, see Oehmler & Zoorob (2020). We will also learn more about them and PSR/H’s work with them in subsequent chapters.

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Serrels, M. (2019). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drops in on Twitch stream, says Nintendo 64 is the best console. CNET. Retrieved 03/14/2020 from https://www.cnet.com/news/a lexandria-ocasio-cortez-was-on-twitch-talking-about-her-love-of-the-nintendo-64/. Sidnell, J. (2017). Action in interaction is conduct under a description. Language in Society 46: 313–337. Sinatora, F.L. (2019). Chronotopes, entextualization and Syrian political activism on Facebook. Multilingua 38(4): 427–458. Skocpol, T. & Williamson, V. (2016). The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Updated edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, A. (2013). Civic engagement in the digital age. Pew Research Center. Retrieved 03/11/2020 from http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/04/25/civic-engagement-in-thedigital-age/. Sonntag, S.K. & Cardinal, L. (2015). State traditions and language regimes: Conceptualizing language policy choices. In L. Cardinal & S. Sonntag (eds.) State Traditions and Language Regimes, pp. 3–26. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Spencer-Bennett, J. (2018). Moral Talk: Stance and Evaluation in Political Discourse. New York: Routledge. Srinivasan, R. (2009). A response to Annette Markham. In A.N. Markham & N.K. Baym (eds.) Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, pp. 165–171. Los Angeles: Sage. Tagg, C. & Seargeant, P. (2014). Audience design and language choice in the construction and maintenance of translocal communities on social network sites. In P. Seargeant & C. Tagg (eds.) The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet, pp. 161–185. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tagg, C. & Seargeant, P. (2017). Negotiating social roles in semi-public online contexts. In S. Leppänen, E. Westinen, & S. Kytölä (eds.) Social Media Discourse, (Dis)identifications and Diversities, pp. 211–234. New York: Routledge. Theodoropoulou, I. (2015). Politeness on Facebook: The case of Greek birthday wishes. Pragmatics 25(1): 23–45. Treré, E. (2019). Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms. New York: Routledge. Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and Tear Gas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. van Dijk, J. (2012). The Network Society (3rd ed.). London: Sage. van Dijk, J. & Hacker, K.L. (2018). Internet and Democracy in the Network Society. New York: Routledge. Vegh, S. (2003). Classifying forms of online activism: The case of cyberprotests against the World Bank. In M. McCaughey & M. Ayers (eds.) Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, pp. 71–95. London: Routledge. Walker, T. & Cochran, A. (2018). ‘March for Our Lives’: 15,000 Houstonians marched though downtown Houston. Retrieved 10/20/2020 from https://www.click2houston. com/news/2018/03/25/march-for-our-lives-15000-houstonians-marched-thoughdowntown-houston/. Wardle, C. (2017). Fake news. It’s complicated. First Draft. Retrieved 09/15/19 from http s://medium.com/1st-draft/fake-news-its-complicated-d0f773766c79. Webster, S. & Abramowitz, A.I. (2017). The ideological foundations of affective polarization in the U.S. electorate. American Politics Research 45(4): 621–647. Wikibooks. (2019). Perspectives in digital culture/The prosumer society. Retrieved 09/15/ 19 from https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Perspectives_in_Digital_Culture/The_Prosumer_ Society.

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Wortham, S. (2005). Socialization beyond the Speech Event. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 95–112. Zappavigna, M. (2014). CoffeeTweets: bonding around the bean on Twitter. In P. Seargeant & C. Tagg (eds.) The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet, pp. 139–160. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zentz, L. (2017). Statehood, Scale and Hierarchy: History, Language and Identity in Indonesia. London: Multilingual Matters. Zentz, L. (2021). Public-private (sphere). In J.Stanlaw (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

2 CHALLENGING ETHNOGRAPHY The Ethics and Relationships of Online Research

2.1 “There hasn’t been anything good enough to replace Facebook”: An Approach–Avoid Relationship With Facebook In her second interview, when I asked about the initial formation of PSR’s Facebook page, Dona explained that various people had been asking for a Texas chapter in the Pantsuit Nation space (see Chapter 1), and so she had taken on the task: Pantsuit Nation became Pantsuit Republic Texas, um,(.) a few days before the election of 2016, the presidential election. uh, it- it started uh because- well for a few reasons- I started it for a few reasons there were multiple uh threads going in Pantsuit Nation about creating state, specific, uh like chapters more or less of Pantsuit Nation I mean this was just a virtual community so they were y’know just talking about other Facebook pages was what I assumed. um and after multiple people had um inquired about a Pantsuit Nation Texas I went ahead decided that y’know that’s something I could whip up within y’know seconds so, um I created it and, shortly thereafter we had many thousands of people there I think within the first week or two after the election we had somewhere near 20,000 people, and ultimately I think it was close- uh close to about 27,000. at- at the height. um and yeah for me personally I was really interested in seeing people capturing the energy um and the interest in fighting for what was right what was just um y’know in many different domains and using technology to do that right because it seemed that there was something- there was some huge potential here to mobilize people across distance and across

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various divides um by connecting them uh through Facebook as a platform I mean as- as had happened um previously through Twitter and the ability of BLM to mobilize very rapidly and across large numbers of people. so I was really impressed with the power of social media to bring people together for a specific cause. Despite these successes, it seemed that Dona spent more time telling people to get off of Facebook than hailing its affordances. She frequently referred to the problems of social media and people’s need to get out of their house/off their phone and into the community. In a fairly blunt assessment of the situation and in reference in particular to immigrant detention centers and family separations, she wrote: Here’s an interesting thought experiment. If Facebook existed in Nazi Germany, would those complicit in the extermination be well-intended folks “sad facing” news of concentration camps? (Dona, Personal, October 1, 2018) Lucy responded: Yeah you nailed it And again spoke up further down the thread: Translating emotion to action, passive response to a definitive purposeful activity. Not easy Later, Dona shared a quote from a Facebook Friend, starting the post with her own preface to the quote: Wise words. Let me know if you want to take action, and I will plug you in. This is an internet era, where more fingers move about the state of humanity than feet on the ground towards liberation.—[tags Friend who shared the quote]1 (Dona, Personal, January 27, 2019) The group as a whole seemed to have an approach–avoid relationship with Facebook. They were all thoroughly aware of the problems that the platform presented, from privacy and algorithm issues to “keyboard warriors” and “slacktivism” (Dennis 2019; Treré 2019), and to unequal punishment, according to Facebook’s “Community Standards”2 and moderating formulas, of posts made by and about people of varying races, ethnicities, and genders (Angwin & Grassegger 2018; Dwoskin & Jan 2018; Huddleston 2017). On

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this latter issue, Joseph frequently campaigned, on Facebook, against their automated formulas for monitoring language use, by getting himself, as he and his friends called it, put in “Facebook jail” by using language that Facebook’s moderating formulas flagged as “hate speech.” For all these contentions, Dona still maintained: Facebook has been useful for organizing. I’ve looked at like ten different platforms, and there hasn’t been anything good enough to replace Facebook. For all of the problems we have with Facebook we haven’t been able to get off of it. (Dona, Interview 4, June 13, 2019). In this chapter I will explain my methodological considerations in navigating this “online ethnography” (Georgalou 2020). Approaching “ethnography” as an epistemological framework that is perpetually partial and no less so in ethnographies that take place largely online, I will discuss what it means to “be there” in an online context. Second, I will discuss positional considerations that I took into account in conducting this research. In this area I will focus mainly on “home ethnography” and my navigation of conducting an ethnographic study as a parent of a young child. This was of particular relevance in this study as it also spoke to a set of conditions that a large number of members of PSR and PSRH had to navigate when deciding how and how much to participate in the organization’s activities. Third, I will present some ethical considerations regarding privacy in conducting studies in a social media platform such as Facebook, which contains many configurations and choices regarding the public and private nature of one’s interactions there. The final section of this chapter will serve to transition us to an examination of the structure of Facebook posts, allowing me to share some final thoughts regarding the analytical considerations that I took into account when examining language use in this space. In that section (2.4), I will present a mnemonic I have devised for the “Seven A’s” of Facebook: authorship, audience, acknowledgment, alignment, affiliation, amplification, and algorithms. These are the pre-textual conditions that frame all language and narrative practices on the platform. I will tie this together with a summary of the methodological and analytical frameworks I have laid out in Chapters 1 and 2 for the data analyses in this book, before proceeding to those analyses in Chapters 3–5.

2.2 Methodological Considerations Anthropology has typically been a synchronic activity, based in analog interactions over lengthy time periods and complemented by various types of archival

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data collection. The game is changing, though, as our lives expand into online contexts. Varis (2014) has discussed the fact that accessing online data such as that of Facebook posts is an act of accessing a type of archive. boyd (2010, p. 46) discusses that social media platforms provide material that is persistent, replicable, scalable, and searchable—and therefore it cannot be considered synchronically collected. When we look at posts on Facebook and other social media sites, the actions and activities have already been completed; we cannot observe real-time corrections or conversational negotiations, we can’t necessarily see if posts have been deleted or edited, and so on (but see Meredith & Stokoe 2014 for a rare and excellent example of real-time analysis of online chat). In this project, I was present in more than online ways, but this project is online text dominant. During my fieldwork period, I saw many of my participants’ posts in as “real time” a way as one might on social media—that is, when I opened Facebook I saw in my feed a post from Joseph, Jess, etc. I did not, however, collect that data when I saw it scrolling through my feed in real time for, as Varis (2014) states, such real-time collection would require a 24-hour presence online (and you still wouldn’t catch it all). Instead I collected it in three-month time intervals, scrolling through the archives of their Walls and the PSR/H secret Facebook groups and taking screenshots of their activism-related posts. Postill (2018, p. 26) describes ethnographies that depend on internet elements as situated within “now four ways of ‘being there’”: First, one can ‘be there’ physically, co-presently, interacting with research participants face to face—or indeed, side by side, back to back and so on (see Postill 2008). Second, the ethnographer can also be there remotely, that is, via Skype, streaming, chat pads and other telematic media. Third, we can be in the field virtually, in a ‘third place’ that is neither our present location nor that of our interlocutors, for example via a mailing list, a web forum, a 3D real-time game, a WhatsApp group and so on. Fourth, ethnographers (and their participants) can be elsewhere imaginatively, after the fact through stories or digital content found on blogs, social media, video-sharing sites and so forth. Hine (2000) claims that digital ethnography is necessarily partial and is “not quite the real thing in methodologically purist terms, but rather is an adaptive ethnography which sets out to suit itself to the conditions in which it finds itself” (p. 65, see also Hine 2015). If this isn’t a general definition of ethnography, then I don’t know what is. As Blommaert & Dong (2009) and Varis (2014) claim, “ethnography is not reduced to the employment of certain techniques, but seen as an approach to studying (digital) culture with specific epistemological claims” (Varis 2014, p. 3, citing Blommaert & Dong 2009).

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Androutsoupolos (2008, p. 3) states that ethnography “seeks to understand the social meaning of different ways of using language by taking into account participants’ awareness and interpretation of their practices, and by relating them to the social categories and activities of a community (rather than to abstract macro-sociological classifications).” Under these premises, the work at hand remains entirely ethnographic, and all ethnography remains entirely partial. The collection of Facebook data over time in this study, whether or not the data were collected at the time they occurred, still represents a synchronic set of data, I argue, particularly in the sense that although I collected the social media data after they happened, I still witnessed and/or participated in, either in person or online, most of the events as they were happening; I participated in online and offline communications about events as they were being organized as well as during and after them; I took notes and documented meetings, I collected relevant news articles, and so on. In sum, I collected various types of data as I followed the participants over the time period of the research and my involvement with both PSR and PSRH. The fact that many new aspects of life, and more specifically here, of activism and organizing, are lived out on the internet forces us to continue to discuss, or to perpetually renew our conversations concerning, how or in what ways the collection of online data, in the archived form described here, fits in with prototypical, “old-fashioned” synchronic, analog ethnographic methods (Hine 2015). In the end, I argue, we need to mix more methods, or to at least become more multimodal (Dicks et al. 2006; Robinson & Schulz 2009; Treré 2019)—to collect data across multiple media—in our approaches, in order to succeed at Geertz’s “deep hanging out” as we arrive at certain understandings of culture, identity, communication, and so on in this current information era. As Baym puts it: Certainly, the internet magnifies and forces us to confront what seem like new challenges in our research. Yet when we confront those challenges … we find that these are challenges all researchers face, not just internet researchers. Bringing internet research into the dialogue serves to highlight questions of concern to all, but reaffirms that to do good qualitative internet research is to do good qualitative research. (2009, p. 189) In the sections below, I will address ethnographic conventions and the methodological choices and conditions that arose in this project in several topics. I have discussed 1) the issue of synchrony above; below I will add 2) “home ethnography”; 3) motherhood and parenthood as a part of ethnographic methods and, simultaneously for this project, as a part of activism and community organizing more generally; 4) positionality and moral political

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principles; and 5) online data collection and ethics. These will set the scene for a conversation on how I have approached stories and stances as they appear on and are conditioned, pre-textually, by the communicative affordances of the Facebook social media platform (for the specifics of how I collected and coded data, see Appendix A).

2.2.1 Home Ethnography It must be noted that much of data collection in ethnographies consists of developing an understanding of the context you and your participants live in. Reflexivity is inherent to the qualitative research process, and essential for establishing rigor in ethnographic work (Markham 2009). In Indonesia (my previous research context; Zentz 2017), I was immersed in a new and novel context that I had to learn the ins and outs of through daily lived experience; I was mostly familiarizing the foreign in that project as in more “traditionally” conceptualized ethnographic work (Geertz 1983; Townsend 1999). I woke up in a “foreign” place and went to bed there, too; people on the streets commented on my not belonging there, and in interactions with people I knew there was much conversation about “where you are from” and “where I am from.” In the project at hand, the setting was decidedly not foreign to me in the sense that I have described in the previous paragraph. I went to bed and woke up feeling like I was “at home,” my daily conversations did not consist of macro-level cultural comparisons, and nobody questioned my belonging in most spaces that I entered. This project constitutes a “home ethnography”: a “detailed stud[y] of sites that the researcher may have linguistic and cultural proximity with as well as some kind of first-hand experience and knowledge of” (Georgakopoulou 2007, p. 20). However, Lally points out that ontological security is only ever an illusion (2009, p. 160), and with this I fully agree. While I was indeed “at home,” this space still felt novel to me in the sense that we in PSR and PSRH were all creating an organization and sets of activities that were new to us, and in the wider context we were all experiencing news that got more and more appalling every day as we all tried to deal with it individually, with our families, and with each other (cf. Bonet & McWilliams 2018 for comments on both ethnography “at home” and ethnography in the Trump era). It was also new to me in the sense that the people with whom I engaged in PSR/H were people I did not know before I joined, and the activities that I pursued—meeting with leadership, forging relations with members of religious communities and civil rights organizations, forging relations with my own committee members, and feeling consistently perplexed at why I couldn’t harness more engagement, were also novel experiences for me and for all of the people featured in this research.

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This work absolutely challenged me to see my “home” in new and novel ways—not only to “foreignize the familiar” in a new national context where White supremacy and far right thought had re-entered the mainstream (Meyer 2018)—but also to engage with new people in groups that I had not engaged with before, in the pursuit of goals that I had never pursued before. So while I still felt contextually more of a fish in water for this ethnography, obliged to foreignize the familiar in many respects, there was still plenty of “novel” activity for me to engage with and think about. Still, these conditions make for a quite different interpretation of the situation being studied and of my role in it— with different types of information taken for granted—and they allow for different access to contextual nuance in comparison to a project that consists of familiarizing the foreign.

2.2.2 Parent as Ethnographer, Parent as Activist The work conducted in this project was also different from my previous work in the sense that I was no longer a wandering, free spirit. Townsend addresses his role as both a parent and an ethnographer: I did not have to decide between, for instance, the research project I really wanted to do and the demands of family life, but it is clear to me that the way I thought about my [research], the areas in which I specialized, and the opportunities I pursued were conditioned by my status as parent. At the very least, I decided to do fieldwork that was compatible with both my parenting and my parenthood. (1999, p. 90) In February 2018, when my first daughter was born, Lucy was brought on to the state team to take over for me through April so that I could have a maternity leave. When I resumed, I frequently attended meetings, online or in person, baby in tow. Sometimes she slept through them, sometimes we left very, very early. In spring of 2019 I almost stepped down from the state board because I simply felt useless to the group (this could have been influenced by the sheer exhaustion of the first trimester of my second pregnancy). When I brought up my frustrations in a board meeting, however, Joseph stated something to the effect of: “Well, we’re a feminist organization, so if anybody would be interested in making this work it should be us.” With the group’s encouragement and understanding, I stayed, toddler in tow and big, exhausting bump in my belly, until I reached the end of my two-year term in August 2019 and right before the birth of baby number two. In June 2019, when Jess began to revitalize a White women’s reading/ working group “committed to anti-racism and undoing white supremacy in

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their lives,” one person stated that she would love to participate but she’d just had a baby and would of course need to bring baby along and would that be okay. Jess (herself the single mother of an elementary school student) enthusiastically stated, “My loves! Of course bring the babies!” (Jess, PSRH, June 13, 2019). The circumstances I describe in this section—my positionality as simultaneously parent and ethnographer—were the conditioning factors of my ability to participate in PSR/H in the first place. As such, these details constitute the details of my positionality just as any ethnographer presents their positionality in relation to their participants. I find this conversation particularly pertinent in this study given that the conditions that I operated in as a mother and a partner were also conditions pertinent to the participation of myself and many other mothers in this women-led activist organization. Thus my story of my limitations, availability, and strategizing around the other demands in my life were a generally possible set of conditions for any mother of young children who might have participated in PSR or PSRH. Most activism activities take place on weeknights and weekends due, of course, to the commonality of daytime work among members (whether that work be 9-to-5 in an office or flex work from home) and the volunteer basis of most activism. Throughout the time of this ethnography, however, my husband worked many evenings during the week, and half the day on Sunday. I worked throughout the week and on weekend hours here and there, but this family schedule made my ability to show up at evening and weekend events and meetings quite limited. I could take my daughter to meetings with me (I was little interested in taking her to protests when they occurred, given the albeit small possibility of gun and other violence at this type of event that is everpresent in at least this American’s mind), but since babies are not yet fully interested in activism as I have indicated above, she really got impatient after at most 30 minutes of any meeting. Since a lot of activism consists of talking to each other, her impatience with my choice of activities began to feel like an imposition—on myself, on her, and on the group, despite the group’s overtly pro-mother stance. So there were a few sparse events that I took her to, but these general life conditions mostly led me to follow the group online, to meet with the state board face to face as much as I could, with or without my daughter in tow, to join any video or phone calls we might have with each other, and to participate in our team communications in the private online platforms I listed in Chapter 1. The position of secretary that I occupied was actually quite convenient for my limitations, and actually, another member of the state board who also had a (first and second) baby around the same time as I did occupied the role of moderator of the statewide PSR Facebook page for similar reasons: it required little-to-no face to face meeting time and she could tend to it whenever she had a minute.

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This set of circumstances form a crucial element of ethnographic information regarding both my positionality and the wider truth that activism and organizing are made up of a vast array of non-traditional and often unpredictable hours, and the people involved work in various personalized ways in order to be able to participate. It is typically very hard for a parent, especially of younger children, to participate in activism at all, for many of the reasons that I described above. As the group that I participated in deemed itself an “intersectional feminist” organization (see Chapter 1) and was led and founded primarily by females, many of whom were mothers of children of all ages and who worked full-time, I found that the group were overtly encouraging, when the topic was broached, of people like myself who even dared to try to contribute while parenting young children. In the few citations I have found, of either straightforward or incidental mention of work–family balance in anthropological research, Ghodsee (2009) wrote about how being a single mother in the field conditioned her types of access to cultural spaces in Tbilisi, Georgia. Gilmore (2016) discusses her son’s creation and development of a pidgin in friendship with a local boy in Kenya while Gilmore herself was initially doing other research on baboons. Additionally, Rachel Lears, the anthropologist who made Knock Down the House, the documentary film I will mention again in Chapter 5, briefly discusses how she balanced child care with her husband and often brought her son along with her during the filming of her documentary because there was simply no other option (Stout 2019). Townsend tells of a symposium he was invited to in which the organizers wrote that a fieldworker’s “status as a ‘parent’” is a category equivalent to “sex, race, class, ethnicity, age and sexual orientation” in its “implications for data collection and theory.” They argued that the family lives of anthropologists must be added to those factors, such as colonial histories, current political situations and spheres of influence, ease of access, and availability of funding and support, which have given anthropology, and national anthropologies, specific histories. (1999, pp. 88–89) The methodological choices made in the work presented in this book are entirely a condition of the nature of my ability to participate in this group, and I have discussed them here in order to emphasize that we as ethnographers could spend much more time in our methodological and professional discussions talking about how we conduct our research among our various sets of life circumstances. Not all ethnographies are conducted by unattached, wandering nomads who can be wherever they want to be, whenever they want to be there (as I was in my first ethnography; Zentz 2017), and we

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should not present this picture to those learning to do this work. By explaining how our life conditions influence our ethnographic conditions, I argue that we create space for open conversations regarding how to do ethnographic work under any set of preconditions.

2.2.3 Ideological and Moral Leanings A final note on positionality brings up a question of ethics regarding my own personal belief systems in relation to my participants. In my first presentation of this data at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, an audience member asked a question about our ideological and moral leanings in relation to the data we panel members had collected. That is, how can we account for the fact that those of us studying, for example, right-wing conspiracy theories on 4chan (Ludemann, 2019) and far-right identity politics on Reddit (Brotherton, 2019; Tebaldi, 2019) are not only unsympathetic to these causes but so bothered by them that we need, as one presenter put it, to take “mental health breaks” during data collection due the pure emotional exhaustion we experience when dealing with these particularly vitriolic ideologies and the language used to perform them? This in comparison to a project like mine, where I am not only sympathetic to the movement but an active member of it. In fact, in many ways, my participation in this group was my mental health break in the sense that working with a group of people who were actively trying to push back against events that we all equally viewed as atrocious served to create social networks of solidarity and support in a time of great stress (albeit on different topics, see Behar 1996 and Bonet & McWilliams 2018 for the realities of emotional investment and drain during fieldwork). Our science is not an objective one; it is one of bearing witness and personally investing ourselves in people and examining issues of power, difference and (in)equality, and of bridging “experience near” and “experience distant” concepts (Geertz 1983; Hine 2015). Amid this, we are the research tools and we ourselves are embedded in histories of power and dynamics of moral dissent and disagreement. As such, our relationships with the participants and the data are always important to state and examine. By doing so, we ensure that our science is a rigorous and reliable one—rigorous in our interpretations, and rigorous in examining who has the right to tell stories about people and in what ways (Behar 1996; Jacobs-Huey 2002). While the likelihood of finding an anthropologist or any social scientist who is sympathetic to, for instance, White nationalist causes is exceedingly rare, and as such, a sympathetic presentation of such beliefs also exceedingly unlikely (cf. Skocpol & Williamson 2016), none of these sympathies and allegiances, or lack thereof, should alter the ways in which we examine the technical phenomena that we come across.

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Before proceeding to these more technical phenomena—the way in which the Facebook platform conditions the communications that take place there—I here present some ethical considerations that were taken into account in conducting research on this platform.

2.2.4 Online Data Collection and Ethics: Problematizing Public/ Private Partitions Of particular and unique concern in the process of figuring out how to proceed with data collection in this project is the question of what constitutes public and private spaces on Facebook. These notions with respect to social media have been problematized before, leading to conceptualizations of “semi-public” or “semi-private” spaces, “privately public” and “publicly private” ones, extensions of the private self, and so on (Lange 2008; Papacharissi 2010; Tagg & Seargeant 2017). An initial problem with these terms as they refer to users’ posts on their own personal “Walls” (I explain Walls and groups in depth below in Section 2.3) arises with the choices that are available to a person when they author a post. When I post, I can choose to make my post a) “public,” that is, accessible to people who are not my Facebook Friends; b) “private,” that is, accessible to only my Facebook Friends; and then c) I can go further to block specific people from seeing my post. However, the “publicness” and “privateness” of these “officially” public and private posts is quite unclear. It is unclear from the user’s end in the sense that not all users pay attention to whether or not they are posting publicly or privately; and it is also unclear how public a public post really is—that is, could I find the text of the post in a generic internet search? This does not seem to be the case in my experience. But if someone looks me up on the internet and clicks on my Facebook profile, can they scroll through my public posts, see what I have written in them, and see who has responded? Yes, they can. So even a “public” post still isn’t all that public, and a private post can be seen by potentially over 1000 people, depending on how many Friends the poster has. The latter most certainly cannot be considered private in the same way as we consider one’s home or an intimate relationship to be sites of “private” communication. Expanding the use of these problematic terms to groups (also explained below), though, complicates the situation further. We can think of groups as generally private, “backstage” spaces (Goffman 1959). However, a public group is one that is accessible to anyone who wants to join, and even without being a member of the group one can see the content of the posts that take place within the group, and they can also see who are members of the group. It is, let’s say, a backstage without a curtain divide. A private group is one where outsiders cannot see what is posted in the group, but they can still see who members of the group are. And for a secret group, it is not searchable—so there is no way

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that an outsider could see a post from inside the group’s “boundaries,” or even see who is a member of the group. However—and to limit my discussion here to privacy in secret groups since those were the primary spaces of PSR/H interactions—within secret groups, which are presumably “private” spaces (and which were treated as such by myself and my research participants) as well as “backstage” spaces (Goffman 1959), one can still share a post that will potentially be seen by 10,000 or 20,000 complete strangers.

2.2.4.1 Participant Privacy and the Unclear Public/Private Nature of Facebook Posts Given the above dynamics, or quagmires, that a site like Facebook presents for a researcher, I will now discuss some of the choices I made, in collaboration primarily with Dona and Joseph, regarding how to ethically collect data and protect the privacy of those involved. From all of my participants, I had gained permission to collect posts from their personal Walls including response threads, with the understanding that I would anonymize all non-participant comments in the threads. For their PSR and PSRH posts, I would present only their original posts and nothing from the response threads. This decision was made for the main reason that the PSR and PSRH pages are secret Facebook pages. This means, as I stated above, that they are not searchable on Facebook, and if someone were to look at a member’s personal profile page, they would not be able to see that the person was a member of this group. Dona’s explanation of why the groups were secret provides some clarity: the reason why PSR was um, was a secret Facebook group I mean that was kind of a legacy thing right I mean it was historic at first because Pantsuit Nation was that way. um: we did at some point consider making it a closed group. I’m not sure what that designation means now but at the time what it meant is that people would be able to see, the names of the members of the group. anybody in the public could see that. um and because we were very attentive to the fact that we had a number of people particularly in rural Texas or in suburban areas, who felt very alone, um in identifying as- as progressive, um I- or even not yknowlike they- they may have been like moderate Republicans even. um or moderately conservative but they were just so, um, horrified@ with what was happening with the Trump administration, um or in some cases if they were really um, uh(.) up on what was happening in the Texas state leg or locally um yknow abh- yknow abhorring what was happening at those levels as well, those people uh i- in feeling alone they also did not feel like they could be very public in, in their, uh: I don’t know political concerns or political identity um, it was re- it was not

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really their identity because again some people continued to assert that they were like moderately conservative. um it was more that they were just like so, appalled, at what was happening they were like we can’t even like identify with this group anymore. not that they necessarily identified with the majority of people in Pantsuit Republicly either. but they ended up in the same space. so um, yeah so I wanted to make sure that we protected their identities and the only way to do that at that time was to keep the group a secret group that was not searchable. and that’s why we ended up making like a landing page [the PSR community page] that was- was public, and then after we did a screen we would let people into the group if they were not organically added by friends. (Dona, Interview 2, November 20, 2018) Thus with this level of secrecy came a level of expectation of guardianship of the privacy of all things said within those spaces. As such, I made the decision in conversation with Dona and Joseph that I would only collect participants’ posts and comments within those spaces, and if I ever discussed response threads, I would only do so in paraphrase. An example of this looks like Image 2.1. In this image, taken from the PSRH group, I have blocked out comments by non-participants (the bottom block of color, as well as blocked out names of people who responded with “likes”). These are the comments that would be at most paraphrased, as with conversations that I will present in Sections 4.5 and 4.6. I have left visible a comment that I made and a “like” that Kara gave the post, as even though this conversation took place within the secret space, Kara was a participant in this study and I was, well, a participant observer. Regarding the decision about how to present response threads from the participants’ personal Walls, the choice to collect and potentially use response threads with non-participants’ comments left in but anonymized carried a couple of weighing factors. First, it was up to the participants to decide if they would let the commentary of people on their own Walls be discussed. I described to them explicitly how I would collect data, what I would paraphrase, what I would anonymize, and what I would present with names attached, and they gave me their consent. Second, many of their posts were public and therefore technically more visible to anyone who wanted to put the work in to see them—that is, if I were to look up a person online and click on their public Facebook profile, any of their public posts would presumably also be visible along with the response threads. Third, with such a large number of respondents on those threads who I did not and would never know, there was no way to get permission from these individuals. I had discussed this with a local IRB representative at my university and she discussed with me that there is a clause in research protocols for social sciences that allows for waiver of consent if the data collected is from too many people to gain consent from.

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IMAGE 2.1 Blocked out comments/names in secret group posts Source: Jess, PSRH, March 9, 2017

So for personal posts, where I present data from non-participants, I present them as in Image 2.2 (and see the data presented in Sections 4.3 and 4.4), where participants’ comments and names are left in with only last names blocked out (and alias inserted for Lucy), while non-participants’ profile images and full names are eliminated, as well as any references to non-participants in the text of all conversation participants:

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IMAGE 2.2 Blocked out comments/names in personal Wall posts Source: Lucy, Personal, December 7, 2018

Regardless of the public/private nature of the posts of my participants on their own Walls, and regardless of the IRB protocol’s clause on waiving consent, this decision still weighed on me ethically (cf. Stern 2009 for similar contemplation). As such, I collected response threads from personal Walls in order to have them

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available for analysis, but I decided that I would use comments from non-participants sparingly at most in my write-ups. This decision to use response threads sparingly was only reinforced when I noticed that I had collected so many posts that I simply became more interested in examining primarily the participants’ original posts themselves, and in looking primarily at what they were saying in the response threads to each other’s posts. Analysis of full comment threads became increasingly burdensome as the number of screenshots I took skyrocketed above ten thousand (to a total of over 13,000; see Appendix A), and so I ultimately only examined full threads when the conversation was directly pertinent to my analysis. Of course, I did not make these decisions in a vacuum, and so now I turn to some of the considerations that I made, based on an ever growing body of literature regarding how to conduct online research while maintaining people’s privacy and consent. The most prominent guidelines that I managed to come across as I set out to collect data were a 2017 document published by the British Psychological Society concerning online data and privacy (British Psychological Society 2017), and a 2012 document published by the Ethics Working Group within the Association of Internet Researchers (Markham & Buchanan 2012; see Page 2018 for similar findings). For my purposes, though, I didn’t really find that those documents provided answers for the specific concerns that my research site brought up. In fact, Sveningsson (2009) took up an earlier version of the latter document, pointing out that there was much conflict in its construction across disciplinary boundaries. (This body of work continues to grow and adapt to the ever diversifying concerns of conducting research on various internet platforms, for example in a 2019 document from the Association of Internet Researchers titled “Internet Research: Ethical Guidelines 3.0 Association of Internet Researchers” (franzke et al. 2020).) As Sveningsson states, “Research ethics, on- as well as offline, seems to remain a dynamic and unsteady field that defies all attempts at drawing up any definite and overall sets of rules and regulations (2009, p. 86; see also Hine 2015). It cannot be done with a broad set of guidelines and is even harder to do across fields; that is, psychological societies have different concerns than do anthropologists, and “internet researchers” may or may not be thinking of the specific instances I dealt with when they form a working group on internet research. I suppose this is one reason why it’s hard to find publications on research ethics in anthropology—because each case comes down to some combination of what the IRB (in the case of the US) wants, what participants directly involved in their own specific situation want and care about, and what the researcher does with all of these potentially competing interests (including, of course, our own needs to publish and get promotions; cf. Boellstorff et al. 2012). All descriptions in this book of the data I collected and the choices I made in coding are, like any ethnographic project, locally and inductively decided upon in consultation with my own ethical leanings, general field standards as I was able to find them, the University of Houston IRB, and my participants. While connections may be drawn for guidance in other research projects, of course, each project will require its own methodological approaches and its own tools for analysis.

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Below, I move on to a discussion of the pre-textual conditions taken into account in my analyses of these participants’ stories, stances, and interactions on Facebook, before tying up the chapter with a summary of methods and tools for analysis.

2.3 Navigating Interactions on Facebook In the remaining sections of this chapter I will explain how the structure of Facebook conditions, influences, and “pre-authors” the texts we encounter there, presenting the “Seven A’s,” a mnemonic I have devised to capture the communicative conditions in which posts and their ensuing conversations on Facebook operate. I will then demonstrate how an analysis can bring together the theoretical frameworks I laid out in Chapter 1 with the communicative limitations and affordances described through the Seven A’s, before transitioning to the data analyses presented in Chapters 3–5.

2.3.1 How Facebook Works In her work on narrative in new media communications, Georgakopoulou states Media-rich environments afford opportunities for sharing life in miniaturized form at the same time as constraining the ability of users to plunge into full autobiographical mode (think of the 140 characters [Twitter’s character limit until 2018]). In particular, they offer users the ability to share experience as it is happening with various semiotic (multi-modal) resources, to update it as often as necessary and to (re)-embed it in various social platforms. (2013, p. 20) Facebook is a “microblogging” platform that brings people together through social networks and allows them to share information multimodally, combining text, video, image, and so on in a variety of combinations. The term “microblogging” that is used to label sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, among others, indicates that users can post their thoughts, as they would in a blog, but in much quicker and shorter formats, which can therefore allow them to post more frequently and interactively (Nations 2019). Facebook consists of personal “Walls” and “groups,” as well as personalized News Feeds. When an individual account holder opens up Facebook on their computer or their phone, what they first encounter is their News Feed. This is a running list of recent or popular posts by accounts they follow (“Friends” or public/ community pages like news sites, pop-star fan pages, etc.). When an individual posts on their Wall, they are writing a post that will be visible to their Friends, or certain subsets of their Friends if they have organized them into groups. When one authors a post, their most easily accessible option is to post to their own Wall—this option is available at the top of the page as soon as they open the site (on a computer) or app (on their mobile device). They can also post to

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groups that they are a member of, by clicking on the group and then clicking on the option to post that is, again, at the top of the page. As PSR and PSRH online activities took place in groups, I will explain those before I go on to explain the structure of posts and how I have come to understand the pre-textual factors that conditioned all of the narratives presented in the data chapters to come.

2.3.2 Groups Groups themselves de facto indicate a type of alignment by serving as spaces of affinity around a common practice, interest, and so on, though the levels of investment and affiliation within these groups can vary widely (Leppänen et al. 2015; Stommel 2008), and this invokes the “thick” and “light” communities described in the prior chapter. The three different types of group that can be established on Facebook are public, closed, and secret or hidden3 (Facebook Help Center 2020a; Facebook Help Center 2020c; Moreau 2019). Members’ levels of investment do not necessarily align with the public- or private-ness of the group. Public groups are open to anyone to join (some vetting of prospective members can still take place). The group can be found in a search within Facebook, and posts made within the group are visible to non-members—that is, if I click on the group’s main page within Facebook I can see all the posts that have taken place within the group and the ensuing conversation threads. Closed groups are more likely to require vetting of members. A host/moderator of the group may invite a member to join or might automatically add a member, or a prospective member can request to be added to the group. Membership in these groups is also visible on a user’s profile, and the group is also searchable within Facebook. However, non-members will be unable to see any of the conversations that occur within the group unless they request to join and are subsequently accepted. Finally, a secret group is invisible to outsiders. It cannot be searched, one’s membership in the group cannot be seen on their profile, and so obviously, conversations within the group are invisible to outsiders. One can only join a secret group by being directly added by a Friend or a moderator who is already a member. These groups are thus the most likely to be very strongly based around social networks (however vast they may become). Pantsuit Republic Houston and Pantsuit Republic Texas both conducted their activities within secret Facebook pages, and they had complementary public-facing “community” pages that anyone could “follow” (Image 2.4 is taken from PSR’s community page). See Table 2.1 below for a broad visual explanation of the types of communication groupings and activities users can engage in.

2.3.2.1 Group Administration and Moderation All types of groups have hosts/creators and moderators, who are usually labeled within the group space as “Admins” or “Mods.” The admins within any type of

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TABLE 2.1 Types of communicative groupings on Facebook

Type of interaction

Type of grouping

Communicative affordances available

Sharing/posting information

Personal Wall

Sharing/Posting and Receiving/ Discussing

Public group

Every Facebook user has a “Wall.” That is a space where they can author a post. Posts are archived on their Wall unless the user themself chooses to delete a post. Posts on a user’s Wall can be designated “Public,” “Private,” or be set to include/exclude certain individuals or groups of Friends depending on how the user has grouped their Friends. Additionally, a poster can “tag” another FB user when they write a post. That person will then be highlighted at the top of the post, and the post may show up on the tagged person’s own Wall depending on whether they have calibrated their settings to allow for that. An affinity space where people gather around a shared interest. Non-members of the group can see who is a member of the group and can see all posts that take place inside the group. A person’s membership in a public group appears on their own FB profile. An affinity space where people gather around a shared interest. Non-members cannot see what conversations take place inside the group. A person’s membership in a private group appears on their own FB profile. An affinity space where people gather around a shared interest. Non-members cannot see that the group even exists. It is not searchable within FB. A person’s membership in a secret group does not appear on their FB profile. A user/business/organization/affinity group can create a Community page that people can “Like” and “Follow,” meaning that the latter can see when a post is made by the administrators of this page. Conversations can ensue in threads below the posts made from these pages, and they are all publicly visible to whoever might encounter those posts (other followers, or people who simply look up the page and read the posts/comment threads). This is what a user initially sees when they open Facebook. It is a “feed,” or sequence, of posts from other individuals that they are “Friends” with and pages that they follow. The News Feed is generally sequenced based on (proprietary and secret) algorithms that Facebook manufactures by measuring people’s behaviors when they are on the platform—what they “like” the most, types of external links they click on the most, advertisements they frequently click on, and so on, to much greater detail. The user can “comment” on or “like”/react to any post they scroll by.

Private group

Secret group

Public page (Community page)

Receiving information

News Feed

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group create a set of “rules for the game,” and they usually post these rules in a “pinned” post, which remains at the top of the group’s feed at all times, or in the “About” section of the group. If a group member goes to the main group page on their phone or computer, the first thing that they will see is that pinned rules post, or if they click in the “About” section when they join, they can see the rules for engagement. Image 2.3 shows an example of a pinned post in PSRH that sets some of the rules for engagement in the group:

IMAGE 2.3 A pinned post in PSRH Source: Samantha, PSRH, January 20, 2019

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Admins/moderators additionally have the power to cease all interaction on any given post by disabling comments in a specific thread either permanently or for a set time period. It was frequently the case in the groups at hand that these participants—most of them moderators in these secret group spaces—would first insert themselves into a discussion that was getting heated or in which language use was seen to be inappropriate (sexist, racist, etc.) in order to provide commentary on the conversation in relation to the groups’ moral political, progressive and intersectional feminist goals, or to give one or several warnings that the conversation had gone off track, transitioning from informed debate to personal insults (we will see examples of such activities in Section 4.5). If a conversation headed in this direction and participants did not heed the moderators’ warnings to get back on topic or cease to use inappropriate language, then the moderators could simply shut down the conversation or pause it for a period of time in the hopes that people’s tempers would cool off a bit before the conversation continued. Moderators/admins can also block individual participants from continuing to participate in a conversation if they seem to be fanning flames or acting disingenuously, spreading falsehoods and so on, and they can even remove group members. So again, in the case of the groups discussed here, if a group member reveals themself to be a “troll,” meaning either that they are not operating in good faith, or that they are posting from a fake profile, or that they are in the group only to attack other posters’ posts (or any combination of these), then a moderator will remove them. Also, if it is discovered that a group member shares outside of the group a screenshot of discussions that took place inside the group, the member might be removed. And so on, of course, per group type and per circumstance. Member removal was rare and was usually carried out in consultation with at least other moderators if not the whole board of either PSR or PSRH, in order to ensure that the person doing the removing of the person from the group was doing so on appropriate grounds. In fact, at least among the PSR board, member removal was taken so seriously that we attempted, in spring 2019, to formulate an official document clarifying the grounds on which a member would be removed. The document, titled “Guidelines for removal of PSR member,” was last edited by me on April 14, 2019, and it stated: If brought to our attention by any members of our space that a member violates the spirit of our principles (see PSR mission statement), outside of our space, we will collect evidence from the accusing member, address the issue with the person in question, and decide as a board whether to allow said person to remain in PSR. If a member of PSR uses information circulated within our secret page in order to do public damage to another member, documentation of the event will be collected and the person will be removed by majority vote of the PSR State board.

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If a member repeatedly violates the code of conduct that is pinned to the top of the PSR State secret Facebook page up to 3 times maximum (this may be fewer considering the nature of the offense), the member will be removed with a majority vote of the PSR State board. (PSR Administrative Document, April 14, 2019)

2.3.3 Posts Storytelling on Facebook, as a microblogged event from a laptop or, increasingly, a mobile device (cf. Varis 2014 for a discussion of “decomputerization”), in which a teller can post various types of multimodal stories with no limits on text length, variably situates itself between blogging, wherein a narrator shares generally more formally structured thoughts at length with their audience (Myers 2010), and structurally emergent, conversationally told narratives where speaker and interlocutor much more actively engage in a story’s co-construction (cf. Goodwin 1986; Sacks et al. 1974; see Antaki & Widdicombe 1998 and De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2012). Additionally, stories told and co-constructed in the context of Facebook are multimodal and semiotically designed, as with other types of visual text, and so authorship and response on the platform also requires a significant amount of visual, semiotic work (cf. Bezemer & Kress 2017; Kress 2010; Kress & Van Leeuwen 1996; Scollon & Scollon 2003). On Facebook, there are various ways to communicate. A user can post a text, be it textual, pictorial, video, or a “share” of a news article or any web link, to their own “Wall” (these are “initiating contributions” per Androutsopoulos 2014; see Image 2.4). In general, many online interactions are not only directly addressed toward the people one perhaps knows that they are speaking to, but also to many others who might come across the post and actually take the time to read it (Theodoropoulou 2015; cf. Bell 1984; Goffman 1959; Goodwin 1984; Seargeant & Tagg 2014 re audience design). The complications regarding how posters shape both the content of their posts as well as their posting behaviors was originally referred to as a case of “context collapse” (Androutsopoulos 2014; Marwick & boyd 2010, 2014; Seargeant & Tagg 2014). The idea of “collapse” addressed the various social communities that converge on one person’s post on Facebook or various other social media platforms that people use. Researchers noted that participants would often avoid posting about certain topics, avoid posting altogether (see also Georgakopoulou 2017; Tagg & Seargeant 2020), or they would engage in “social steganography” (Marwick & boyd 2014) in order to navigate such collapse. That is, they wrote their posts in such a way that the message that they conveyed would be quite nebulous to those “not in the know,” while those who the poster wanted to see and understand the message would be able to infer what they meant based on information and experiences they had shared both offline and in other, more private, online spaces (Georgalou 2020 refers to these as “opaque” utterances, requiring inferential interpretation from the audience).

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IMAGE 2.4 Anatomy of a Facebook post Source: PSR Community Page, September 6, 2018

Later, Tagg & Seargeant (2014; see also Tagg & Seargeant 2020) sort of inverted these earlier interpretations of context collapse: instead of looking at the contexts external to the speaker/poster, they emphasized the significance of how

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(and why) authors navigate writing to their different social media audiences and shaping their messages on various social media platforms. Drawing on Bell’s (1984) notion of audience design, Tagg & Seargeant (2014) named this “context design” in order to point out, in keeping with the field-specific history in sociolinguistics of examining how speakers navigate and actively construct the contexts in which they are communicating, that when individuals post on social media, they actively shape the contexts that they are writing within (amid the various semiotic and textual constructs that each social media platform provides for them). Interlocutors use language and other semiotic tools in order to signal, as with Marwick & boyd’s (2014) social steganography, who they are talking to and how they intend the conversation to proceed. This is elsewhere related to “emergent orders of normativity” as well as Bakhtin’s “addressivity” (Agha 2007a; Blommaert, 2010; Lempert 2009; Leppänen et al. 2017; Silverstein, 1976; Varis & Wang, 2011). We must keep in mind, though, that on social media platforms, a context can only be designed so much by users/posters. That is, social media platforms themselves play a (continually changing) meta-semiotic and “pre-textual” (Giaxoglou & Georgakopoulou 2021; Page 2018) role in which they serve to define and delimit the ways we have of communicating in those spaces and even what we are allowed to say in that space. They serve in various ways per platform as a “moderator” or even “referee” (Chovanec & Dynel 2015)—moderating more and less what people say, and also as “pre-author” or “third author” (Eisenlauer 2014), setting the conditions for the structure of what can be said. On Facebook, the modality choices provided to posters are numerous:4 there are plain text; live video feeds with no textual complements; and quite commonly, text used by itself in a brief statement or a long narrative. Texts can be written as a “header” or as a longer story that explains or introduces and contextualizes a featured image, video, shared link preview, or shared “memory” (Bezemer & Kress 2017; Page 2018). Facebook’s placement of text above a featured image invites readers to engage with the textual framing first before they interpret the image(s) or link preview below it (Bezemer & Kress 2017), and thus it also invites authors to write their statements with this placement in mind. In Image 2.4 above we see an example of a link preview: when a user shares a link, Facebook formats the shared link such that a preview image appears prominently to attract a viewer’s attention (this aligns with Kress & Van Leeuwen’s [1996] “ideal” space in an image; above, the image that I have blocked out5 is of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker speaking in the Senate), with the title of the article/webpage that the author has shared the link to below the image, in the space of the “real” (above, “Booker releases ‘confidential’ Kavanaugh documents”; of course, we acknowledge that article bylines like this generally, as well as the pictures that accompany them, serve as clickbait and so, despite their “realness” they frequently still feature elements of exaggeration, emotional cajoling, and so on in order to invite more clicks).

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Various events can provoke a person to author a text on Facebook. Largely, these are events/texts that are intertextual with other events/texts, many of which take place offline (cf. boyd 2015; Georgakopoulou 2017a; Tagg & Seargeant 2017). When a poster authors something onto Facebook, they are largely performing for a “semi-public” or “semi-private” audience (terms that I have questioned above), and “entextualizing” their experience onto Facebook for an audience that does not share the same experience that they are posting about (Leppänen et al. 2015; Bauman & Briggs 1990). Authored performances are further shaped and interpreted by the audience of the post, who may indicate acknowledgment and/or (dis-)alignment (cf. Leppänen et al. 2017) in various ways. The constraints on story-building and relation to one’s audience on Facebook are not so simple as this, though. There are several features that Facebook has built into the possible construction of a post, and they shape the ways in which people tell stories, take stances, and interact on the platform. Below, I share the mnemonic that I have devised for approaching these affordances and limitations in analyzing the posts that we will encounter in the following chapters.

2.4 Seven A’s: Authorship, Audience, Acknowledgment, Alignment, Affiliation, Amplification, Algorithms My first step in addressing how to navigate the variability in both form and content of posts is to offer this seven-term mnemonic, which I have assembled in the interest of devising a way of understanding the elements that condition conversations on Facebook. For the purposes of my analytical goals, this has begotten the “Seven A’s” framework for examining the elements of posts. These Seven A’s consist of: authorship, audience, acknowledgment, alignment, affiliation, amplification, and algorithms. I will explain them below.

2.4.1 Authorship and Alignment Dona once stated: when I post I’m generally thinking about how this resonates with other people who might be connected to me. so it is definitely relational. like it’s not like this is just about me I want you to know about how weird I am@@@ yknow@@@. I can do that I guess@@ but@. I imagine that it’d be the same for a lot of people in that I think that people are motivated by like, engagement with their posts. right like I think- I don’t think that most people are on social media to have a post floating out there with nobody ever liking it or commenting on it@@ yknow@@. so in that sense I think people are trying to reach others. but I- I very explicitly like am thinking about that. (Dona, Interview 4, June 13, 2019)

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With this commentary, Dona made clear what many researchers have pointed out, as I explained in the previous section: when we post, or author content on social media networks, we post with an audience in mind, and we design our post such that our intended audience will take it up in ways that, likely, align with our sentiments. In the “doing” of posting—in entextualizing a story, performing a stance, signaling a “virtue” or a moral political alignment in a post—posters6 make a significant number of multimodal choices and display various types of literacies and communicative goals as they choose when, how, where, and to whom to author a post (cf. Seargeant & Tagg 2014). In Bezemer and Kress’s (2017) description of a poster’s “interest” in writing a post, an author selects and deselects information in order to achieve their storytelling interest or goal. What content do they want to be “heard,” who do they want to hear it the most, who (people) and what (ideas) do they want to align and dis-align themselves from by posting it—ultimately, what individually, socially and contextually salient information makes this post worth making, here and now?

2.4.2 Affiliation Quite related to alignment, I define affiliation as an overt statement regarding the groups and concomitant values one presents themselves as participating in. This can be done through an “attending” type of post, where one places oneself directly in the company of a certain set of representative individuals, or it can be done through an author’s stating that they are part of a specific group, whether that be a general “progressives” or “Americans,” or a more specific group like “Pantsuit Republic” or “Houstonians.” There are many ways in which posters can demonstrate their affiliation and/or togetherness on Facebook. Below I will list a few as they are relevant to the language of the participants featured in this study.

Tags If a poster wants to share that they are together with someone (in spirit, in a picture, and so on), they can “tag” them. Milan describes the communicative effect of actions such as tagging: social media enable users to appeal to other people, by means of tags, citations and mentions. In doing so, they reiterate the collective definition of ‘we’/‘them’, but also spread it to bystanders, setting in motion further cycles of exchange and negotiation. (2015, p. 896) Tagging is thus one of many ways of creating an exclusive “we” and indicating that that “we”—or that “with,” to use Goffman’s (1971; cf. Scollon & Scollon

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2003) terminology—constitutes a distinct social grouping. Not only is the “we” or the “with” created by the poster themself in using the tag function, but such a function generally prompts the person tagged to respond to the post and the tag, further reinforcing the “with” grouping to others who might come across the post in their News Feed.

Header Tags There are two ways tag a Friend on Facebook. The first is presented in Image 2.5, where Lucy tagged her entire post with the Facebook profile links of eight other people including Kara. It is evident that she authored this post using her phone. This is clear given the nature of the video she posted, wherein the viewer could see that she was holding her

IMAGE 2.5 Tagging in a header Source: Lucy, Personal, October 23, 2018

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phone in front of her face in a vertical position and talking to her assumed/designed audience. After recording the video (this was not a live streamed video; it was recorded and then uploaded), when she went to create a new post in Facebook, she would have arrived at a screen the likes of what I show in Image 2.6, taken on October 6, 2020 as a screenshot of my own mobile device when I go to author a post. In order to tag Kara and the others she was with at the event she was reporting, Lucy would have clicked on the “Tag Friends” line, started typing in her F/friends’ names, and selected their profile links when Facebook suggested them. The names/profile links of those tagged would then become hyperlinked in the post and appear in blue (instead of the usual black) font at the top of the post, as seen in Image 2.5. If a reader of the published post clicks on that hyperlinked blue name, they will be taken to the profile of the person being mentioned.

IMAGE 2.6

Creating a post on a mobile device

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In-text Tags The second way to tag someone is to tag them within the text of the post. The name suggestion and selection process is just the same as above. As one is authoring the body of their post, they simply type in the name of their Friend. As they are typing, Facebook suggests matching names, and the author selects the person they are referring to. The text of the Friend’s name appears blue and is hyperlinked to their profile. In Image 2.7 below, Dona has tagged two candidates—Lina Hidalgo and Beto O’Rourke—who were campaigning in 2018 and with whom she was also Facebook Friends (hashtags, like the “#winning” in this post, will be explained below).

IMAGE 2.7 In-text tags Source: Dona, Personal, October 20, 2018

Attending One can also indicate, when authoring a post, that they are attending an event (Image 2.8). Usually in order to indicate this, the event has to be an official event on Facebook. When one indicates that they are attending an event, it appears at

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IMAGE 2.8 Attending Candidate Forum Source: Joseph, Personal, April 10, 2019

the top of their post in header position. And usually, when one indicates that they are attending something, they are more often than not attending it with other Facebook Friends who are also attending and thus have a similar affinity for the topic or activity of the event. Thus, an indication of “attending” is another strong indicator of alignment with certain people and ideologies. Other options for indicating certain types of attendance or participation when the event that one is participating in has not been entextualized in an official Facebook event are “check-ins” at certain locations, and indications like “watching,” where one can indicate at the top (header) of their post that they are watching an event that they feel that or see that others are likely to be watching or interested in as well. For instance, when Lucy finally got some time to watch the documentary series Surviving R. Kelly (Hampton et al. 2019), about the famed R&B singer and his several allegations of sexual abuse of minors, she posted that she was “watching R. Kelly is a pedophile and Black Girls Matter” (Image 2.9). This was likely a “watching” category that someone else had made and that she

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Watching … Black Girls Matter Source: Lucy, Personal, January 19, 2019

IMAGE 2.9

found when she wanted to indicate that she was watching the series (when you start to type in the name of the events you are watching or attending, Facebook provides some autofill options based on popular events or categories/titles that other Facebook users have created themselves). By indicating that she was watching it, and also by using a “watching” category that did not explicitly name the show, she demonstrated that her audience design was intended for others whom she knew were also watching the show (like Samantha, who liked this post).

Hashtags The meaning and use of [# + “term or phrase”] has rapidly expanded since it first came to use on Twitter as simply a label for indexing topics across posts (Lee 2018; Salazar 2017; Zappavigna 2017). It has been used in activism on Twitter to do just that—to direct people’s attention to important information for, e.g., a specific protest action (as in Tufekci’s (2017) description of the Twitter organization of the Tahrir Square and Gezi Park protests; see also Zappavigna 2015, 2018) or, as in Image 2.11, a category of post like “#CALLTOACTION.” However, over time the use of the hashtag has become much more expansive semantically, across both users and platforms. Describing the hashtag as a “technomorpheme,” Giaxoglou (2020) points out that hashtags act as both “linguistic segment” and “clickable hyperlink” (p. 13). They can be adjoined to words, phrases, and clauses, and they serve both linguistic and metalinguistic functions. As “clickable hyperlink,” their function is generally as stated above: to index information under one term, or under one “hashtag,” as it is commonly referred to, so that people can click on said link and find out who is saying what about that topic, or find information “filed” under that tag (again, this is presented in the #CALLTOACTION tag, Image 2.11). This has been a useful tool for gathering people around information needed in protest and activist activities (as well as, of course, a large spectrum of other activities). As its use has expanded over time, hashtags are now used to indicate/

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follow/set trends around brands or topics, to fill in inferential gaps that arise due to lack of shared context (Scott 2018), to communicate solidarity and alignment around a topic/idea/activity (Zappavigna & Martin 2018), and to frequently make tongue-in cheek metacommentaries on the use of hashtags itself (cf. Rauschnabel et al. 2019; Zappavigna & Martin 2018). The latter has not just remained in written form—it is also now frequently used in speech (Scott 2018). In Image 2.10, Lucy has written the hashtag “#November” which serves a somewhat nebulous purpose, but we might say that its main purpose is to motivate herself and others to stay focused on getting out and influencing the vote for the coming November election. In Image 2.12, Jess uses the hashtag phrases “#ImKidding” and “#DontSayNothin” for purely ludic purposes and to fill in information surrounding the picture and her statement—she is making a joke about sexism, and she is taking and posting a picture of Joseph, cooking in the kitchen, while he is unaware. Scott points out, more specifically to the use of hashtag comments in face-to-face settings (that is, in oral speech), that in situations where contextually shared knowledge is indeed more abundant, the use of hashtag comments is more likely to take on an evaluative quality. We will see in several of the texts in the analyses to follow, however, that authors/posters make use of hashtags for similar purposes in their

IMAGE 2.10 #November Source: Lucy, Personal, October 6, 2018

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IMAGE 2.11 #CALLTOACTION Source: Jess, Personal, January 28, 2017

IMAGE 2.12 #DontSayNothin Source: Jess, Personal, September 15, 2018

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written posts as Scott (2018) describes in oral instances. Quite often in the case of these activists such metacommentary constitutes evaluative and positive, motivational commentaries on the group’s work in order to encourage them to either continue on the activist path or to get more engaged.

2.4.3 Alignment on the Part of the Audience Acknowledgment As Bamberg writes with regard to the nature of narratives in general, “it is the audience-design of the narrative that makes it seize and take possession; it intends to affect the audience because the worst that can happen to a narrative is that it remains ‘responseless’” (2006, p. 141). Seargeant and Tagg (Seargeant & Tagg 2014; Tagg & Seargeant 2020) discuss this in relation to concepts such as Goffman’s “presentation of self,” Bell’s “audience design,” Bakhtin’s “addressivity,” and other symbolic interactionists and conversation analysts such as Garfinkel, Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson. While conversation analytic approaches to narrative view narrative as co-constructed in interaction, the design of social media make it such that the main narrator “holds the floor” for the length of their narrative and then responses to it are subsequent—it is the audience, those the post was designed for as well as other “overhearers,” who further decide the meaning and direction of the conversation (De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2012; Goodwin 1986). After a post is made, then, what elements of the post signify acknowledgment and engagement and in what ways, and how does that shape the ways in which comments in the comments thread as well as future posts will be constructed (cf. Bezemer & Kress 2017)?

“Buttons” All posts, and comments in the conversational threads and sub-threads below them, can receive five “button” reactions or “acknowledgments” (cf. Bezemer & Kress 2017 and see Image 2.13). These are also referred to as “icons” (Page 2018). These reaction buttons allow those reading the post to align or dis-align themselves (cf. Georgakopoulou 2017a; Georgalou 2020; Leppänen et al. 2017); with the poster and/or the content posted using five particular forms of evaluation. Of course, these five “simple” buttons take on a significant amount of contextualized meaning in practice. I will describe a few possibilities here, in the order in

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IMAGE 2.13

Facebook reaction buttons

which they appear in Image 2.13. A thumbs-up emoji may indicate that the reader “likes” the post, they agree with the post, they acknowledge the expressed feelings of the poster, and so on. This is the most common and was the first and only reaction button available for many years (since 2009, Georgalou 2020) until the others were recently added, and so it is often used as a sort of “default” acknowledgment. A heart emoji indicates evaluations such as an expression of love or care for the poster, or a love of the sentiment that the speaker has conveyed; that is, it can be used as a “very strong like.”7 A “laughter” emoji indicates that the reader thinks that the content of the post is funny (in various possible ways); a “wow” emoji indicates shock or surprise at the post’s content; a “crying” emoji usually indicates some sort of agreement with a poster’s expression of sadness or lament. An “angry” emoji is usually an expression of shared anger over content that the poster has shared—this is an act of alignment. But it of course can be used to actually express anger at the poster, as well, and thereby express dis-alignment/ opposition. I have seen this frequently in Facebook users’ responses to posts made by politicians.

Comments When “Friends”—people who are able to see posts by and the profile information of a user—respond to a post, they do so in a “thread” that forms below the post (these are “responding contributions”; ibid.). The thread is a series of comments that are ordered chronologically. The current iteration of Facebook also allows for “sub-threads.” That is, a conversational thread can form in response to a response to the original post (see Image 2.4). The conversations that ensue in threads can consist of alignment and/or dis-alignment (Leppänen et al. 2017) in relation to both the poster and the content of their post.

2.4.4 Amplification and Algorithms A user’s likelihood of seeing a post in their News Feed is related to algorithms established within Facebook that track users’ behaviors in order to see who and what each user interacts with most often—how long they stop to look at a post, whether they click on a link, or whether they like or comment on the post (Constine 2016; Cooper 2020; Dennis 2019; Powers 2017). This tracked data then informs the structure of what a user sees on their feed; the more they

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interact with certain topics, certain types of posts, and certain people’s posts, the more they will see of the same or similar, both in terms of Friends’ posts as well as in terms of advertisements, which are the primary source of revenue for Facebook.8 Such an algorithm (which is constantly being altered) seemed attractive to at least someone when it was drawn up, but it does also have significant drawbacks. Dona once expressed to me her desire that the algorithm allow her access to the greater diversity present among the whole lot of her Friends’ viewpoints about the world, their roles in it, and their beliefs about it. But because she only gave “acknowledgments” of alignment to the Friends that she agreed with—her closer set of progressive friends—the algorithm generally prevented her from seeing the information posted by those she did not generally agree with (this speaks, as we will see below, to an “algorithmic spiral of silence” [Tufekci 2014], as things that don’t get clicks more generally end up not or barely being seen by users). As she explained it: I don’t like get rid of, my Facebook friends who may disagree with meykno- or that, I’m sure do disagree with @@me@@. um. unfortunately F- Facebook’s algorithms like kind of silence people like wh- when you don’t end up liking their posts it’s not like I’m um I don’t want to read posts from my friends who have a difference of opinion with me, it’s that I don’t agree with them, so I’m not necessarily going to like their posts, right? I often won’t. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to read them. And that is what is really troublesome about how Facebook, um presents information to me from my own social network. (Dona, Interview 2, November 20, 2018) Based on Facebook’s algorithms, her window on diversity of opinion is narrowed because Facebook only cares about giving her what she “likes” according to their definition of the term, and giving her what gets more reaction from her specifically in the form of actual acknowledgments and comments made among herself and her closer Friends (with whom she is also “algorithmically aligned,” to coin the term). In addition to one’s own behaviors conditioning what they see, one is also likely to see posts that have received lots of attention from other people, again in the form of acknowledgments and comments. So, for instance, even if my own behaviors and engagement patterns have caused me to never see the posts of a high school friend of mine because we never communicate with each other and have very few interests in common, she might one day post some big news—say, a birth announcement with a picture of her new baby—which gets 100+ “likes” and tons of congratulatory comments. Despite the fact that my and her usual tracked behaviors would cause me to never see her posts, the amount of attention that this one post gets in the form of likes and comments gives its visibility a

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“boost.” Such a boost gives the post yet more attention to a wider audience, it accumulates more and more likes and comments, and more and more people like myself who never interact with that new mom on a regular basis see the post and react to it. Because of this algorithm, which Marwick & boyd (2011) refer to as “scalability,” users are aware that when they comment on a post or like it, its visibility will be boosted, or “bumped.” If a person wants to make their or someone else’s post more visible to more people, then, they “bump” the post, usually by writing that very word or a play on it in the comments thread (Image 2.14), or they insert silly memes, gifs, or

IMAGE 2.14 Bumping a post Source: Jess, PSRH, March 12, 2018

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images, or comments echoing what the poster has stated, in order to increase the number of comments and therefore the post’s visibility to a larger audience. This was common in the PSR/H groups when a member of leadership posted some information that others felt needed to be brought to the attention of a large number of people within the group, and it is thus also an act of alignment or positive evaluative stance. This is fun for examples like the birth announcement, where a fun or very remarkable event happens in someone’s life and they post about it, but this algorithm has its drawbacks. Many administrators of public “community” pages on Facebook post highly inflammatory content, regardless of its veracity, knowing that it will elicit large amounts of reactions.9 Some of the worst examples of this are “fake news” organizations like Alex Jones’s Infowars to Mad World News (featured in New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast; Roose 2018), both of whom have gained millions of followers based on their completely anti-factual appeals to emotions and bigoted ideologies. While such inflammatory and false posts have captivated people’s attention by earning thousands and even millions of clicks, likes, and comments, often factual news that is bad, but true and important, can fall into “an algorithmic spiral of silence” due to the fact that viewers don’t click “like” on such horrible news, even if they want or need to know about it (Cooper 2020; Dennis 2019; Mozilla 2017; Treré 2019, p. 172). Tufekci (2014) cites the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri as a prominent example of this, where the “signal” of posts about this horrible event that invoked systemic problems of race and policing in America was not eventually seen by all that many people—it did not “go viral” like so many of the inflammatory posts mentioned above do, because those who saw posts about it simply didn’t like the news. This did not mean they did not want to know about it; it meant that there was no proper way to react given the meta-communicative constraints put in place by Facebook (and Twitter, etc.) administrators.

2.5 Bringing It All Together: A Framework for the Analysis of Stories and Stances on Facebook Above, I have explained that there are constraints and affordances leveraged upon users as they communicate on Facebook. I have briefly summarized previous explanations of how to understand the layout of Facebook posts (Bezemer & Kress 2017); explanations of entextualization of texts and experiences from offline to online contexts (boyd 2015; Georgakopoulou 2017a; Leppänen et al. 2017; Tagg & Seargeant 2017); and explanations of Facebook’s “pre-authorship” of texts (Chovanec & Dynel 2015; Eisenlauer 2014; Giaxoglou & Georgakopoulou 2021; Page 2018). Based on such understandings as well as my own experiences on Facebook in general and more specifically in engaging intensively with the data that this book is based upon, I created a framework consisting of three levels of analysis.

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The first level deals with the pre-textual construction of texts on Facebook. In order to understand these conditioning factors on how people presented themselves and their stories in their posts, I have formulated a mnemonic that I call the Seven A’s: authorship, audience, acknowledgment, alignment, affiliation, amplification, and algorithms. Though I will not discuss each and every one of these in every post I analyze in the chapters to come, these seven terms are designed to capture who writes a post (authorship), who they write a post for (audience), who responds to a post and in what ways (acknowledgment), how participants in post-response sequences align themselves in relation to each other and the ideas that they are sharing (alignment), who a poster explicitly associates themself with (affiliation), how posters and respondents ensure that people will see posts (amplification), and what algorithms ensure that posts will be seen or prevent them from being seen by potential audience members (algorithms). The Seven A’s address some of the immediate structural affordances and constraints of communication on Facebook. They must be complemented, therefore, with a framework fit to examine the language therein, constructed with those platform limitations. I explained in the previous chapter that Facebook, due to its structure which prompts a poster to tell something about themselves to the audience, is a prime site for narratives—stories told—and stances—positions taken through those stories. I have therefore combined the structural approach of the Seven A’s with an analysis of stances taken in small story narratives. I analyze these stances, as I described in Section 1.3, first at four levels related to what, who, and how a post author or respondent positions themself, and second in relation to the type of stance that they are taking—what attitude, belief, or positionality they are presenting to the world through the navigation of these four levels. The four levels of stance focus our attention on 1) participants’ use of linguistic resources in formulating stances throughout their narratives, 2) their stances toward their own narrative texts, 3) toward their audience, 4) and toward larger-scale discourses of identity and politics (Barton & Lee 2013; Georgalou 2020; Jaffe 2009). The types of stance-taking I have become interested in upon inductively engaging with the data I have collected from these seven participants relates to how they used elements of their own biographies in order to assume epistemic stances on issues that they wanted to address; how they used these epistemic stances, in Chapter 3, in order to take evaluative, moral and affective stances toward political issues of the moment; how they conveyed stances of (dis-)alignment in portraying a localized group identity (Chapter 4) and addressing public political issues at various scales related to a nationally scaled political identity that was morally aligned with certain nationally visible activists and politicians (Chapter 5). Through all of these chapters, I will also comment on how the participants used stories and moral and evaluative stances in order to motivate their audiences to act or keep acting in progressive political ways. The third level of examination consists of macro-level considerations of chronotope and scale that I also laid out in Chapter 1. I am particularly interested

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in how the group has navigated the traditional institutionalized hierarchy of nation/state/local government structures while making use of multiple, complex communicative platforms that enable them to create novel local and translocal networks that allow them to navigate time and space in new ways while still acting on this unchanging hierarchy of political structuration. While such navigation is present in all the data chapters, it will receive my specific focus in Chapter 5. In the following post and response sequence based on a single post from Joseph (Image 2.15), I provide an example of how the Seven A’s + narrative stance + chronotopes/scales analytical framework might come together in one Facebook post. In September 2018, Joseph attended rallies in front of and some activities inside of the Islamic Society of North America’s first ever event in Houston. Outside, he was there to counterprotest a White supremacist protest against the Muslim event and to act as an escort for any conference attendees who might feel threatened as they walked around outside. He shared multiple posts in just text, and one or two posts containing pictures that he had taken in real time, in order to juxtapose to his Facebook audience both the audacity (including perceived and real threats of violence) and the cowardice of the White supremacist protesters with the caring and kindness of both the Muslim conference attendees as well as his fellow counterprotestors (though not all were peaceful: there was a day of armed protest and counterprotest with guns in both camps). In these cases, he took an experience and a context that he was living first-hand, and transferred it across contexts into the online space of Facebook, where he was able to share the events and his reactions to them/opinions about them with his online audience. This is entextualization (cf. Bauman & Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2015) as an experience lived face to face is transferred into written and pictorial forms framed a certain way for a certain audience most of whom were not simultaneously present with Joseph in the face-to-face experience. Because of his posts about it, though, his Friends were now able to witness his stories and react to them from the location of their own phone or computer, and through the interpretive lenses of their own positionalities and ideological frameworks as well as their knowledge of Joseph and his sets of beliefs and activities. Androutsopoulos (2014) refers to the entextualization process that Joseph undertook as a process of selection, stylization, and negotiation. That is, Joseph, the post author, selected some salient moments from a salient event that he believed others reading his posts would be interested in or should know about; he then stylized his post, or “framed” it, to use Bauman & Briggs’s (1990) words, according to a cluster of semiotic features related to stance, attitude, and a progressive vocabulary set in order to convey his experience in light of his affective and moral stances in a way that aligned with others who thought like him—he thus designed his audience in a way that targeted people who felt the same as he did. In Image 2.15 we see one example of these processes at work.

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IMAGE 2.15 Amazing turnout of ultranationalists Source: Joseph, Personal, September 2, 2018

In the post presented in Image 2.15, Joseph immediately negotiated the interpretation of his own post with an image of himself as the first comment below the original post. This served as a statement that while zero “ultranationalists” had shown up due to inclement weather, he was present, happy/friendly, and “representing” in his PSR t-shirt (clearly conveying his affiliation). Jess responded to his happy face by

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providing a supportive and playful statement: “Yyaaasss! Represent!” In his sarcastic commentary, Joseph insinuates that a group of “ultranationalists,” whom among the PSR group would generally be depicted as using forceful White nationalist language, wielding weapons and proclaiming their own hypermasculinity while calling progressives like us “snowflakes,” were in reality so “wimpy” that they couldn’t even brave a little drizzle to make their point. Through his act of overt affiliation with the presentation of his shirt, he has designed his audience to be a group of people who feel the same about this “ultranationalist” group. He has taken a stance of alignment toward them, and one of clear dis-alignment in relation to the group of ultranationalists (who indeed, as Joseph conveyed in other posts, did appear at other times and did engage in acts of bullying and attempts to provoke violence). His original post received “reactions” (acknowledgments) of alignment, in the form of “likes,” “loves,” and “laughs,” by 42 people, and his selfie post in the top of the comment thread received another 15 alignment reactions. In addition, a comment thread totaling 18 responses (including the two pictured in Image 2.15—Joseph’s selfie and Jess’s response) ensued, consisting of repeated jokes between Joseph and his interlocutors, at the expense of the “ultranationalists.” Such joking “couplets” represent stances of collaborative alignment between participants. This not only aligns them with each other but with a moral political universe in which they coalesce around progressive principles and treat right-wing protestors such as this group as both opposed to what they believe in (equality, diversity, and social justice as opposed to White supremacy, as clearly indexed by the mention of “klan robes” below) and as inauthentic (macho but can’t stand the rain, above) and unintelligent (below). An example of such joking “couplets” is presented in Image 2.16, where a Friend responded: You would think by now they would have figured out how to make their klan robes out of waterproof ponchos And Joseph answered back: There are apparently a handful hiding in the pavilion, afraid of getting wet. Here, the Friend performed an act of clear alignment (alignment in audience) by joining in on making fun of the “ultranationalists” with a sarcastic comment about their wardrobe and preparedness. This allowed Joseph to joke along—an act of uptake of his interlocutor’s alignment offer (alignment in author)—and also to clarify that the unpreparedness of the “ultranationalists,” among the few who had even shown up, had forced them to hide under shelter in the rain—all while Joseph had demonstrated with both of his pictures that he was not seeking shelter

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and therefore, presumably, the rain wasn’t even all that bad anyway. This was ultimately interpretable as, “White nationalists, with all their menacing talk, are really wimps—they can’t even handle a drizzle.” Each couplet like this one received its own set of alignment reactions—likes/ loves/laughs—as well, also seen in Image 2.16. In this post and response thread sequence, it is likely that Joseph’s audience was designed in three ways. First, it is likely that Joseph selected from groups that he had his Friends organized into (though there is no way I can know what his groupings are in his account, Joseph did mention at certain points that he had his Friends organized by group, e.g. “work,” “activism,” and so on). Second, based on who he interacted with most on Facebook within those groupings, a certain subset of those selected would be more likely to see this post soon after he posted it, based on Facebook’s algorithms regarding what content and which people interact with this type of post, from this person, the most. Then, after it gained more traction through all the reactions it got, more Friends would likely have seen the post—it would have been amplified. Third and finally, Joseph designed his audience by using a cluster of semiotic features to index his own stances and convey to his readers that he was specifically speaking to those who likely agreed with him. As Friends responded to Joseph’s post, he then negotiated his ideas and reactions with theirs. These negotiations could consist of their comments, his clarifications or reactions to their comments, and so on, and in this case these negotiations were particularly collaborative in that the interlocutors built up a shared stance together—one of a progressive vs ultranationalist dichotomy or opposition that was immediately taking place on a local level but that was a part of a larger national battle consisting of the same opposition at a much larger scale. While we see above one multimodal story (here, image and text) in which Joseph presents himself in a light sympathetic to Muslims and progressive activists and against “ultranationalists,” we also see him and his interlocutors signaling shared moral stances—not explicitly, but by employing “coupling”

IMAGE 2.16 Afraid of getting wet Source: Joseph, Personal, September 2, 2018

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devices (Martin & White 2005; Zappavigna 2014) that allow them to display and develop a shared alignment at both local and national scales of moral political alignment. With all of the above in mind, I now provide a brief summary of the frameworks and analytical tools that I have employed in this book in order to analyze the data in the chapters to come.

2.6 A Summary of Methodological Approach and Analytical Tools De Fina & Georgakopoulou (2012, pp. 47–48) lay out a useful framework for outlining methodological frameworks and analytical tools in narrative analysis. The five important parameters that they describe are: 1) object of analysis; 2) general methodological approach; 3) methods of data collection; 4) types of data; 5) data analysis. I will preview the content of this book here relying on these five parameters, before presenting the themes more fully in the coming chapters. 1.

2.

3.

4.

Object of analysis: In the dataset presented in this book, largely consisting of Facebook posts, I have been primarily interested in “events, identities, [and] social phenomena.” This is to say that in this book I am less interested in the structure of the texts at hand than in the events they address, the individual and group identity-related acts the speakers commit, and the social phenomena about which they convey their own personal or their groups’ collective stances. General methodological approach: In light of the large amount of data that I collected (upwards of 13,000 screenshots; see Appendix A), some might be inclined to conclude that there is at least a quantitative element to this work. But the ways in which I collected them and coded them come from an entirely ethnographic point of view and epistemology, and as such, despite having such a large number of screenshots to cite, I have treated this work qualitatively and inductively, discerning themes from within the data as I engaged with the participants and became familiar with our activism related activities online and offline. Methods of data collection: In this project, data collected were both elicited by myself, and non-elicited, occurring in their “natural environments.” They were also research-dependent and research-independent. Those elements of the research that are elicited and research-dependent are the interviews that I conducted and the fieldnotes I wrote, and the research-independent, non-elicited elements are the participants’ Facebook posts as well as media artifacts collected. For more specific details on how these data were collected and coded, see Appendix A. Types of data: Posting on Facebook can be quite multimodal, consisting of text, emojis, images, video (live or recorded), and so on. Within a Facebook post

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5.

alone, a poster can share a link with or without their own added commentary, they can just write plain text, they can share an image or a video with their own added commentary, they can upload and share a recorded video, or they can share a live video that will be archived by Facebook and available as a post for anyone with access to that post to watch asynchronously. As for research interviews, some were done live in person and recorded with an audio recorder, others were written essay responses to questionnaires sent via email, others were audio-recorded responses that were then sent to me, and still others took the form of video messages. These latter two were sent back and forth on various communication platforms including Facebook. Data analysis: With respect to the formalities of data analysis, De Fina & Georgakopoulou (2012) suggest that the author should variably answer the following three questions: a) “how are people narrating?”—which draws our attention to “language” and “style”; b) “what are people narrating about?”—which draws the focus to “content” and “themes”; and c) “how do participants engage in narrative practices? [and] why?” This set of questions align with Leppänen et al.’s wording in relation to the goals of what they call a “sociolinguistic and discourse ethnographic approach to digital discourse,” wherein they describe a researcher’s goals as examining “what people actually do—why and how they adopt and appropriate linguistic, semiotic and discursive resources, and what discursive and sociocultural meanings and effects are generated thereby” (2017, p. 6).

My what concern in this book is to answer—by exploring content and themes across these activists’ utterances—how they “write into being” the identities of their movement/organization and of themselves as they develop it, within the political chronotope that they find themselves living through and acting upon. These content and themes are accessed through an examination of narrative practices—exactly how the group members narrate their motivations, beliefs and so on, and how they speak with/across each other through those narrations. I have found it most fitting, with the wide variety of data that I encountered in this study and in light of my larger goals, to employ small stories and stance analyses, because in using both frameworks together I have been able to cut across the multiple genres, modes, and lengths of texts present on Facebook in order to arrive at an understanding and explanation of my research questions: a b

How are narratives on Facebook deployed in the formation of individual and group, moral political identities? How do my research participants both act within and restructure the chronotopes and media within which they collaborate, through various

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discursive activities and across ever changing technological and media configurations? That is, how is the navigation of the scales themselves upon which politics are conducted a part of the moral project of PSR/H? In the chapters that come, I employ the methodological framework and analytical tools that I have laid out thus far in the book. In Chapter 3, I will explore individuals’ biographical small story narratives as they employed them to take stances on various political issues. In Chapter 4, I will examine how the group coalesced around issues thereby forming a singular group identity among various other activist groups locally and political beliefs circulating at local, state, and national levels. In Chapter 5, we will look at how, for this group, a large part of their political and moral negotiations revolved not just around the typical issues one might see circulating in the media, but also around the scales at which politics operate in this nation at this current political moment, and in consideration of the communicative technologies that they were embedded within.

Notes 1 For data presentation conventions see Appendix B. 2 https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/ 3 While I came to know the group type as “secret,” I later found that Facebook was calling them “hidden” (Facebook Help Center 2020b). At this point I am not sure if it was a name change or if they have always called them “hidden,” but see Moreau (2019) to see them referred to as “secret.” Dona also refers to them throughout this project as “secret,” though at one point she did acknowledge that she wasn’t sure if that was what Facebook was calling them anymore. 4 Here I am limiting my description to the types of posts most commonly used among these research participants. There are many more ways that posters can convey meaning in a post on Facebook, but they are too numerous (and irrelevant to this text) in order to explain them in full. 5 In this screenshot, I have blocked out the thumbnail images due to concern for copyright infringement. I have left the image present in full, though, so that I may show in full the “anatomy” of a Facebook post. The reader will note, though, that due to these copyright concerns, in the remainder of this book I have chosen to eliminate several posts consisting of shared images and gifs and to instead simply describe the texts and images within them. 6 In this book I acknowledge Goffman’s (1974, 1981) differentiation between “author,” “animator,” and “principal” in the activation of utterances. However, I refer to people who write posts throughout this book alternately as “authors” and “posters.” This is for two reasons: a) I am not generally spending analytical space on the differentiation above, largely because b) I have generally not encountered instances in the data that I have used in this book where these positions come to be embodied by different people/ characters in participants’ narratives. 7 A sixth button option was added as I wrote this during the pandemic (spring–summer 2020): a yellow emoji hugging a heart to indicate “care.” Based on my personal experience with this button I would say that it allowed various meanings that had previously been bundled into the “like” and “heart” buttons to be parsed out into the “care” reaction. So, relevant to when it was released, if a poster shared something about

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being stressed about decisions they were faced with in deciding whether to send their children back to daycare, or if they were expressing their suffering from symptoms related to COVID-19, they might receive a “care” reaction. 8 Advertisers, on their end, benefit from Facebook’s data tracking in that it allows them to target their advertisements toward people who, through their activities and profile information, fit the profile of an “ideal” client or at least someone “more likely” to be interested in the products, ideas, or political figures they are “selling.” People who buy advertisements upload their ad to Facebook (there is a wide variety of advertisement types, Newberry 2020) and then they select among possible characteristics of their target audience. These are based on age, region, interests (political, sports, fashion, etc.), and so on, to great detail: “For instance, you could choose to target people who are interested in both meditation and yoga, but exclude people who are interested in hot yoga” (Newberry 2020, n.p.). 9 This, in turn, can earn them significant amounts of money thanks to Facebook’s advertisement model which turns “acknowledgments” into commodities—the more clicks, the more attention, the more advertisements sold on the page getting all the attention, which means more profit for both the page administrator and Facebook itself. Users like Jones and the creators of Mad World News have made millions of dollars by selling advertisements on their own pages/Walls, buying fake followers in order to boost their visibility thanks to the popularity algorithms, and feeding the appetites of users who are more drawn to information, whether true or false, that upholds beliefs about the world based on gut reaction and/or voyeuristic spectacle alone. Such activities and attractions, and misinformation and disinformation, as Bimber (2003) might point out, are not new at all, but they have recently manifested, thanks to social media companies’ policies, in perhaps larger-scale and more profitable ways than in prior information eras (see also McNair 2019).

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3 “OUR NEWFOUND OPTIMISM IN DEMOCRACY” Small Stories of Moral Inspiration, Epistemic Authority, and Affective Appeal

3.1 “Our newfound optimism in democracy” As the group’s movement had swept into its frenetic pace of development after Trump’s election and inauguration, Dona reflected on how this new turn to community organizing was changing her lifestyle into energizing and efficient interactions through jam-packed days filled with working, networking in her community, and interacting with family and friends. For her, to be an activist or a community organizer was to remove those labels from, let’s say, one or two evening activities per day, and to start to interweave it throughout all of one’s activities and connections. my day was um packed, you know it was- it was busy, um but that some people may regard it as being untenably busy and, um that- that brought up the question for me of how um it was possible that I could be doing all of these activities and they did not feel, um draining that they did not exhaust me but they sustained me and that they energized me, and um, I- my conclusion is that, um, it- it’s that they uh, they- there’s congruence between what I do in my professional and my personal life. and um it’s- it’s a kind of efficiency that is recapitulated in motifs in the domains of friendship and family and work and interests and, um worldview that is, um it beautifully interconnects all of these things. um and motifs are basically ways that our brains reduce the energetic costs of learning new information. um, it- it um allows us to assign um, um a known pattern to, uh novel data that we see in the world. so that’s a roundabout way of saying, you know this is not just, um, it’s not just a, a sprint it’s not only just a marathon even. it is actually a radical transformation in- in our own psychology as well as um a cultural

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paradigm shift um, that’s happening- or that should be happening, um, with, how we integrate civic engagement in our lives, and how we use it as um, um a tool to mend seamlessly this false divide that we create between who we are as people and who we are as professionals. so when I allow compassion and commitment to community, um to drive, I find that these boundaries vanish for me. um my position on this, and it might a c- it might be a controversial one, is that, um, for most of us who are not, um, expressly prohibited from, you know, discussing or living our commitment to humanity as progressives that we maintain these boundaries because they’re convenient or because they’re comfortable. they allow us the space to excuse ourselves from engagement. um, from that perspective I don’t know that the real challenge is Donald Trump or, [Texas Governor] Greg Abbott. I think the real challenge might be us. um, and that we need to take our newfound optimism in democracy and live it authentically. (Dona, Video, PSR, May 9, 2017) As I reflected on why I found this “speech” so salient, I came to see that it embodies both a quintessential self-presentation of Dona—a very serious scientist who examines her world through cognitive concepts such as “motifs” and “domains,” and a very serious activist/organizer who asks of the members of PSR that they join her in a change in lifestyle, in essence in order to save our democracy through a basic tenet of progressivism which is our “commitment to humanity.” And although this conversation is very serious, and broadcast to potentially over 20,000 people, she offers her thoughts from her kitchen, in her bathrobe, looking “us” straight in the eye (through her laptop camera; Image 3.1) as if she were having a personal conversation with all of us (cf. Kress & Van Leeuwen 1996). Through such talks, which Dona posted to the group only occasionally, she was using lenses that she had adopted over many years, through her education, previous activism and community/political involvement, current leadership and family roles, and so on, in order to formulate some central tenets regarding what PSR’s collective identity would or should be. She was a vocal proponent of this new lifestyle of civic engagement that she described in the video, and this developed into repeated calls for a “cultural shift in civic consciousness,” as well as calls for people to get offline and out in the community, face to face with each other. O’Connor (2018) writes, citing Baynham and De Fina (2016), “when the old stories no longer apply, people need new kinds of stories to make sense of what is becoming of them—and who they are becoming—as they refashion their lives” (p. 18, italics in original). In this chapter I will explore individually expressed statements regarding shifts in moral personhood as these activists “thickened” their identities in relation to political activities.

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IMAGE 3.1

Dona’s “bathrobe meditations”

3.2 Small Stories and Stances in the Formation of a Moral Political Mission It is now well established that narratives form a common site for moral assertions and stances (O’Connor 2018). In the texts presented in this chapter, we will be examining stories and stances that become emblematic across speakers, over time, of PSR/H’s moral political mission. On Facebook in particular, personal stories are told, and they are often told in service to the commentary proposed—they are enacted for particular reasons, situated within multilayered contexts. I have found it most fitting in this work to approach many of these participants’ posts as consisting of “small stories” (Bamberg 2006; Georgakopoulou 2006, 2013), in which speakers—posters in this case—tell stories about themselves in small “asides” or “prefaces” that often serve to frame the poster’s stance with a usually more permanent characteristic of themself. Such positioning generally relays who a storyteller is, what rights they have to tell the story they are telling (their epistemic authority), and their general orientations to the world (cf. Hymes 1996). That is, they present and perform various aspects of their identity through biographical narratives and various types of stance related to those personal stories. In the words of Spencer-Bennett (2018, p. 129), such acts of positioning and stance-taking are also acts of “modest moralising”: short-term shifts from ethical

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talk of one’s own experience towards moral claims about what should or should not be the case more generally. In reference to common parlance on the internet, I have referred to this in Chapter 1 as “virtue signaling.” The framework of small stories intends to examine non-canonical narratives as they are used for various communicative purposes in any given context, online or offline. Georgakopoulou (2006) describes the work of small stories as not only constituted by sociocultural and material context, but also constitutive of it. This is to say that while the participants were authoring their posts, they were responding to prior conversations in online and offline contexts as well as to issues that were arising in their communities and across the nation, but they were also building off of these conversations, and building off of their own biographical experiences, in order to constitute a moral political framework for both themselves and their organizations. What I wish to do in this chapter is to examine a small set of texts authored by Dona and Lucy, relying on the social semiotic, stance, and narrative analysis frameworks that I have laid out in the previous chapters, specifically on the four generally understood aspects of stance-taking that I presented in Section 1.4.4 (Barton & Lee 2013; Georgalou 2020; Jaffe 2009): 1. 2. 3. 4.

the stance-taker—the speaker or author of the statement; the stance object—the person/idea/activity being discussed; stance resources—linguistic resources used to express the stance; and the addressee—persons being talked to either directly or indirectly.

In order to arrive at understandings of these elements of stance-laden positioning, I will focus specifically on the stances participants took within their posts as they authored small stories and deployed biographical elements in order to justify the stances that they were taking on the pressing moral political issues that concerned them as well as the formulation of the ideals of PSR and PSRH. In examining their stories it is not my goal to describe the structure of a singular, linear narrative as they produce it (cf. De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2012; Page 2013, 2018), but rather to examine how they reveal certain biographical elements about themselves at certain strategic moments in seeking to achieve communicative outcomes related to their moral and political goals as leaders of a progressive and intersectional feminist activist organization. In each post sequence, several of the types of stance that I described in Chapter 1 (epistemic, cooperative, affective, moral, motivational) are present; however, I have chosen to thematically highlight one in each sequence in order to assess in more detail how these individual types of stance can be emphasized and deployed toward certain communicative goals such as the encouragement of participation in a newly forming PSR (Section 3.3), the assertion of a PSR/Hwide stance regarding discourses of assimilation (Section 3.4), and a call to action to address the appalling practices of family separation that the federal government is enacting (Section 3.5).

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In reading the texts below we will see Dona and Lucy author themselves in such a way as to generate images of both some of their long-term biographical characteristics and their formative experiences in life—being required not to speak one’s first language; being children of immigrants; being committed for life to diversity and interpersonal connection; being medical professionals with nonpartisan moral opinions; worrying about a daughter’s skin tone in relation to her life opportunities; and so on. In these texts, we will see that identity features both “thick” and “light”— respectively, identity features seen as longer term and more permanent, and identity features that are more temporary and tied to activities and more or less evanescent social networks (Blommaert 2018)—are deployed as deemed necessary in social media posts in order to express one’s relation to current issues and to their audience. Martin & White state that when people take stances: they not only self-expressively ‘speak their own mind’, but simultaneously invite others to endorse and to share with them the feelings, tastes or normative assessments they are announcing. Thus declarations of attitude are dialogically directed towards aligning the address into a community of shared value and belief. (2007, p. 95, cited in Georgalou 2020, p. 175) In combination with the data discussed in the following chapters, we will examine the ways in which these personal revelations work interdiscursively across individualized posts (this chapter), stance-taking in group alignment (next chapter) and work in and through various scales and networks (Chapter 5) in order to portray identities and moral political goals that ultimately contribute to participants’ goals together as a group and an organization in this national political moment.

3.3 “It’s being the change you wish to see in the world”: Setting a Moral Tone As the stark change in reality that the November election resulted in had forced the members of this group to reconsider who they were in relation to our nation and the moral leanings represented in our politics, in many of the group members’ early reflections within the group space, they dug into their past in order to find moments in their lives that were representative of the equality- and inclusion-oriented principles that they stood for and that were now made all the more salient as they felt them to be under threat. Dona’s first written contemplation of this nature came at the very beginning of what became a grueling schedule that the establishment of PSR had come to require of her—a minimum of 80 hours a week spent getting the organization up and running for at least the first eight months of PSR’s existence, as she stated in her second research interview (November 20, 2018). On November 11, 2016, Dona wrote a post describing this experience (Image 3.2 and Text 3.1, below).

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IMAGE 3.2

The “Jello girls”

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She started her post by writing that she was in the middle of a few sleepless nights of bringing PSR together after the election, rushing to coordinate with new and inspiring people who were invested in the same moral politics as she was, and it was making her excited for the future of Texas politics in general. She then refocused her narrative by reorienting the time frame of the story from the present perfect—a past continuing in the present—and a second-person plural “you” term of address—directly addressing the members of PSR—to “yesterday,” a past perfect tense/aspect (cf. Perrino 2011 for chronotopic reorientations in storytelling), and first- and third-person pronouns that refer to her prior self and other characters in her story. With this shift she introduces a small narrative that digresses from the main narrative (suspends the frame, Goffman 1974), stepping back from the details of her recent days and feelings in order to insert an anecdote that would thematically relate what PSR was building (their moral political goals as a community as she was laying them out) to who she had been all along. In this “digression” sub-segment of her post, Dona tells a story about “the Jello girls,” a diverse group of childhood friends who represented, to her, the strength in diversity that she had experienced in her own life and that Houston embodied. She closes the sub-narrative by relating this small biographical story back to the stance that she is taking toward the main conversational frame of her post, and closes with “own this y’all”—a short, summary phrase of motivation to work together, grounded in a shared set of moral political principles that she has used the sum of her narrative to portray. Text 3.1: The “Jello girls” 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

This is my fifth day of averaging around 4 to 5 hours of sleep a night on very little fuel. But, I cannot tell you what a privilege it has been to grow Pantsuit Nation Texas Chapter with you and to watch you all create something so beautiful. I fell into this role accidentally. What I have done has really been to organize and curate the space, so that it is safe, inspiring, supportive, and an instrument for change without being completely overwhelming. I ask you to please check out the entirety of our pinned post, so that effort has not been made in vain. Given the frenetic pace with which we have grown, I have hardly had a moment to fully consider what has happened postelection. All I can see buried in here, is that our great state has some amazingly thoughtful, talented, charitable people. And I am so incredibly heartened and humbled by that. Yesterday, I took one hour of lunch to meet with some of my oldest friends, the Jello girls. We gravitated towards one another in junior high school in Northwest Houston, having come from so many different places. One, a South Indian South African who immigrated to this country. Another a Texan through and through. Myself a first generation Korean-American. The fourth was missed, a Venezuelan-American. Different religions. Different cultural practices. Different family structures from which

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19 we came and which we have ourselves created. And yet, we are so much 20 the same. My 10-year old baby sister said at the time we met, that as 21 we sat next to one another, we reminded her of the layers in jello pudding. 22 As an incorrigible sugar fiend, I could not have thought of a better way to 23 describe these women I love. Profound and sustainable change comes from 24 grassroots efforts, grown organically at home. It’s being the change you wish 25 to see in the world, exactly what we are doing here together. Own this, y’all. [shares picture below this of the “Jello girls’” different colored fists united together] (Dona, PSR, November 11, 2016) In the main frame of this “breaking news” type narrative (cf. Georgakopoulou 2007), Dona entextualizes recent experiences that she has been having and relates them to the larger PSR group. In the first 12 lines, Dona alternates between tenses that convey a recent past that is relevant to the present moment of storytelling by using simple present (“This is my fifth day”) and present perfect tenses (“it has been”; “I have done”); and tenses and pronouns that indicate that she is stepping back from her story frame to speak directly to her audience: “I cannot tell you,” “I ask you.” In doing so, she is relating a recent story—one of her past few “frenetic” days of organizing—to the moment of telling—her writing of this post and her direct address of the members of PSR. She concludes this first section of her narrative by taking an evaluative and affective stance toward it and toward her audience in lines 10–12: “our great state has some amazingly thoughtful, talented, charitable people. And I am so incredibly heartened and humbled by that,” where the “amazingly thoughtful … people” include members of her PSR audience. Her being “incredibly heartened and humbled” by that specific fact is simultaneously a bid for alignment with those addressees as well as a positive evaluation of those people for other readers who find themselves in a more peripheral position to the group’s development. In line 12 she then reorients the narrative toward a specific event that happened in the past, using an adverb of time, “yesterday,” thus shifting the chronotopic orientation of the narrative (Perrino 2011) into a past-perfect, completed event. This brief narrative (lines 12–23) consists of two different Donas in addition to current storyteller Dona. Those are “distant” Dona, who grew up with a certain group of friends in junior high school, and “proximate” Dona, who went to lunch yesterday and who is also the same Dona who has been working at such a “frenetic pace” in the main narrative above these lines. In this story she shares that distant Dona became very close to a very diverse set of female friends in junior high school. She then carries this relationship forward to current day, where after at least 20 years, these friends are still here, together, and devoted to each other. At the close of this small biographical story she provides a third-party assessment of her and her friends’

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relationship as given by her sister in junior high school: these girls were like Jello pudding—united together side by side in multicolored layers (line 21). Combining this assessment from a third party with her own positive evaluation, as narrator, of their “unity in diversity” that Dona describes (lines 18–20): “Different family structures from which we came and which we have ourselves created. And yet, we are so much the same,” and her final statement of her “love” for them, she then returns to her main narrative frame, addressing the “you” audience of PSR again. In line 23 she returns to a direct address of her audience to provide a “moral of the (small) story,” relating the story back to the main narrative frame. It has been relevant to bring these two sub-narratives together (her past few days + a recent event relating her to a longer-term identity trajectory) in order to make the claim that this is an example of “grassroots” connections, “grown organically at home” (lines 23–24), and of a commitment to diversity—“being the change you wish to see in the world” (lines 24–25). She then turns her direct address into a “we” (line 25)—essentially indicating that “what I have been doing is what we are doing”—this is both a bid for alignment with her audience as well as an assumption of two types of epistemic stance. In the first, more directly related to her small story and the moral she drew from it, she explains one way in which her past experiences, carried into the present, embody the mission that she has laid out for the group: “being the change you wish to see in the world” through a commitment to diversity and local, sustainable grassroots relationships. This is a “thick” element of her identity, as she portrays it. The second level of epistemic stance is more recent, less thick, perhaps a new identity in development—her assumed and accidental leadership of this group, but one that she has already, just a few days in, been working tirelessly to bring to life: “I fell into this role accidentally. What I have done has really been to organize and curate the space …” (lines 4–6). This second stance is then re-invoked in the moral of her small story (lines 23–25), (“Profound and sustainable change comes from grassroots efforts, grown organically at home. It’s being the change you wish to see in the world, exactly what we are doing here together.”) and finally in her last statement to the audience: “own this, y’all” which I assess as a “motivational stance”—and one that has more motivational weight when said by a member of leadership—yet another epistemic stance that frames this entire post. Finally, an image is juxtaposed below this text. It is a picture of the Jello girls’ differently colored hands all placed together one on top of the other. This personalized image semiotically reinforces what she has discussed in her narrative— the hands are all differently colored, and their overlapped, intimate placement one on top of the other indicates their togetherness and devotion to one another. This reinforces her argument for unity and diversity, and it also, in a sense, provides pictorial “proof” of her friends’ devotion to each other and to their diversity, through the varied tones of their skin color.

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Dona is using this post to introduce herself as leader of the group through the lens of two nested small stories that exemplify beliefs that she feels will help set the moral tone for this group, in this secret Facebook space. This “moral tone” falls something along the lines of: This is a space of inclusion and acceptance, and I, Dona, as your group founder, want to show you an example of how I embody this principle in order to a) show you how you might embody it, or lay a groundwork of alignment with you if you have a similar story or belief, and b) make such principles a driving moral force in our community. At the local scales of the state and this statewide affinity group, the longer narrative that Dona has told here—the main frame of the post—is necessitated by Dona’s need and desire to “report back” as the leader and founder of the group— to tell them what is going on in this group’s development. Her small story within it personalizes Dona as a leader who is unknown to most of the group’s 20,000 people. More pertinently, it combines with the larger frame of the narrative to enable her to take an epistemic stance that portrays a “thick” element of her identity as directly relevant and appropriate to the development of this group, and as an identity feature and/or belief that she hopes the other group members will align with. In all, the statement proclaims: we are developing in a fast and furious manner, and here are some of the principles that brought me here—I hope you share them, too, and I hope you will fight along with me under this mission/ vision. Relating this to the larger chronotope of that moment, just a few days after the election in 2016, Dona’s invocation of a story that is worth telling—the “why this, now?” of her story—is entirely related to a remarkable and abrupt change in the national level chronotope. Perhaps in the Obama era, or even if Clinton had won the election, Dona’s narrative of the Jello girls and her choice to highlight their diversity and their lifelong commitments to each other as she built PSR would not be a salient story to tell. Such a biographical narrative might have been somewhat unremarkable, even, under such different circumstances. However, now that she finds diversity in this nation under threat and is witnessing a devaluation of this principle (unity in diversity) on the national stage and complementarily in state and local scale manifestations, it is fitting to place it up on a pedestal in telling her own story to the membership of PSR. In this section I have demonstrated Dona’s presentation of a personal story in order to exemplify her local rootedness and commitment to unity in diversity. Relying on very brief narratives relating interactions she has had in her distant and recent past, she has taken stances toward her audience, toward her past and present selves, and toward the stories themselves, and related them to her budding vision for PSR as an organization. The reason for which she has done this is to relate her personal experiences with the goals that she is developing for PSR as a statewide group and organization. Such personalization not only introduces her to the group in a personal

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way, but it also enables her to set the group’s inclusive moral tone through a personally relevant telling. Furthermore, such a story is only relevant here, as this group frantically comes together at the hands of Dona, other members of the brand new leadership team, and the 20,000+ members of the PSR Facebook group, because of the dire change that has occurred in the national chronotope: from the top down and all throughout the nation, election results have put a majority of representatives in power, the morals of whom these people in PSR see as anathema to the unity in diversity and commitment to one another that Dona feels compelled to depict. In the next section we examine Lucy’s similar use of distant and recent or proximate “selves” as she relates them to a current national news event and the moral values of PSRH and Indivisible Houston, where she also held a leadership role.

3.4 “I AM HERE AND I MATTER”: Demographic (Dis-)Alignment through Epistemic Stance Heritage describes epistemic stance as “participants’ ‘moment-by-moment expression’ of their orientation to who is entitled to talk about certain topics, differential access to knowledge within certain domains, etc.” (2012, p. 6, cited in Jacknick & Avni 2016, p. 55). Epistemic stances are frequently performed when a speaker, or poster, relays to the audience a usually “thick” or at least “thick-er” element of their identity that authorizes them to speak about a certain topic in a certain way. It is essentially a claim that “because I am inherently this way and/or because I have this set of experiences behind me, I am authorized to assert my opinion on this matter.” Many of these activists narrated ways in which their participation in “this fight” was personal, and these largely fell around some of the thicker elements of identity that related them to the issues that were at stake under the Trump administration and with far-right Republicans in power more generally at various scales. For some, this related to being a female and feeling concerned about access to women’s reproductive rights; for others, it was being Black and being concerned about racial equality. This is to say that they deployed select “thick identity” elements in narratives about themselves as “epistemic stances,” in order to align themselves with the progressive agenda that they and others were pursuing at this current political moment, and to dis-align themselves with macro-scale narratives that were antagonistic toward that moral political vision and mission. Such epistemic stance-taking was frequent with regard to professional expertise and ethnic identity. We saw one example of Dona’s frequent expression of epistemic expertise related to her profession in the opening monologue of this chapter, wherein she employed terms and phrases related to her frequently invoked “physician-scientist” identity, such as “motifs and domains” and the

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provision of a definition that she is authorized to give because of that epistemic set of experiences/knowledge: “motifs are basically ways that our brains reduce the energetic costs of learning new information.” Dona also frequently referred to her status alternately as first- and second-generation Korean-American, and her ethnicity also drove much of her work, such as voter translation outreach in the Korean-American community as well as general concern for issues of immigration and the relation of current-day “concentration camps” to those that Japanese-Americans had been interned at just a few decades before (relevant to her as a member of the wider AAPI—Asian American Pacific Islander— community). Joseph frequently invoked his authority to explain the grave stakes that were at hand in our current political atmosphere, invoking his master’s degree in History to draw connections between the state of our current government (at all levels, but primarily state and federal) and Nazism, and invoking his familial/ethnic history (along with his advanced knowledge in history) to draw lines between the current direction of the US government and the Cambodian Pol Pot regime that had murdered many of his own family members before those who survived were able to make it to the United States. He also used his “mixed ethnic” background—Latino on his mom’s side and “Asian” on his dad’s side—to explain that his navigation of one part of his ethnicity having the “model minority” stereotype thrust upon it and the other side having thrust upon it very negative stereotypes related to lack of upward mobility and lack of assimilation gave him unique insight to the unfairness of both sets of stereotypes and the need for people to recognize that all immigrants want the same thing: “They want to live in peace, they want the opportunity to succeed, and they want to add to the rich heritage of their adopted nation” (Joseph, Personal, February 18, 2019). Lucy’s immigrant and Latinx identity and family history also played a foundational role in her activism. A pertinent post she made early on in PSR’s formation described a reconciling with the guilt she had over feeling thankful that her daughter had lighter skin than she did, and her desire to fight for a world where skin color didn’t matter (Image 3.3). This coming to terms seemed to have arisen in the post-election weeks of reflection and repositioning: Text 3.2: I thought I was the only one I thought I was the only one … but I saw a post where a mother relayed a similar sentiment: I have felt this guilt about the relief I have with my daughter’s skin tone. She is half Caucasian, and not dark like her mother. She will be able to “pass.” I struggle with the divide and animosity pertaining to “otherness” and don’t wish that struggle for my daughter. What I really desire is a world devoid of profiling and rancor. In the meantime, I am determined to fight for respect and peace. And, I vow to teach her to do the same. (Lucy, PSR, November 18, 2016)

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IMAGE 3.3

I thought I was the only one

In this early post she laid the groundwork for some of the most salient features of her identity as she grew into her role as an activist. She was Latinx (she labels herself with this term below), with relatively dark skin, she cared deeply about both her daughter’s well-being and her daughter being a socially and politically conscious person, and she was here to fight for a better future. Over the course of her time in PSR/H, Lucy expressed keen awareness of generational change in her family, as a daughter of an immigrant and mother of a native-born daughter. She reflected some more on her experiences as a 1.5-generation Latina growing up with an immigrant and non-native Englishspeaking mother, the sacrifices her mother made so that she could thrive, and her treatment growing up Latina and an English-language learner in Texan public schools. These posts, which came together over time to form a narrative about her lived experience as the daughter of a self-sacrificing immigrant mother and how that led to her concern for the well-being of current immigrants, portrayed a “thick identity”—an important positionality and epistemic stance in relation to her immigration reform focused activism. The collectivity of these narratives portrayed an “authentically” (cf. Grice 1975; Seargeant & Tagg 2014) lived

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American immigration story that needed to be heard and acknowledged—she had lived through many of the struggles that so many immigrant families encounter, and she wanted to use her current privilege as a well-educated person who worked in the field of education (“cultural capital,” as she frequently called it) and her personal experiences as an immigrant and the daughter of an immigrant, in order to help those currently living in her wider community under similar circumstances to what she had lived through in her youth. A culminating depiction of the cumulation of these narratives and her construction over time of this “thick” “Latinx” identity comes to light in this quite multilayered segment we have below (Image 4.4, Text 4.3), which I will preface with the news story she entextualizes in her narrative. On a nationally aired live television news program, Meet the Press, in 2019, retired news anchor Tom Brokaw stated that he felt that immigrants needed to assimilate more: “Hispanics should work harder at assimilation,” Mr. Brokaw said. “That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. They ought not to be just codified in their communities but make sure that all of their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities, and that’s going to take outreach on both sides, frankly.” (Garcia 2019) His comment was immediately met with widespread criticism both within the show and also on public and social media platforms afterward, leading Brokaw to quickly release an apology: “I feel terrible a part of my comments on Hispanics offended some members of that proud culture,” Mr. Brokaw tweeted. “I never intended to disparage any segment of our rich, diverse society which defines who we are.” (Ibid.) That evening, Lucy posted a video from the position of her Indivisible Houston role, and she then shared her public IH post directly into the secret PSRH group (Image 3.4) with the header: Text 3.3: a few thoughts 11 A few thoughts on assimilation and my experience. This header was in addition to the original header of her IH post, which after being shared now appeared as a caption under her video (the fact that a header is flipped into caption position by Facebook when a multimodal post like this is

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IMAGE 3.4

I AM HERE AND I MATTER

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shared indicates that the platform has pre-textually defined headers and captions as doing similar if not equal communicative work). In the original header that she had posted in her IH post, which now appeared below her video, she stated: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

By no means is my experience universal. But when people insist on creating paths or expectations for another cultural group, they will fail to capture the nuances of different communities, families, and individuals. I AM HERE AND I MATTER. Tom Brokaw, you do not speak for me. Assimilation is double speak for not being good enough as you are. I call bullshit. #BrokawBorg #Multiculturalismisbeautiful #Embraceyourself IH Action Chair Lucy

Her statement in the video was as follows: 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

hi guys I just wanted to share my reflections on the Tom Brokaw issue, um specifically about his uh call for assimilation. I think that um he speaks of something he has no understanding of I personally was removed from my birth language at the age of 4. my mom made me stop speaking spanish. and because of that I kinda lived in this netherworld of not belonging in either place feeling like a pretender in either place being outside looking in um almost all the time. and so it, it was hard uh to kinda reconcile that. um more recently I’ve come to terms with um who I am and where I’ve come from, um and come to embrace myself but that took h· decades. so to make this blanket statement about what hispanicsand I don’t identify as hispanic I identify as latinx h· um what other people should do, was so h· (.) far beyond the pale that II just could not h· conceive of that. uh this is someone that I grew up respecting h· so it kind of hit me pretty hard [clears throat] and then further to see his non apology h· um he had no clear understanding of what he said and the gravity of his words h· and I- I don’t suspect he ever will, and it’s not- really don’t care, if he does or not,

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37 but I do expect other people to hold him accountable for what he’s done and what he said, 38 and um, that’s pretty much it, 39 so I just wanted to share that. 40 thanks.

(Lucy, PSRH, January 28, 2019) In line 1, the header text that Lucy has written specifically within the PSRH space, she provides a “story announcement” (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008). Next, in her original post header, starting in line 2, she provides a header that could be seen to function alternately as an evaluative coda or an evaluative introduction.2 By providing such information in her initial written text (the caption, lines 2–11), Lucy starts right off by building a moral conclusion based on the epistemic claim that she justifies in her oral narrative in the video. By stating: “By no means is my experience universal,” she is both claiming that her experience is entirely epistemically relevant to addressing Brokaw’s claims while at the same time excusing herself from speaking for all members of the “cultural group” with which she aligns herself—“Hispanics” or, as she prefers, “Latinx.” Here she is positioning herself in relation to macro-level narratives about “Hispanics in the US,” in relation to a story that was told on a national news program—they are far too diverse to be spoken about as one monolithic group. In her spoken narrative (lines 14–40), Lucy builds on what she wrote in her header/ caption by sharing elements of her familial and educational journeys. This consists of a story about her mother’s efforts to make sure her child “assimilated” as much as possible (lines 17–18); an explanation of how hard that made it to figure out who she was and how she fit in American culture (19–25); and then an assessment of what Tom Brokaw said about immigrants and their assimilation practices (26–37), from the point of view of the epistemic authority/experience that she has laid out before it. Lucy’s oral narrative in her video can be separated into several segments, with sequences nested within sequences. First, she presents a story announcement—a statement that she is about to tell a story (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008)—in lines 14–15: “hi guys I just wanted to share my reflections on the Tom Brokaw issue …” In this first segment, Lucy has announced that she will be telling a story specifically pertaining to “the Tom Brokaw issue.” This indexes a conversation that has been occurring prior to this post, and her entextualization of it positions the narrative she is about to share as ultimately one of breaking news and her evaluation of events that have just taken place. Next, Lucy provides another evaluative preview (in addition to those in her header/caption) of what she is about to tell when she says in line 16: “I think … he speaks of something he has no understanding of.” This is her “official” stance on the matter, and it is the overarching stance of this complete narrative. Immediately after this in lines 17– 22, she provides a small biographical narrative in the completed past (past-perfect tense/aspect) that contains internal evaluative statements. The narrative elements here consist of lines 17–18, in which a “past Lucy” is posited. This Lucy was

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“personally … removed from my birth language … my mom made me stop speaking spanish.” Current narrator Lucy evaluates past Lucy’s resulting identity destabilization, wherein negative evaluative lexical choices like “netherworld,” “feeling like a pretender,” and “being outside looking in” portray a past Lucy who was lost in terms of how she fit in with macro-level narratives of Spanish and English speaking Latinos and English-speaking White people/non-Latinos. Following this, in lines 23–25, she provides another small biographical narrative in the present perfect, signaling that this element of her story—feeling lost— continues through to today: “more recently I’ve come to terms with um who I am and where I’ve come from.” This “recent Lucy,” who has come to terms with herself in her relation to the cultures that she is a part of, coincides with her current narrating self, whose “thick” identity as relates to her ethnicity has stabilized. But, she evaluates, that was very hard work—there were a lot of “grand narrative” obstacles to achieving this understanding of self. In lines 26–30 Lucy stakes an overarching claim in which she generalizes Brokaw’s action by turning it into an infinitival phrase that describes a general behavior beyond what only Brokaw said: “to make this blanket statement about what hispanics- … what other people should do …” This makes Brokaw’s action an exemplar of a certain type of action frequently performed by, presumably, a certain type of person. She then narrows the specificity back down to Brokaw’s statement in line 29 by using a simple past “was” that specifies the singular Brokaw event as its subject, “was so far beyond the pale that I- I just could not conceive of that.” In this latter part of the utterance, Lucy’s evaluative phrases “so far beyond the pale” and “could not conceive of that,” as well as the pre-positioning—as a clausal subject “to make this blanket statement”—of the act she is evaluating, function together to amplify what both of these latter evaluative phrases mean: in a negative sense, Brokaw’s words were unimaginable—prior to his having uttered them, she could not conceive that he would have said something like that. Also important in this five-line evaluative section from lines 26–30 is a very brief and specific ten-word utterance where Lucy specifically deploys an epistemic stance in a way that entirely strips Brokaw of any epistemic authority he himself might have on this issue. Her very brief statement in line 27—“I don’t identify as hispanic I identify as latinx”—is a power move in no uncertain terms. By interrupting her evaluation to make this utterance, Lucy has staked a claim, building on the biographical experiences she has revealed in the segments above, that nobody defines her identity but herself—she is Latinx and not Hispanic, and she is the one with the power to make this definition. So for Brokaw to even attempt to make a statement regarding all “Hispanics” reveals his lack of knowledge and authority on this issue. After this evaluative section, Lucy provides another small narrative in line 31. In her distant past, Brokaw “is someone I grew up respecting.” Here, Lucy depicts a personal, affective relationship between her past self and Brokaw’s public image,

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setting up a scenario where her past and current self expected better of Brokaw. “… so it kind of hit me pretty hard [clears throat]” (line 32, evaluative stance) because it was a personal relationship of admiration and respect that has been broken. In line 33, “and then further to see his non apology,” she elaborates on this disappointment. The infinitival phrase formation “to see his non apology” serves as a rewording of “I saw his nonapology” which, as with the infinitival phrase used in line 26, allows the speaker to place the infinitival adverbial clause in front of the main clause and thereby generalize it as a “type of behavior” and foreground its significance—here, the emotional impact that it made on her. She follows this with the sentiments (evaluation) that clarify her evaluation of his actions: “he had no clear understanding of what he said and the gravity of his words.” Again, building on the epistemic authority that she has constructed for herself throughout this narrative as a rather self-defined Latinx woman who has fought to figure out who she is and where she comes from allows her to fully assert, in a quite pedantic way, that Brokaw does not know what he is talking about. In fact, she goes so far as to indicate that he is incapable of fully learning about the situation and people that he was referencing in his statements: “he had no clear understanding … and I don’t suspect he ever will.” Lucy has achieved a dramatic climax above. Throughout the narrative Lucy has built up a story of herself as one of a young girl and woman struggling to find an identity due to macro-scale narratives of assimilation that led her mother to keep her from speaking Spanish. She then fought for a long time to find an identity and found it—as Latinx. And despite the power of Brokaw’s nationally scaled platform on Meet the Press and in all of the other nationwide news outlets that covered this story after he made his statement, and despite her previous admiration for him, Lucy makes a conversational move that could perhaps be called a “mic drop moment”—she claims in line 36 that he and what he said are unimportant to her: “I really don’t care.” We can call this an affective stance of disalignment through complete dismissal of the person and his utterance, grounded in the epistemic stance that she has narratively constructed throughout the above sequence of statements in which she has clarified how hard it was to figure out who she was and how she fit in a macro-level chronotope in which hegemonic discursive tropes asserted expectations of assimilation. Despite not caring anymore, though, Lucy clarifies in line 37 that it is not the case that she doesn’t think he should be held accountable for advancing the assimilation narrative. She does expect a wider public to hold Brokaw accountable (as some of them are doing by making this such big news)—she is just, personally, “over it” because she has come to terms with herself despite these master narratives. Finally, in lines 38–40 Lucy concludes her narrative in a way that seems to continue the nonchalant or dismissive tone of not caring that she began in line 36: “That’s pretty much it … I just wanted to share that. Thanks.” In this lengthy narrative, Lucy has made several epistemic claims based in a series of small stories and affective evaluations of them that she used to provide evidence

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that she had the authority to take epistemic stances on what Tom Brokaw had said. She was not just “a progressive” who didn’t think Brokaw should say something like that. She had experienced first hand what hegemonic ideologies of “assimilation” can do to people—the identity conflicts that they can bring about. Thus through her utterances she asserts that she has the experience necessary to make a moral claim that a) Tom Brokaw doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and b) he should be held accountable for what he has said on such a visible national platform. In this example of the iterative capacities of Facebook posting, Lucy entextualized (onto the IH page) and then re-entextualized (into the PSRH secret group) a conversation that had been taking place elsewhere (in national news and social media) and took a series of statements that disaligned her identity and her moral politics with what a nationally visible figure had said. She essentially used a public platform that she administrated—here, the Indivisible Houston public page—and made a statement of moral political values that represented both groups’ (IH and PSRH) values as a whole, grounded in her personal story and her self-positioning on the issue. By posting in the secret PSRH group after posting it publicly on the IH page, Lucy is both sharing her personal epistemic point of view on the matter and she is also proclaiming the moral political platform of PSRH from her position of leadership within the group—this is my story, and it is also something that our group believes in with regard to the grand narratives available in this country. This is how we fit in the national conversation; it is our platform.

3.5 “I will personally escort him”: Affective Stance in Portraying Investment in Others Not only did their lifestyles deeply change after the formation of PSR and the transition to a Trump administration, but many of the participants became deeply invested in certain people whom they, for many reasons, likely would not have met were it not for the mission they had developed within this political climate and their PSR/H activities. In relation to these people, they held vigils, hosted fundraisers, offered to conduct medical evaluations (in Dona’s case), and connected them to other people and institutions who could help them. Such investment in people and development of personal relationships was often reflected upon as not a service being done to/for/upon people but rather a personally rewarding experience that made these individuals better off alongside those they helped. As Lucy once described it, quite expressively: “I AM GRATEFUL for having a small role in helping as an ally … sometimes doing the right thing IS ITS OWN REWARD” (Lucy, Personal, December 21, 2018). In June 2018 Dona shared for the first time a story about a woman she had been in contact with through her immigration and health outreach activities, whose husband and son had crossed the Texas–Mexico border in El Paso seeking asylum and medical treatment for their son, who was suffering from a brain cyst that was affecting him neurologically in many ways. When they had arrived at

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the border, the son was sent 400 miles east to Brownsville, TX without his father. In a post that Dona authored on June 22, 2018, she posted a fully edited video that she had put together of herself, in her white medical lab coat (immediately portraying an epistemic stance of medical authority in making her statement) narrating what had happened to this family, and her involvement in it (Text 3.4 below). The video was 4.5 minutes long and I will not reproduce it here. In summary, though, Dona narrated a longer version of what she wrote in text above the video, as seen in Image 3.5. In the video, she juxtaposed her own narrative with video recorded clips of L, the mother in question, communicating to Dona in video chats on her phone in Guatemala. The video excerpts of L are all in Spanish, but Dona has provided English subtitles (Image 3.6). However, an important semiotic resource and affective stance measure deployed in these videos, even without those subtitles, is L’s sobbing throughout most of her own conversational turns on the video chat.

IMAGE 3.5

“I will personally escort him”

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IMAGE 3.6

Image of L in video

Before analyzing the text written in the post, then, we have to take into consideration the above semiotic stance resources deployed. They are featured in Images 3.5 and 3.6. In Image 3.5, Dona’s white medical coat is a very purposeful choice, especially when one takes into consideration that she has filmed this video from an office room in her home and not at any work office where she might be expected to wear that coat. We will see this symbolic choice again in Chapter 5 when Dona wears her coat in a protest/demonstration event that she has organized, also related to family separation at the border. The effect of the coat, worn in a context where she would not otherwise be wearing it, conveys to the audience that she distinctly wants to signal her epistemic authority as a medical professional in the matter that she is discussing. Along with frequent statements of hers across posts, some of which we have seen in this chapter’s introduction, she was conveying that she was not speaking to this morally unacceptable situation from a politically “biased” point of view but rather from her “objective” and

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“non-partisan” view as a medical authority. From this point of view, she told the story of a tragic case of family separation and neglected medical attention due to the federal government’s policies at the Texas–Mexico border. The second semiotic choice of interest within the video is her sharing of recordings of L, the mother in the case, who stayed back in Guatemala and has talked to Dona frequently via phone call and video chat. In the recordings of L, not only is content shared about the family’s situation directly from L’s mouth, but in those videos L is frequently sobbing and thus, even if a person doesn’t understand Spanish or is not paying attention to the subtitles that Dona has provided, they can audibly understand the deep distress that the family and especially this mother are experiencing. These two choices in Dona’s audiovisual presentation, which she recorded, edited, and then uploaded onto Facebook, are highly reflexive choices—Dona has had a significant amount of time to decide how she would like to present herself as narrator, the story she is telling, and the people within the story in order to make an important moral political point. In her textual summary above the video, Dona summarizes the longer narrative within it and adds some additional commentary about the situation and her relation to it. In my presentation of this text, I have underlined affect-laden words that I will revisit below: Text 3.4: The story is devastating 1 L lost touch with her husband over a month ago, after he 2 had made the treacherous journey from Guatemala in search of asylum and a 3 brain evaluation for their son, E. L discovered they were 4 separated in El Paso and remains distraught with no news of whether her 5 husband will be deported without her son or whether her son is receiving any 6 neurological care. She is desperate to reunite her family and deeply worried 7 about her son’s health. The story is devastating. If this regime cannot figure out 8 how to reunite this family and deports E’s father without him, I will 9 personally escort him back to Guatemala. But what about the nearly 2000 10 others? For them, I will vote. In the meantime, I have offered to do a first pass 11 neurological evaluation of E at Casa Padre. No response. 12 13 Please watch this video, and give what you can. 14 [shares link to GoFundMe page explaining E and his father’s journey and separation, and E’s medical condition] (Dona, Personal, June 22, 2018) In this textual summary/commentary, Dona starts with the story of L and her family (lines 1–7)—a “breaking news” type small story (Georgakopoulou 2007).

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She then ends the story with a commentary on it—it is “devastating.” In lines 7–9 she provides another very brief small story in the form of a future projection: “If this regime cannot figure out how to reunite this family and deports E’s father without him, I will personally escort him back to Guatemala.” Then another future projection (ibid., lines 9–10): “For them, I will vote.” And finally, another breaking news type story (lines 10–11): “I have offered to do a … neurological evaluation … No response.” This again positions the government/those holding the boy as unwilling to cooperate or provide the medical treatment that he needs. Dona’s primary stance throughout this sequence of telling is that discussed above regarding her semiotic self-presentation of epistemic authority in the form of her wearing of her medical coat. By doing this she is presenting herself as a non-partisan medical professional—non-partisan in the sense that her medically informed point of view does not align with political party or ideology (a refrain she frequently repeats across posts). She has the experience and background to know that this situation is both dangerous for the child’s health as well as appalling in terms of the government’s refusal to find medical help for him, not to mention their separation and distancing of him and his father and the lifetime of trauma that this will produce. This latter half of my description—the “appalling” part—serves as a lead-in to the other primary stance that weaves throughout Dona’s text, in complement to L’s story and her sobbing in the video: its emotional/affective appeal. Throughout the post reproduced above (Text 3.4), I have underlined all of the words and phrases that Dona has used to make a strong emotional appeal to her audience. These are adjectives of strong emotion: “treacherous,” “distraught,” “desperate.” She also cites large numbers (in this post and elsewhere), which also serve as a powerful tool of affective appeal. This is particularly effective across posts (not shown here), where, with regard to this issue of family separation and detention Dona frequently cites numbers in the thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands in order to display the reality, in specific numbers, of how many people are affected by the federal government’s family separation and states likes Texas’s complicity in these actions. In addition to the specific words underlined above, Dona also uses larger phrases to convey an affective stance and a personal investment in this issue that she feels the audience should share with her. By fronting an adverbial/prepositional phrase “for them,” in line 10, she re-emphasizes the people whose health and safety are compromised in this situation. Following this prepositional phrase with “I will vote,” she emphasizes that our individual votes matter for the wellbeing of many people. In lines 7–9, Dona again emphasizes her personal relationship to this issue in juxtaposition to the “regime’s” lack of action. By stating that if they do not act, “I will personally escort him back to Guatemala” (lines 8– 9) again displays her personal emotional investment in this issue. That is, for Dona, the only way to address this situation at the macro, national level, is to vote this current “regime” (line 7, a term that, itself, carries connotations of negative evaluation) out of office.

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Dona not only uses phrases that aim to convince the audience about how they should feel about the case she presents and the broader situation she is addressing. She also uses phrases that display her emotional investment in the story/these people/this issue. “The story is devastating” displays her personal feelings about the story she has just told about L, E, and his father. Conveyed in third person, though, it conveys that this is a sentiment about this story that should be widely agreed upon. It is not just devastating to Dona and to the family discussed in this post; it should be devastating to anyone who hears of it. In this post, Dona, like Lucy did in her post in the previous section by asserting her epistemic authority as an immigrant/daughter of an immigrant, has asserted an epistemic stance. Dona’s, though, relates to her professional authority that gives her superior standing, both politically and morally—over the decisions that the federal government is making with regard to the treatment of immigrant families at the border. From her stance as a highly knowledgeable medical professional, she is also able to assume an affective stance in portraying this family’s situation— because of her medical knowledge, she is able to assert that what the federal government—the “regime”—is doing, is deeply immoral and problematic—as a professional (at least), she is dismayed. In order to convince her audience that they, too, should be dismayed, she has visibly denoted her epistemic authority by wearing her white coat and stating, at the close of her statement (lines 10–11), that she is able to offer to conduct a neurological evaluation. Furthermore, through her deployment of affective elements, a promise to “personally escort” E and his father back to Guatemala, and a promise to vote the current government out of power, Dona has signaled virtues and a moral political framework for action: we who can are in charge of these people’s well-being since the government has refused to take responsibility for their own actions. Finally, this is a video she has posted on her personal page and made public (this post was public when Dona first posted it; later she changed it to private), intending for many people to see it including those beyond her own Friends list. This is a public post, meant to reach “the” American public through networked sharing.

3.6 Compelling Stories: Stances and Virtues on Facebook In the three posts that I have analyzed in this chapter, I have highlighted examples of moral, epistemic, and affective stance-taking performed on and around carefully selected biographical small stories, through the use of various semiotic and linguistic choices (stance resources). Through these multimodal and reflexively produced narratives, Lucy and Dona positioned themselves in relation to the stories they told, the (real and potential) audiences who witnessed their tellings, and “bigger picture” moral political frameworks of the construction of their activist organization as well as the relevant local, state, and national moral political issues and frameworks that they found themselves navigating and negotiating.

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Throughout their posts both in the secret PSR and PSRH Facebook groups as well as on their personal Walls, the participants made use of “small stories” that, over time, served to construct a narrative about their lives and their various identities. Through these narratives, they managed to construct an “activism-relevant” and morally specific, “virtue-signaled” image of their lives by drawing on both long-term identities that they saw in themselves as well as newer identities that they were cultivating through their activism and that were “thickening” as they came to identify more and more with their activist activities and communities. In their production of small stories that revealed personal histories and beliefs, these participants wrote into being their individual and collective “moral person” (cf. Heyman 2000; Jaffe 2009; O’Connor 2018) or “moral type” (Agha 2007a), over time in their Facebook posts. Dennis might call these people “civic instigators”: citizens who actively share political material on social media and express their opinion by way of challenging others … this provocation is not done with any ill intent (citing Coleman 2012: 110), but as a way of generating attention, awareness, and understanding for political issues that they deem to be important. Ultimately, they feel that their actions fulfil an educative function … (2019, p. 158). All of these very personal texts above, while quite individually written and expressed, also worked together across speakers to form the face of the movement—to amplify their cause (Dennis 2019). Their statements, though uniquely authored by them all as individuals, spoke to moral and ethical themes that they all embraced and wanted to push forward as a movement. They deployed their small stories in an effort to take stances on various issues, topics, and activities—to indicate why this fight was personal for them, and to signal virtues through their beliefs and some actions that they felt their movement should adhere to. Over series of posts, across time, posters can develop a sort of story about themselves—who they are or wish to be perceived as, and which social circles they want to be seen as associated with. Georgakopoulou (2013) notes that certain stances or clusters of stances become associated with a social identity through practice conducted within hierarchical social formations, and Du Bois claims that “the individual alone does not take a stance, since stance involves simultaneously people’s relationships to each other, and to some third entity” (2007, cited in Keane 2011, p. 170, see also Bamberg 2006). That is, when people post as individuals, as we have seen in this chapter, they are also posting as members of various social groups, and they are “designing” their statements to align with the groups that they imagine themselves to be a part of and to be speaking to (Marwick & boyd 2010; Seargeant & Tagg 2014). Therefore, a look at identity and subjective stance-taking inevitably leads to a look at intersubjectivity and processes of group identity formation (Blommaert 2019). Melucci writes that

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the biographies of participants in a movement often testify to the importance of such a recognition factor as a deeply emotional experience which brought about their participation and commitment to struggle. The joyful and encouraging discovery that other people are living the same experience is a strong support for individual commitment to collective action. Mutual affective recognition is not a post factum event but a central factor in the process of involvement. (1996, p. 300) The members of this group were driven individually to seek what they were passionate about and to step in to make positive change in their personal and shared areas of concern. However, these individual choices were all supported by a collaborative agenda that they organized themselves around. Therefore, as we move to the next chapter, we move from the research participants’ personal worlds and some of the individual, subjective expressions that constructed their activist identities, which we have seen above, to some of the ways in which the group collaboratively established and ratified each other’s “ethical worth” (Keane 2016) via collective, intersubjective, and collaborative communicative acts that served to support each other, keep each other going amid both exhaustion and exasperation, and collaboratively, dialogically, form the mission, vision, and public image of their movement.

Notes 1 Note that I have numbered the multiple texts under consideration in this sequence with one singular numerical sequence. This is to ease referencing in the analyses below—I will continue this practice in the next chapter across post and comment sequences. 2 Note that it is possible that some people only read the text and don’t watch the video, and it is possible that some ignore the text and only watch the video, so her multimodal telling, in addition to Facebook’s then algorithmic prioritization of videos by moving them to the top of people’s feeds—also enables her message to get to a maximal number of viewers possible. It can be said that her header/caption, then, is also an invitation to watch the video as she knows people will likely encounter her text first before deciding whether or not to watch the video.

References Agha, A. (2007a). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bamberg, M. (2006). Stories: Big or small? Why do we care? Narrative Inquiry 16(1): 139–147. Bamberg, M. & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text & Talk 29(3): 377–396. Barton, D. & Lee, C. (2013) Language Online: Investigating Digital Texts and Practices. London: Routledge. Baynham, M. & De Fina, A. (2016). Narrative analysis in migrant and transnational contexts In M. Martin-Jones & D. Martin (eds.) Researching Multilingualism: Critical and Ethnographic Perspectives, pp. 31–45. New York: Routledge.

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Blommaert, J. (2018). Chronotopes, synchronization and formats. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies. Paper 207. https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/sites/default/files/download/ TPCS_207_Blommaert_2.pdf Blommaert, J. (2019). Online with Garfinkel. Retrieved 07/18/19from https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=7cTI9wxo6xI. Coleman, G. (2012). Phreaks, hackers, and trolls: The politics of transgression and spectacle. In M. Mandiberg (ed.) The Social Media Reader, pp. 99–119. London: New York University Press. De Fina, A. & Georgakopoulou, A. (2012). Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dennis, J. (2019). Beyond Slacktivism: Digital Participation on Social Media. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (ed.) Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, pp. 139–182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Garcia, S. (2019). Tom Brokaw apologizes for comments about Hispanics and assimilation. New York Times. Retrieved 08/05/2020 from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/ business/media/tom-brokaw-hispanics-assimilation.html. Georgakopoulou, A. (2006). Thinking big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis. Narrative Inquiry 16(1): 122–130. Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. John Benjamins. Georgakopoulou, A. (2013). Small stories research and social media practices: Narrative stancetaking and circulation in a Greek news story. Sociolinguistica 27:19–36. Georgalou, M. (2020). Discourse and Identity on Facebook. New York: Bloomsbury. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Grice, H.P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Arts, pp. 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Heritage, J. (2012). Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction i, 1–29. Heyman, J. M. (2000). Respect for outsiders? Respect for the law? The moral evaluation of high scale issues by US immigration officers. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6(4): 635–652. Jacknick, C.M. & Avni, S. (2016). Shalom, bitches: Epistemic stance and identity work in an anonymous online forum. Discourse, Context & Media 15: 54–64. Jaffe, A. (2009) Introduction: the sociolinguistics of stance. In A. Jaffe (ed.) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp. 3–28). New York: Oxford University Press. Hymes, D. (1996). Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor & Francis. Keane, W. (2011). Indexing voice: A morality tale. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21(2): 166–178. Keane, W. (2016). Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kress, G. & Van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Martin, J.R. & White, P.R.R. (2005). The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Marwick, A.E. & boyd, d. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. new media & society 13(1): 114–133.

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Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. O’Connor, B.H. (2018) “Too much cream on the tacos”: Narrative and moral personhood in transfronterizo experience. Association of Mexican American Educators Journal 12(2): 153–181. Page, R. (2013). Seriality and storytelling in social media. Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 5, 31–54. Page, R. (2018). Narratives Online: Shared Stories in Social Media. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Perrino, S. (2011). Chronotopes of story and storytelling event in interviews. Language in Society 40, 91–103. Seargeant, P. & Tagg, C. (2014). The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Spencer-Bennett, J. (2018). Moral Talk: Stance and Evaluation in Political Discourse. New York: Routledge.

4 “YOU ARE A BEAUTIFUL, TALENTED, BRILLIANT, POWERFUL MUSK OX” Alignment, Collaboration, and Bonding in the Formation of a Group Identity Online

4.1 Dona is 100% Authentic The group found many ways to express their unity on Facebook, over time, on their personal Walls, and in their group spaces. Amid their exhausting volunteer work as activists and leaders of their organizations, humor was an essential source of connection and emotional release. Not only did it take place through purely ludic, Facebook-specific activities like having “gif-offs” on one person’s Wall where that individual would share a favorite gif and others would follow suit; it was also employed during other activities such as sharing personal “metamorphoses,” as we will see below, or, here, complimenting each other in playful ways and motivating each other to keep going. In the text below, we see one of frequent examples of Lucy employing gifs and memes related to her wealth of investment in pop culture knowledge to convey her feelings. In September 2018, Lucy wrote, on her own Wall, a “note” to Dona: [tags Dona] is authentic I was speaking to [tags X] about how grateful we are for COMMUNITY. Dona, you have been instrumental in building that. Thank you. (Lucy, Personal, September 12, 2018) Below this text, she shared a gif featuring Leslie Knope, the main character of the American TV sitcom Parks & Recreation. Knope is quoted saying, “You are a beautiful, talented, brilliant, powerful musk ox.”

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Dona “loved” this post and so did Joseph, as well as myself and six other people who were “in” on the humor and sentiment of Lucy’s expression. Below her post, the individual (X) whom Lucy had tagged in the text immediately responded in the comments thread: Absolutely. Every time I’m too exhausted or too upset at the person who wasn’t interested in voting and shut their door in my face, seeing everything you all are doing motivates me to keep fighting.

Then, recognizing that her prized Parks & Rec reference might not be available to her primary interlocutor, Lucy immediately added in the comments: It occurs to me that [tags Dona], you may not know the reference of the gif. In Parks and Recreation, Leslie Knope (a force to be reckoned with and an ace at project management, making binders, and friendship) always has these most random compliments for her BFF, Ann. It is meant as a total affirmation of how I admire you!!

This sequence embodies several important aspects of this group’s collaborative formation of a group identity. First, Lucy overtly entextualizes their relationship onto Facebook in front of a larger audience of “ratified overhearers” (cf. Goffman 1979), and entexualizes a conversation about Dona that she has been having with a Friend (an act of overt affiliation) who is actively involved with PSR/H but not as a member of leadership. Second, Lucy’s direct address of Dona consists of an overt compliment, given in a very humorous way, relying on a pop culture reference in the form of a gif (an activity that Lucy was very fond of). Third, below the post, the person who Lucy tagged chimes in to immediately agree with Lucy’s sentiment, and to add that “you,” the members of this central leadership group, inspire “me,” an outsider to your group, to keep going in moments of exhaustion and frustration. In the analyses in this chapter, I will demonstrate some of the ways in which the group of leaders featured here collaboratively spoke as one aligned and unified social unit. As they spoke up with and for each other, they co-authored “into being” (boyd 2010) an image of themselves as a specific group with explicitly shared stances toward ideas, people, and actions that aligned with, represented, or fell under their overarching moral political frameworks of progressivism and intersectional feminism.

4.2 Stories and Stances in the Formation of a Group Identity Herring (2004) uses the framework of computer-mediated discourse analysis to operationalize six dimensions of virtual communities: (1) active, self-sustaining participation around a core of regular participants; (2) the emergence of roles,

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rituals, and hierarchies; (3) evidence of a shared history, culture, norms, and values; (4) self-awareness of the group as an entity that is distinct from other groups; (5) solidarity and support, as evidenced in, for instance, humor, positive politeness, and reciprocity; and (6) criticism, conflict, and the emergence of means of conflict resolution. And Milan (2015) describes how social media serve to reinforce collective relationships in ways that are not possible without them: through online interactions, collective identity is “continuously activated and reinforced, rather than being galvanized only in occasion of meetings or demonstrations” (p. 896). In addition to looking at Facebook posts as individual, subjective statements as we did in the prior chapter, it is also useful and revealing to examine texts that are more overtly intersubjective, intertextual, and collaborative. Much of the group members’ posting, and responding in the comments sections of each other’s posts, and acknowledging each other’s posts, served to exemplify their opinions on specific issues and ideals, and to formulate the group’s mission and vision as they asserted and constructed a moral community in both frontstage and backstage spaces. As Leppänen et al. (2015) write: “Their membership in this particular community thus gives them access to, and socializes them into the use of, linguistic resources and their intended meanings, histories, and ideologies” (citing Bauman & Briggs 1990, p. 76). These activists regularly mirrored each other’s tone, played along with each other, supported each other’s messages and ideologies, and so on, effectively socializing each other into speaking as a group, and socializing outsiders into seeing them as such. Gnach states that From a linguistic perspective, every aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in some common endeavor develop ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations, and specific ways of meaning negotiation that emerge in the course of their joint activity and which are displayed through language use (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1998; Eckert & Rickford 2001; Gumperz & Hymes 1972; Heath 1983). Therefore, communities should be identifiable due to their language use. (2018, p. 193) As they responded to each other’s posts, the group performed, reinforced, and amplified their shared unity and identity. That is, by responding to each other’s posts with reaction buttons and/or comments—engaging in acts of alignment, acknowledgment, affiliation, and amplification—they both ensured that quantitatively more people would see these posts, and qualitatively they not only constructed an identity among themselves but they made it more possible for others to see their affiliation and cooperative acts of alignment with every like, comment, or “bump.”

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In the sections below, we will see these group members both overtly and tacitly recognize each other’s “lines” as they, in frontstage spaces, entextualize an event together (4.3), and situate themselves as a unified group with shared stances about locally relevant candidates and political issues (4.4), and in backstage spaces, collaborate to monitor their Facebook group members’ behaviors and shape conversations through their shared ideological, moral and political lens (4.5), and recognize, share, and amplify each other’s “metamorphoses”—thicken their identities—into people who unapologetically asserted themselves in their daily interactions (4.6). Through stance acts that show their alignment with each other across both conversational turn units as well as entire narrative and multimodal posts, they acknowledge each other’s assertions through reaction buttons and textual commentaries and build each other’s statements in ways that enable their individual and group identities to “thicken” into identities as leaders of a unified progressive and intersectional feminist activist organization within Houston and Texas that was at once united with other progressive organizations and actors in a common goal but also distinct from many of them, with their own group-defined moral political stances on various people and issues.

4.3 “If you decide to show up and be a part of this fight, then I welcome you”: Collaboratively Entextualizing an Event Online In early 2019, a number of focal participants participated, alongside many other activists in the community, in putting together an “Education Town Hall.” Before, during, and after the event, they entexualized it in several posts. Below, I will provide a “distributed linear” sequence (Page 2018) of their posts before discussing the ways in which this sequence portrayed them as a unified group of actors. I will not number the lines in this sequence as I am less interested in the details of the texts than in the sequence of them as the participants 1) entextualized the event together in the form of invitations and advertisements beforehand, 2) performed acts of alignment as they entextualized the event as it happened, 3) and then commented on the outcome of the event after the fact. Though I will not go line by line in this section, some of the most pertinent elements from within their texts in their indication of group-shared stances will be highlighted.

1) Invitations to the Event Several days before the event, many of them shared not only invitations to the event in an attempt to begin to publicize it and attract people’s attention to it, but also links to a fundraiser for the event so that they could cover some of the costs of things like space rental as well as hosting their guest speaker, Jitu Brown, who would travel in from Chicago to speak at the event. The posts contained a link to a GoFundMe fundraiser for bringing Brown to Houston, and the posters’ accompanying explanatory texts above the link and link preview image. Dona shared the GoFundMe link on December 31, 2018, writing:

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[Tags Jitu Brown], a father and activist who demands better for children in the south side of Chicago, has shown us what is possible when we eschew the dominant narrative of ‘failing schools,’ one that invariably throws communities of color under the bus, and instead throw our weight behind the children we choose not to educate. Students, (student) activists, educators, advocates, and policy makers in Houston stand to learn a lot from his experience—that is if we can come up with the funds to get him here for this education town hall. Please donate with me! [shares a link to a video of Jitu Brown speaking about what he has done to keep local control of schools and to prevent their corporatization and chartering] [shares link to GoFundMe fundraiser to raise funds for bringing Brown to Houston] (Dona, Personal, December 31, 2018) In the post, Dona shared about the guest speaker and the importance of his coming to speak at this event, as well as the important issues that “Students, (student) activists, educators, advocates, and policy makers in Houston” could learn from the event. It would be informative for all, and so it was worth chipping in for. The morning of the event, January 5, Jess posted a link to the event page, inviting her Friends to attend. It contained the same preview image as was displayed in Dona’s post described above, and Jess wrote above this preview: Let’s do this!! We will see you there! [shares link to Facebook event titled Education Town Hall/Reunión Pública sobre Educación] (Jess, Personal, January 5, 2019) On the event’s Facebook page (that is, the link that Jess shared) it was described as: For the second time, our community has fought off possible closures in historically Black and Brown neighborhoods. In April there were 10 schools in danger of closure and charters. Recently, the city of Houston attempted to partner with HISD to takeover the management of four historically underserved schools in Houston ISD…. There will be another attempt to close our schools and we must be ready. Join us to learn more about the state’s attempt to close our schools and what we can do to fight the Texas Education Agency. Jitu Brown, the director of Journey For Justice, will be our guest expert. Journey For Justice helps groups organize to win community-driven alternatives to the privatization of and dismantling of public school systems. Journey For Justice

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organizes in neighborhoods, cities, and nationally for an equitable and just education system, based on a belief in the potential of all children and the rights of parents, youth, and communities to participate in all aspects of planning and decision-making. Find out more about Journey For Justice at https://www.j4jalliance.com This event description stated their goal in hosting the town hall: bringing to people’s attention the state’s current attempts at taking control of Houston’s most vulnerable and under-resourced schools, and highlighting and explaining their desire to prevent school privatization and emphasize the need for decisionmaking as informed by the voices of those most affected by local and state level education policies. This town hall did not, of course, arise out of the blue. The group put it together amid a very contentious conversation over whether or not the governor would authorize a “state takeover” of HISD’s “low-performing” schools. This promised that the schools’ futures would be dictated by state-level, and mostly Republican, politicians who were removed from the local situations in the neighborhoods surrounding these schools. To these activists and the community members affected, this promised a privatization of schools that would further disenfranchise the students of these communities, by eliminating their local public schools and making education harder to access and of questionable quality. Members of the organizing committee for this event published an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle three days before the

IMAGE 4.1

Abbott’s response

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event, on January 2, stating just as much (and more, Webber et al. 2019). Lest we think that these assertions stayed local, I present here a tweet posted by the governor himself in response to this article, as presented on January 3 in a post by Lucy (and Joseph and Jess on their own Walls), in which she tagged the three authors of the oped (also co-organizers of the event), as well as Jess, Joseph, the chair of Indivisible Houston, and one more organizer. The group used Abbott’s comments to continue to boost the event’s visibility and, as is visible in Lucy’s tags here, to continue to present themselves as a “with” (Goffman 1971; Scollon & Wong Scollon 2003) both in the organization of this event as well as in their stances toward it/toward the issue that the event would address. Of course, the presence of social media apps allows us not just to post before an event, but also to post while we are there. The group did this to continue to bring the event and the issue to their Friends’ attention, and by sharing a feed of the event that Joseph was streaming they actually attempted to bring the actual event to more people than those who were physically in the room with them.

2) Entextualizing Attendance at the Event A number of group members posted the day of the event that they were there and ready to learn about the issue at hand. For instance, Joseph shared the same Education Town Hall event link that Jess had posted earlier in the day and indicated that he was “attending.” Below this post header, he wrote: Come join the community! (Joseph, January 5, 2019) Jess re-posted the link again from the event to state that she was there, writing simply Townhall for Education (Jess, January 5, 2019) Then she shared a link to a video being live streamed from the Indivisible Houston page, which Joseph himself was streaming.

3) Commentaries after the Event Right after the event, Lucy authored a post in which she shared a few photos, tagged Joseph, Jess and ten others, and wrote What a remarkable day! I learned sooooooooooooooo much. (Lucy, Personal, January 5, 2019)

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IMAGE 4.2

#WeChooseHouston

The next day, Jess posted a few pictures from the event, tagged Lucy and another Friend, and wrote: It’s hard to put into words what happened yesterday at the Education Town Hall. So I’m not going to try to. But I will leave you with this: Never underestimate the power of a few people who fiercely believe in change.

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Who deeply and inherently believe that our children deserve the equitable right to an education where they are served as a human being rather than a dollar sign. Who will go to great lengths to educate, organize and listen to those most affected and do what’s necessary to move the needle on what is not only deserved, but necessary. And understand that what we are up against is the undoing and destruction of institutionalized racism of public education in this state and country. So do not be so quick to jump to an opinion of something you have not done your research on. Do not assume that a state takeover is what is best for our children. Stop declaring your opinion on the future of HISD if you have decided to not show up. Not do the research. Not ask questions. We are here to change the way public education is structured in this state. Understand this. And if you decide to show up and be a part of this fight, then I welcome you. #WeChooseHouston #SOSHOU (Jess, Personal, January 6, 2019) The next day, Joseph posted a link to the YouTube video he had live streamed during the event and then lightly edited afterwards.

IMAGE 4.3

“pushing back against the TEA”

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Above the link preview he wrote: It is vital that everyone in HISD are aware of all the facts, and that they all join us in pushing back against the TEA: [YouTube link] This is two hours long, view it as you can. (Joseph, Personal, January 7, 2019) And finally, four days later, Joseph posted a picture from the end of the event, of about 30 people (including Lucy, Samantha, and Jess) gathered on the stage of their venue with their guest speaker (Jitu Brown) featured in the middle. Proud of what they had accomplished in conducting the town hall, Joseph wrote: If you don’t show up for the work, you won’t know who’s represented, and who’s voices are being heard. Don’t speak for our entire community because you’re wanting to be centered as an individual.

IMAGE 4.4

“I have two families”

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I have two families, one biological and one not. They are both diverse as hell, and I will come for you if you come for them. (Joseph, Personal, January 11, 2019) Several other PSRH leaders who were not participants in this study also shared links before the event, “attending” posts during the event, links to the live feed during the event, and pictures of the event afterward, along with the similar commentaries to Joseph’s and Jess’s above, displaying devotion to each other, to a specific (though often opaquely stated as in the examples above) goal for the future of HISD, and their shared stance about who had the right to speak and make decisions on this issue. In the sequence of posts above, we can see various ways in which the group collaboratively entextualized this event and displayed their “groupness” before, during, and after it took place. Page (2018) describes such a narrative sequence as “linearly distributed” (p. 20). Here, rather than examine the line-by-line details of the narrative resources deployed by the posters, it is that distribution of posts across time and across speakers that I wish to describe, along with its cumulative narrative effect. 1.

2.

3.

Before the event, they shared, multiple times, links to the event’s Facebook page as well as links to a GoFundMe fundraiser for the event. In those posts they made a case for why people should donate to this event and care about the issue that would be discussed there. As such, they collectively entexualized a conversation that they were participating in elsewhere and prior, at city and state levels and online and offline, regarding a fight between maintaining local control of schools versus a “state takeover,” which would promise the replacement of public neighborhood schools with private and charter schools. Some posted while they were at the event—Joseph sat in front of the speaker’s podium and posted a live YouTube feed of the speakers and events on stage. He shared it through Indivisible Houston’s community page, and others, like Jess, shared Joseph’s IH post onto their own Walls. Some posted after the event: a

b

Lucy posted immediately afterwards, tagging ten collaborators and sharing pictures of the group as well as a picture of herself and a close friend posing with the guest speaker. Jess posted the day after the event (Image 4.2). In it, she tagged Lucy and another member of leadership in her post about the event. In the text of the post, she made steganographic comments claiming that the people who “show up,” “do research,” and “ask questions”

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c

d

e

are those who have the right to have a say in what happens to local schools, and not those who “just assume” that a state takeover is what’s best. Joseph posted two days after the event, sharing a link to the video that he had live-streamed and subsequently edited and posted onto YouTube (Image 4.3). In this post he mentioned the importance of knowing “the facts” and joining the organizers of the event in “pushing back against the TEA (Texas Education Agency).” That same day, Joseph went back to Lucy’s post from January 3—in which she had shared the governor’s tweet and used it as a prompt to continue to invite people to the event—and placed a link to the same YouTube video under a comment in which Lucy had shared the event link (visible in Image 4.1B above). Joseph shared a post several days later in which he did not tag anybody, but he shared a picture—a group portrait in which all of the organizers were present, including Lucy, Samantha, and Jess (Image 4.4). In this post he wrote, similar to what Jess had written five days prior ((b) above), that those who showed up and did “the work” and did not instead “center” themselves were those whose voices deserved to be heard and considered.

In the series of texts presented above, posted separately by each individual about a collaboration that they all participated in, the group intertextually and collaboratively demonstrated that they were functioning as one collective unit by: 1) sharing the same posts to their event and the GoFundMe page for the event; 2) posting individually from the event in order to continue to bring the issue to their Friends’ awareness; 3) posting after the event in ways that presented themselves and their stance on the issue of local control of schools as aligned. Across their posts, they showed significant parallelism in their language regarding a) the importance of saving public schools that serve majority Black and Brown communities and b) “showing up” and “educating yourself” if you wanted to have a say in this matter; and c) asserting their opposition to a state takeover of the schools in question. I will not go further into the details of this sequence, as here I am more interested in the sequentiality itself. The conclusion that I would like to draw here, before going into more detailed analyses of post and comment sequences in subsequent sections, is that: a) the group are collectively entextualizing a conversation about the future of Houston’s public schools and the state’s attempt at a takeover; b) the group are collectively taking a moral political stance on who has the right to make decisions on behalf of their community schools; and c) by posting about it before, during, and after the event, tagging each other in their posts, and sharing images of each other across their posts, they are displaying their

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alignment as a unified group for all their Friends to see. Through these acts they are amplifying three things: a) the issue at stake—schools staying open and staying under local control; b) their stance on it—they should both stay open and stay under local control so as not to further disadvantage Black and Brown youth; and c) their “with-ness” as a group who agree on this issue and work together toward its resolution. They also, by speaking opaquely (Page 2018) at times (mentioning “those who show up” versus “those who just want to center themselves” without naming names, and so on), are designing their audience as people close enough to the local situation regarding a proposed state takeover of HISD that those whom they want to reach in authoring those posts will a) know what they are talking about specifically, and b) be interested in the stance that the group members are taking on the matter. Having explored here an “inter-post” example of how the group collaboratively constructed their unity, we will now move on to some more detailed “intra-post” sequences where I engage with the texts more directly in order to explore how they aligned themselves and collaborated within singular conversations.

4.4 “I know that Joseph speaks honestly”: Collaboratively Formulating a Group Stance Above, we specifically focused on a sequence of events that entextualized and commented on offline activities being translated online as the group planned, held, and summed up their thoughts on an education town hall event that they had hosted. This sequence consisted of a set of individual posts that served a group organizing and mission-sharing goal. Within and across these posts, they shared a particular stance regarding the local- and state-level administration of public education in relation to educational access for minoritized youth. Below, we also witness entextualization onto Facebook. Here, though, it is not a particular event but rather a series of experiences and interactions that build up to Joseph taking several stances that are controversial among the local progressive activist community. When he does so and is met with disagreement from other local activists, his fellow PSRH leaders step in to back him up. Collaborative acts of moral stance-taking such as those examined in the sequence below served to solidify the group’s message across each other. It also served to depict them, both to a general audience of onlookers on Facebook as well as a subset of those onlookers who were members of the local left-wing and progressive activist communities, as a group who held a specific set of shared moral and political values and stances. In this sequence consisting of two posts that Joseph made and the lengthy conversational threads that played out below them, Joseph addressed an issue that had arisen regarding a local candidate’s position. Said candidate, labeled “H” here, had become acquainted with PSRH leadership during his involvement as one of the student organizers of an April 2018 demonstration against gun violence, the

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March For Our Lives Houston rally (MFOLH). During and after that experience, H became known for some manipulative behaviors and political activities that earned him skepticism from the PSRH leaders and various student leaders who had interacted with him. Several months after the MFOLH experience, H, who was just about to turn 18, decided to run for a city council position in the 2019 elections. He was African-American, which is particularly relevant in this first post, related to Joseph’s accusation of “tokenizing.” Joseph wrote:

IMAGE 4.5

“y’all aren’t listening”

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Text 4.1: y’all aren’t listening 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Every time I try to bring up the dangers of a particular person, I get shot down by a contingent of people. Tokenizing someone that’s toxic will take down the entire party. Super disappointing. Also, y’all aren’t listening to young people in the movement that have been hurt. I’m disgusted. (Joseph, Personal, February 7, 2019)

In this post, Joseph, by stating “every time I try to bring up the dangers …,” is, as we have seen elsewhere, entextualizing conversations that have been happening elsewhere and prior to the moment of his post. Further, Joseph speaks very opaquely (Georgalou 2020; Page 2018) to his general audience, steganographically indicating, to those in the know, who this is about with respect to two referents: “a particular person” who Joseph labels as “dangerous” (line 1) and “toxic” (line 2), and “a contingent of people” (line 2) who are rejecting Joseph’s assertions (“I get shot down,” line 1) that this particular person is dangerous. In these brief three lines, Joseph is taking a stance of dis-alignment against both the “particular person” and the “contingent of people” who not only problematically support H but, through Joseph’s assertion of “tokenizing,” are by Joseph’s assertion ignoring his problematic behaviors simply because they want a “token” on their side. Contextualized with what I have written above, the people who support H are supporting him as a candidate because he is young and Black, and they are ignoring the fact that he is manipulative and “toxic” and that as such, he will, if placed into a position of power, “take down the entire party” instead of advancing progressive values. The first two responses to Joseph’s post consisted of statements directly in response to lines 7–8 above, “y’all aren’t list[en]ing to young people …” These respondents stated (see Image 4.5) that they themselves didn’t intentionally disrespect young people. Such responses demonstrate that they were not the direct addressees of this post whom Joseph steganographically signaled in lines 1–3, but that they were involved enough to have been interacting with youth organizers and therefore hoped that Joseph was not referring to their own behaviors. The final response was from a person who indicated that they clearly knew the students in question, but they were not in enough on their interactions to know exactly who this was: “Please PM me who this is. I am not certain who.” In the middle of these responses, Samantha, who had worked intensively with Joseph and the youth organizers for the MFOLH event, signaled her status among the audience of the post as a ratified overhearer—she was not the direct addressee of the post—the people Joseph was accusing of doing the tokenizing. She was instead privy to the previous conversations that Joseph had been having

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and through her statement she indicated that in those conversations she had been aligned with him. She chimed in in support of Joseph’s assertion with, 9 Honestly, I don’t know how you haven’t gotten to the 10 point of posting screenshots and letting the toxicity burn.

With these two lines, Samantha signals her alignment (cooperative stance) with Joseph. She initiates her statement with the adverb “honestly,” which, here, serves to indicate an affective stance of exasperation, indicating that she is annoyed that these conversations are even continuing and that people are refusing to agree with Joseph’s assertions. Her following words suggest sympathetic alignment with Joseph’s frustrations as well as a sort of supportive congratulatory note that he has been strong enough to keep from “posting screenshots,” which would mean “outing” the individuals involved in these behind the scenes conversations that Samantha and Joseph have both been involved in. A few days after this post, it seems that the issue had not yet been resolved, and so Joseph posted a longer and somewhat clearer post (consisting of less steganography and more clear indication of who the participants in this situation were) regarding whom he had been referring to: 11 Look, I won’t be gaslit on my own wall. I have been asked to keep quiet, in the 12 past, and accused of bullying when I spoke out about my experiences with 13 H. He’s now running for public office. I won’t keep quiet. I’m speaking for 14 myself only. He’s toxic. He lies, and he has an amazing ability to sweet talk 15 people he “needs” and bully those he doesn’t like. I’ve seen how he does this 16 first hand. He’s lies about the circumstances of this picture. He’s a 17 conservative when it comes to many things. 18 19 I think it’s good to have a conservative voice that is pro gun reform. I don’t think 20 he should run for office as a Democrat. I don’t believe in keeping silent when it 21 comes to local politicians who I have first hand knowledge about. 22 23 I know some of you have a different experience with him. Good, I hope he’s 24 changing. He’s not ready to run as a Democrat though. 25 26 He needs to earn the trust of those he’s bullied. He hasn’t even tried to do that. 27 28 Kubosh [incumbent H is running against] is horrible. We need a true progressive to defeat him.

[shares two pictures of H wearing pro-Trump clothing and holding, with other young White male Trump supporters, a handmade “Build A Wall!” poster.] (Joseph, Personal, February 16, 2019)

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Another PSRH leader chimed in in the comment thread to thank Joseph for sharing his point of view and to point out that she had also seen the individual in question “show toxicity” and try to “hijack” local gun reform movements. She further stated that we needed a “true progressive” to step in and run for the position. Soon after, a couple of fellow activists outside of Joseph’s closer PSRH circle stepped in to contest his assertions on the grounds that a) the individual was a teenager and didn’t deserve to be criticized like this, and b) they knew the individual personally and felt positive about him. In the lengthy comment thread, when Joseph’s judgment and his interests in writing the post came into question, various allies chimed in. Among those were Samantha and Lucy. As the whole comment thread was immensely long (34 comments) and full of detailed arguments, I will not show it in full. Instead I have excerpted Samantha’s (Image 4.6) and Lucy’s (Image 4.7) insertions into the conversation. When one interlocutor brought Joseph’s assertions into question, Samantha asserted to them:

IMAGE 4.6

29 30 31 32 33 34

He does not make this post lightly

[tags interlocutor] Joseph has been an advisor and mentor to the students of MFOLH since its inception. He has put in so much work in helping student leaders find their paths. He does not make this post lightly. If Joseph feels this strongly about someone, trust it has taken a lot of proven patterns of behaviors for him to say enough is enough.

And at the end of the entire 34-comment thread, Lucy chimed in:

IMAGE 4.7

I know that Joseph speaks honestly

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35 I know that [tags Joseph] speaks honestly 36 and this post was made with a ton of thought and weighing words. 37 Thank you, Joseph. 38 From my personal experience, I can tell you that peers growing up with 39 H have been confused about his political affiliations, which of itself 40 is a dangerous place to be as a candidate. In these two comments, Samantha and Lucy explicitly align themselves with Joseph. That is, they take cooperative stances toward him that consist of their epistemic stances with regard to him and his trustworthiness, expressing that they have knowledge enough of him to speak to his motivations in writing this post. Samantha does this by explicitly describing her knowledge of Joseph’s relationship to the students involved in his post, based on her firsthand experience (lines 29–32). Lucy does so by making the epistemic claim “I know,” referring to her first-hand experiences witnessing Joseph’s integrity— she knows that he “speaks honestly” (line 35) because of her previous experiences with him. Based on her knowledge of him, she feels assured enough to stick her neck out for him in front of others and assert that he has put a lot of thought into making a post that carries such significant facethreatening language in calling someone out specifically (lines 35–36). Moreover, Lucy takes it upon herself to interrupt her statement and reposition herself, from addressing the interlocutors in this post to addressing Joseph specifically. In line 37, she takes a stance of both evaluation and alignment. Combined with the two lines above it, her “Thank you, Joseph” turns the interlocutors into a set of ratified overhearers instead of direct addressees as she models to others that they should be thankful for the frankness and the moral righteousness that Joseph exemplifies generally and has displayed here in his assessment of H. She then returns to the main frame of her post in which she is directly addressing the interlocutors in the comments thread, and again invokes her own epistemic experience (lines 38–40), now not in relation to Joseph but in relation to her personal observation of the teens in question. Starting her claim with “From my personal experience …” she asserts that she, too, has been personally engaged with the students in question, and she knows, firsthand, that many have been “confused about his political affiliations, which is a dangerous place to be as a candidate.” By positioning this description after her assessment of Joseph, she is essentially claiming, not only is Joseph right, but I have seen similar problems regarding H with my own eyes, and— regardless of personality issues—by drawing the argument out to his candidacy in particular—I agree with (align with) Joseph in claiming that H is not an acceptable candidate. In this conversational sequence, we began with Joseph’s individual assertions, across two posts, in which he claimed in more and less clear terms that certain

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members of the activist community that he was a part of were not taking the points of view of teens who had had direct contact with H seriously enough. This was a controversial opinion that was being discussed both online and offline and in backstage communications that I (and many reading these posts) was not privy to. When the situation seemed to have arrived at an impasse, Joseph hinted, in his first post above (Image 4.5) that he was preparing to “out” the individuals who would, in so many words, rather have H as a token for their cause than actually engage with the problematic political and interpersonal behaviors that he was engaging in. After a few more days, Joseph was indeed ready to make the conversation more public, and so he posted a more clear statement to his Wall in which he posted clear pictures of H wearing MAGA hats and holding signs that said “Build that wall”—clear disqualifying acts for anybody running locally for a progressive or even just, more broadly, a Democratic seat. He was providing pictorial evidence, to complement his own personal opinion based on direct experiences with H and with his peers that H was not an appropriate candidate for the Democratic position that he was running for. In making this assertion so visible on the relatively frontstage space of his Wall, Joseph was met with significant pushback from those in the community who were “pro-H.” At this point, the group of PSRH leaders came together around the issue and asserted a shared stance—aligned themselves with Joseph—by backing up Joseph’s individual statement. In making these assertions, they asserted epistemic knowledge, based on personal interactions with each other and the individuals being described. By claiming their firsthand experience with and positive evaluations of Joseph, they aligned themselves under the same moral political purview, and more specifically here, the same moral and political judgments of H specifically. This alignment with each other simultaneously depicted a collective stance of dis-alignment from other members of the left-wing activist community in Houston who did not agree with Joseph’s assessments. The cumulation of such acts represent one among many instances where the group “wrote themselves into being”—they shared a collective identity as a unified group who shared a particular set of moral and political stances and spoke out for each other when any among them was challenged.

4.5 “This group is here to support and uplift females first”: Controlling Discourse The group generally collaborated in creating a culture that spoke out unapologetically for their principles. They acted on this in frontstage ways by creating events like town halls (seen in Section 4.3), hosting and attending protests, calling for and participating in boycotts, calling representatives and encouraging others to do the same, speaking at city hall hearings, board of education hearings at city and

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state level, or even making assertions on their personal Facebook Walls as we saw in the section above. Their work, though, was not only “public-facing,” of course. They spent ample time speaking in the more “backstage” spaces of their secret Facebook groups. As Dennis (2019) describes, the work of micro-activism online is simply part and parcel of the current spectrum of activists’ activities. With our expanded communicative repertoires, thanks to the addition of social media to our lives, there is simply more that can be done in more places. As Prochazka & Blommaert (2019) state, this “knowledge activism” is real and important work. As such, the secret spaces that these activists administrated and led within were spaces not only where they entextualized their face-to-face activities in order to “walk the talk.” They also led that walking of the talk by controlling the discourses that circulated within their spaces. One of these moments arose when some misogynistic comments were brought into question and chastised in a conversation thread within the PSRH secret Facebook group, leading to the following sequence of events. As PSR and PSRH were spaces led by female and female-identifying people under “intersectional feminist” moral political principles, reminders and warnings were regularly sent out to men who engaged in toxic masculinity and who demonstrated what has come to be known as “mansplaining,” or overt condescension and disagreement towards the women in the space. Below I will show a sequence in which the group collaborated to monitor and sanction language occurring within their Facebook space that contradicted their group’s principles. On October 25, 2018, Jess posted a reminder to PSRH: Text 4.2: #LadiesWeGotYou 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

To the men: You are guests in this female/female identifying centered space. We have the right to mute, block or remove you from this space if we see fit due to your tone, mansplaining or misogyny. #LadiesWeGotYou (Jess, PSRH, October 25, 2018)

In this brief comment, which Jess posted with a single and bright fuchsia colored background to enhance its visibility, Jess specifically selects a set of her potential audience—“the men” (line 1)—as her direct addressees. This is an overt act of audience design that calls upon the men to listen and simultaneously turns all of the members who do not identify as men—“female/female identifying” members, as “ratified overhearers” (cf. Goffman 1979) whom she is speaking for.

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IMAGE 4.8

#LadiesWeGotYou

That is, she has written a post that anyone in the group can see, but she has structured her audience such that “men” will see that she is directly speaking to them in front of the larger audience of the entire group. Further, still in line 1, she positions them as “guests,” thus positioning herself and the other “female/ female identifying” members as the group who are in control of the space. Jess then further aligns herself with this group of ratified overhearers, and likely, among them, the members of the leadership team who moderate the Facebook group, by turning them into the “we” on whose behalf she is speaking (line 3). “We,” the group of “female/female identifying” group members who control this space, have more rights than you in this space and as such we can essentially control both your presence here and what you are allowed to say/the manner in which you speak in this space (lines 3–6). She closes her statement with a hashtag, “#LadiesWeGotYou” (line 7). This “we” specifically positions Jess as speaking for the leadership team and not all of the women in the space, as the latter become the direct addressees, “ladies,” of the hashtag phrase. This hashtag line can be seen as a summative assessment of her post—a coda of sorts, declaring that the point of her post is that women will be supported first and foremost in this group and this is, in so many words, as policy of the admin team. The post received 132 likes/loves, including from most of leadership, which indicated their collective endorsement of this position.

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In the comments thread, Lucy responded with a gif of multiple women showing up and putting a supportive hand on one another’s shoulders, and further down, Joseph wrote (Image 4.14): 8 I came here to make a post about allyship and then 9 saw this. Thanks [tags Jess]! Jess responded to Joseph’s comment with two emojis, the first indicating a stance of “solidarity” and the second, love/affective alignment. 10 ✊❤ Notably, Lucy’s gif of women supporting each other and Joseph’s brief comment (Image 4.9) serve not only as stances of cooperative alignment taken toward Jess and toward the stance that she has asserted in order to convey a shared ideal and communicative expectation; they also serve to “bump” her post—that is, it is often the case that these brief, pithy types of response (which here also include overt alignment with what Jess has authored) are purposefully placed in a comments thread not only to display alignment among the leadership group but also, as I described in Chapter 2, to ensure that more people see the post. Both types of act constitute cooperative alignment—the overtly stated thanks from Joseph, and Lucy’s gif showing women supporting each other, show that the leadership group members all stand together on this message that Jess has authored. But the mere presence of these short responses/ images simultaneously serves to raise the visibility of her post, and this achieves a collective goal of navigating Facebook’s algorithms in order to ensure that this post and Jess’s stance within it is seen by as many people in the group as possible. While most comments below this post, outside of leadership’s responses, were supportive of or in agreement with what Jess had authored, the last two respondents resisted or disagreed with Jess’s comments. The first, an older White man, retorted that he had many women in his family and because of this he had

IMAGE 4.9

Thanks, Jessica!

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voted blue (Democrat) for five decades. He closed with a statement that he gets grouchy sometimes (implying that he did occasionally engage in angry debate or perhaps even what was being labeled as “mansplaining” by Jess above), and perfect people are hard to find. To this, Joseph quickly responded: 11 Thanks for centering yourself on this post 12 asking men not to do so. Totally inappropriate. The same individual responded back, stating that threats are often taken personally and, again, perfect people are hard to find. Joseph responded again: 13 14 15 16 17 18

… this was in direct response to several incidents of men being completely inappropriate. The tone is appropriate due to the amount of frustration caused to members. I won’t ask women to tone police in their space. People are free to agree or disagree, but at the end of the day men have plenty of spaces where we are centered.

Joseph’s comment here contextualized Jess’s original post by clarifying that it was made in response to other conversations that had been happening within the group space, and it further indicated that the members of the leadership team had been having “backstage” conversations on other communication channels (Facebook Messenger or Slack, for example) that a statement needed to be made to address a problem that they collectively saw within the group, of “men being completely inappropriate” (line 14). Thus we can now also revisit Jess’s original post as a coauthored one. That is, in the Goffmanian (1974) interpretation of authorship, the group has co-authored the statement prior to Jess’s utterance, and she has served as animator of the utterance as the leader of PSRH in their Facebook group. Subsequent to Joseph’s comment, members of leadership as well as two other PSRH members liked Joseph’s comment, and then another member of leadership chimed in effectively stating that demeaning and condescending, dehumanizing behavior in this group is not tolerated, as a policy, and that this was no different than having a policy stating that racist language would not be tolerated. Below this subthread, an older woman spoke up, stating that she disagreed completely with Jess’s statement, and asking who set the rules in this space—a group or just Jess? Joseph immediately responded again: 19 A committee, and we started this group to be 20 an intersectional feminist space. The admins all agree that 21 mansplaining isn’t appropriate in a feminist group.

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This was liked by four people including admins, and then Jess followed with: 22 23 24 25 26 27

[Addressee] this group is here to support and uplift females first. And it’s not up for discussion on whether or not men get to come in this space, as guests, and derail that focus. Ever. This isn’t just my opinion, it’s the leadership and the members as well. We are here to support women first. It’s not up for discussion.

The day after Jess’s post about mansplaining, Joseph wrote another post also in PSRH: 28 To reiterate [tags Jess]’s words. Men we are guests here. We have been 29 invited to help elevate the voices of women, to add to the dialogue, but at no 30 point is it appropriate for us to take over the page, to “mansplain” to the 31 women of the group. In some of the posts over the last few weeks I’ve 32 noticed men replying with unnecessary vigor to women who disagree, while 33 ignoring the men saying the same thing. I’ve seen men discount the opinions 34 of women completely when they’ve been asked to back off. 35 36 It is not enough to simply claim you are a liberal/progressive/etc 37 38 You have to act the part. Learn to listen. Learn to take a step back and 39 contemplate. 40 41 I say this also to the white allies in here, when people of color are trying to 42 explain themselves. It is important for all allies to put ourselves into the 43 shoes of others. 44 45 Conversation is a two way street, I see plenty of you talking at others, but 46 not listening. Do better. (I hold myself to this same requirement). 47 48 Also 49 50 WE NEED TO GET OUT THE FUCKING VOTE. [includes a link to a Google Doc of GOTV activities] (Joseph, PSRH, October 26, 2018) Joseph starts his post with an abstract: I am about to tell you exactly what Jess told you (“To reiterate Jess’s words,” line 28). He thus also displays another stance of alignment with Jess and the rest of leadership, and this post is introduced as yet another attempt to amplify what she has said (in addition to the comments and “bumps” and supportive statements that they authored in the thread that played

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itself out below her original post). Like Jess, Joseph structures his audience in line 28 such that “men” are the addressee and the rest of the group members ratified overhearers. He also reiterates what he has said in the comments thread under Jess’s post by stating that these statements are a response, collectively authored by leadership, to “men replying with unnecessary vigor to women who disagree, while ignoring the men saying the same thing. I’ve seen men discount the opinions of women completely when they’ve been asked to back off” (lines 32–34). This statement serves multiple purposes. More generally, Joseph’s posts about toxic masculinity, misogyny, and mansplaining (which were frequent) not only acted as peer pressure and virtue signaling towards other men to “do better,” but also signaled to women that he was doing work as a man, and trying to lead by example among men, towards creating equal ground between women’s and men’s voices. They also served to complement and support the posts and statements made by the rest of leadership, who were all women, regarding the same topic. This worked to quantitatively amplify their message, with more posts about the topic and more comments/acknowledgments under those posts ensuring that more people would encounter their message. And it also worked to amplify their message across different “types” of voices. That is, perhaps, men seeing another man model this behavior might be more likely to listen to him than to a woman claiming the same thing. This last goal of amplification above brings us to the larger theme that Joseph steps back to address in his post, starting on line 36. Allies (or “liberal/progressive/etc”) in general need to work harder at walking their talk of uplifting minoritized populations, be it men chiseling away at their own misogyny, or White people at their own racism. He starts to address this by bringing back up a comment made by another leader in the previous thread (among the paraphrased commentaries above), that “mansplaining” or misogynist language is just as unacceptable as “whitesplaining” and ignoring the opinions of people of color. In lines 41–43 he makes this comparison before ultimately asserting that they all, as allies, are not “putting themselves in the shoes of others” (lines 42–43) and not listening enough (line 38). That is, they say they are “liberal/progressive/etc” and they align themselves with such a moral political orientation by being members of this group, but they need to show it more, to work harder at walking the talk of that orientation. This call is made from Joseph’s epistemic stance/position as a leader in the group, an avowed and vocal fighter of “toxic masculinity” across many of his posts, within and outside of this group, and his cooperative stance of alignment in support of what the other members of leadership have asserted. Finally, though, while Joseph acknowledges the importance of this “knowledge activism” work that they are doing in writing these posts and debating about them, he also acknowledges that this doing better must be complemented by face to face, boots on the ground organizing work. The conversation needs to be carried offline, onto the streets, and into the ballot box (line 50): “WE NEED TO GET OUT THE FUCKING VOTE” with an attached list of information related to GOTV activities.

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The post received likes or other positive reaction buttons from most of the group’s leadership and a total of 32 people (including me), and there were three comment responses. The first was Lucy, who wrote, in a stance of full alignment and support, endorsing Joseph’s message in full: 51 Spot fucking on!

❤

In this very long example of a linearly distributed sequence, we have seen the group assume collaborative stances toward each other, and epistemic stances toward the larger PSRH group, in order to assert their moral political vision of walking the talk of “progressive” and “feminist” values. Harking back to Dona’s post in the opening sequence of Chapter 3, the leaders were collaboratively calling upon the group to do a better job at being the change they (said they) wished to see in the world.

4.6 “Metamorphosis”: “Becoming” Together On the topic of “speaking out,” there were several moments when members of the group described that since becoming activists they had gone through significant “metamorphoses.” Lucy elsewhere described her own shift into a much more decisive person, and Joseph frequently claimed that this friend circle was changing, partially because he was filtering and unfriending people with whom he found himself to be at a morally irreconcilable impasse, and partially because some friends were leaving him as they saw him as having gone too feminist and “full SJW”—social justice warrior. His virtue signaling (virtues that they did not align with) was just too much, in their opinions. Similar identity shifts were not unique to these focal participants. In fact, it seemed that membership in the larger “light” communities of the PSR and PSRH secret groups had helped many members to own their own voices, speak their minds more, and start caring less what other people thought about these stances that they took either newly or more loudly. Caring less about what other people thought and finding the gumption to speak out more was thus an experience shared across the wider movement, and many conversations about these new ways of being were led—and arguably experienced more intensely— by the group leaders featured here. In the excerpt below, a post Lucy made to PSRH in November 2018, she addressed this shift in her identity in a way that brought out an enormous thread of stories and support among PSRH women, including Jess and Samantha, regarding the changes that they had undergone since the 2016 election. And in true Lucy fashion, her original post includes a Leslie Knope meme. As Jess did in her post in the previous section, Lucy starts with an announcement of who her direct addressees are (and therefore, tacitly, who her ratified overhearers are):

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Text 4.3: METAMORPHOSIS 1 This post is for women[-identifying] only. 2 In the last two years, I have had a personal METAMORPHOSIS. Mostly, I 3 am not afraid to speak up, use my voice, take up space, and BE 4 POWERFUL. 5 6 Honestly though, I have had a friend (woman) tell me that I am intimidating 7 and it troubled me since she was bothered by my more amplified self. 8 9 I wanted to reach out because I know I am not the only who experienced a 10 personal shift in November 2016… and have had people remark 11 negatively/passive aggressively on changes in demeanor. 12 13 Can you relate? Can you share your experience? What can we all do to 14 encourage women to lift each other up? 15 #selfaware 16 #justwaitbecauseImnotdone 17 #chigonapower (Lucy, PSRH, November 28, 2018) The resources Lucy uses in this post to convey her message and her stances are multiple and complex. First, within her text, she leads not first with an abstract but with an announcement of her story to come that consists of an overt declaration of her “audience design” by defining exactly who her direct addressees are—“women[-identifying] only” (line 1). We saw this terminology in the previous section, where Jess asserted that the PSRH secret group “space” is a “women/women identifying only” space. Jess’s statement is important to remember here in that she, from a position of leadership, describes the space as belonging to women. So when Lucy, also a member of leadership, states that she is addressing only women[-identifying] members here, this is because she is taking a stance of authority, as well: contextually within this space, she has an authoritative right to define her audience since, as the group expressed in the previous section, men in the space are simply guests—they can be told not to respond to a post if a woman poster calls for it. By staking this claim from the epistemic stance of group leader, Lucy is also modeling this behavior for others in the group—if other women in the group wish to limit the audience of their post, they are entitled to because, as the leaders have shown and reiterated regularly, this is a space primarily for women. After defining her audience and speaking from this authoritative position, Lucy changes her stance from authority with the right to design her audience, to “peer.” Starting in line 2 she is now speaking directly to her fellow womenidentifying peers in PSRH instead of to the whole group (of course, the men are ratified overhearers). Speaking from this position of equality or sameness, she

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shares a small story. In line 2 she shares her abstract, “In the last two years, I have had a personal METAMORPHOSIS.” This is what her small story will be about. More specifically, in lines 3–4: “Mostly, I am not afraid to speak up … and BE POWERFUL.” Notably, the two segments that are in caps lock (expressive orthography, as Georgalou 2020 terms it), “METAMORPHOSIS” and “BE POWERFUL” are semiotically linked through their shared capitalization. The emphasis placed on both of them shares that their meanings are indexically linked: she has undergone a big change, and that change consists of being powerful in a way that she never has been before. Additionally, as these terms/phrases generally connote positive activities—undergoing a metamorphosis and being powerful are acts of change into a more developed form and a more empowered way of engaging in the world—Lucy is also taking a positive affective stance toward this very narrative of her experience. In lines 6–7 she writes the body of her small story: a friend she had recently interacted with “was bothered by my more amplified self,” which represents a change in stances between the characters of her story. A distant past version of Lucy and this friend had previously been aligned, but now, Lucy’s change in demeanor has resulted in dis-alignment between these two characters’ more recent selves. It is important to note that a change in a friend’s view of her could have led to varying responses from Lucy. She could have taken that comment and stopped speaking up in order to remain in alignment with that friend. Instead, though, she aligned herself with this new group of friends in her activist community, who were all learning to do the same—to step into their power a bit more and speak their minds more despite expected pushback—even though it affected their previously aligned relationships: “I know I am not the only one … [who has] had people remark negatively … on changes in demeanor” (lines 9–11). She ends the post with an overt request for alignment from her audience, using direct second-person address: “Can you relate? …” And then three hashtag comments that serve an evaluative function toward her narrative and her personal metamorphosis close her statement: “#selfaware” (line 15) implies that she is paying attention to her changes and her alignments; “#justwaitbecauseImnotdone” (line 16) implies that this is just the beginning of her speaking out—this displays an element of motivational stance toward herself and her audience encouraging them all to continue on this path; and finally, in the final line of her post (17) she relates the story back to elements of her own personal and thick identity features with a hashtag she uses quite frequently to invoke her empowerment as a Latinx and female-identifying individual: #chingonapower (her text above contained a typo and was an aberration from the usual spelling as I have written it here). Below the text of her post, for added humor (and visibility), she has posted another Parks & Recreation meme (see this chapter’s introduction where Lucy explains that Leslie Knope, the character speaking in both memes/gifs discussed in

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this chapter, has a particular forte in stating things awkwardly) wherein Leslie Knope is stating, loud and clear for all to hear, “YOU’RE RIDICULOUS AND MEN’S RIGHTS IS NOTHING.” While this does entextualize macro level conversations taking place at a wide scale regarding the notion of “men’s rights” as a movement to combat feminism (cf. Osberg 2020), it is also a playful image that Lucy has posted in order to simply draw more people in due to the humorous wording (placed in caps lock which, in the world of memes, generally indicates that the statement is engaging with the absurd), and the reference, likely widely recognized among this audience to this humorously awkward feminist TV character. Most members of PSRH leadership “liked” or “loved” the post, and the responses in the thread below were ubiquitously in agreement/alignment toward it and toward Lucy. Many members of the group shared similar stories—about how they had found their voices and about how friends and family were often baffled at best, and unaccepting at worst, toward these changes. But they coped with their new dis-alignments by relying on the new alignments they had made in this group. The very first response in the comments below Lucy’s text was from Samantha, and as we saw in the last section, as a member of leadership this simultaneously serves as a stance of positive evaluation and alignment in experiences and ideas as well as serving as a stance of cooperation in the form of a “bump” which will, relying on Facebook’s algorithms for visibility, bring more attention to the post. Samantha wrote: 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

I’ve definitely noticed a difference in how people I knew before have responded to me. People used to think I was rather vapid because my personal interests veer toward the traditionally feminine. The more I’ve come to know and use my voice to amplify my lived experiences and those of others the more people don’t know how to speak to me and often avoid it. The only people who don’t avoid it are my students. They have responded well to my more amplified self because as I’ve come to know and use my own voice I’ve learned to better amplify and fight for theirs. I’ve also gotten a better handle on my classroom management too.

Joseph, Dona, and Lucy all liked/loved Samantha’s comment, and Lucy responded: 30 [tags Samantha] This completely emoji (“graphicon”, Page 2018) response from Lucy is one of strong alignment—to say that someone’s post is “fire” is to agree with it or to very positively assess it.

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Later on in the long sequence of comments, Jess added her own experience: 31 32 33 34 35

Amen to ALL OF THIS. Whether it’s not caring at all what others think of me and my voice and my activism, not taking responsibility for others reactions to me being “intimidating” … but also learning how to love fiercely in ways I never knew existed. For people I will never know. RISE UP.

Again, Lucy, Dona, Joseph all liked/loved this comment. Lucy responded to many others’ comments in very supportive ways. In doing so she encouraged a “thickening” of a group identity among those who might have identified more “lightly” within it. For instance, one group member posted in reference to prior posts she had written to the group, about her family no longer letting her be around her niece and nephew for fear that she would insert her beliefs about the current situation into the children’s minds. Lucy wrote: 36 [tags interlocutor] I love this 37 comment because it is hard as fuck when your family 38 becomes opposition. Your resolve is inspiring. In total, the responses to Lucy’s post were quite numerous with 67 comments. As responses began to die down, Lucy and Jess closed the thread with the following: Lucy: 39 CAN I JUST SAY YOU ALL ARE 40 AMAZING. ❤❤ Jess: 41 THIS THREAD IS EVERYTHING ✊❤❤❤ Notably in these final two juxtaposed comments, we can see what Lempert refers to (2009, citing Agha 2007) as parallelism in an act of indicating alignment to their shared audience. Here their alignment is demonstrated through the shared use of expressive orthography in the form of caps lock, which indicates strong emotion and signifies perhaps a “yelled” utterance, as well as semantic with respect to the strong positive evaluative words/phrases the two use, “AMAZING,” in Lucy’s case and the verb phrase “IS EVERYTHING” in Jess’s. Their assumption of the “authority” to make such comments that assess the value or status of a thread within the group, and to close the conversation, constitute, again, an epistemic stance of authority or group leadership. This sequence of utterances taken in its entirety exemplifies both the group support that Herring (2004), in this chapter’s introduction, describes as essential to bonding in virtual communities, and it also demonstrates how they engage in

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imitating each other’s tone (caps lock, sharing similar experiences and alignments), which West & Trester (2013) described as one way in which groups speak intertextually online in order to strengthen their community bonds and, here, consolidate their community’s moral framework.

4.7 Constructing a “With”: Alignment and the Presentation of a Unified Moral Political Stance West & Trester write that Being a friend on Facebook may involve doing a significant amount of intertextual work when commenting by responding to the posting in a similar tone (often playful or casual), and sometimes repeating language and building on the original text and sometimes driving the interaction forward by drawing on outside cultural texts. (2013, p. 134) In the four sequences above, we have looked at a variety from among the ways in which these group members built on each other’s texts and posted in similar tones in order to formulate their group stances and ideologies regarding the various issues that they were invested in. In Section 4.3, I looked across posts to show how the group collaboratively entextualized an event before, during, and after it. Such collaborative and intertextual posting worked to display their alignment around an issue as they conducted a “frontstage” event in which they shared with the public their views on the political issues that concerned access to quality education for Black and Brown children in Houston. In Section 4.4 I examined another frontstage situation in which Joseph took a stand in front of his Facebook Friends, consisting of a wider public as well as members of multiple organizations within the left-wing or progressive activist community, on the candidacy of a young adult whom he had had personal interactions with. In these sequences of posts and comments, group members performed stances of alignment with and positive evaluation of Joseph, claiming to their audience and interlocutors that they trusted Joseph’s judgment and agreed with his moral and political principles. In Sections 4.5 and 4.6, we moved into the backstage spaces of PSRH. In 4.5, we saw the group take stances from their positions as leaders of the group in order to assert that group members’ behaviors needed to align with the group’s moral political principles as they related to intersectional feminism. As such, misogynistic behaviors and comments were not tolerated, in the same way that racist language was not tolerated in that space. In this sequence of posts, not only did the group members speak for and with each other but, as they did in the frontstage space of Joseph’s Wall in Section 4.4, they inserted themselves into the interaction in order to demonstrate that they were acting and formulating a collective stance together. Finally, in Section 4.6, we looked at a post that Lucy

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wrote in the PSRH space that described her metamorphosis after having joined the group in 2016. Her post was specifically a call for alignment among the women and women-identifying members of the group, to share the ways in which they had changed and become more outspoken in expressing their moral political beliefs. In so doing, they demonstrated that this new group that they had joined, whether or not they engaged in it in “thick” or “light” ways, had given them a new community to align with in a way that allowed them to feel more secure in letting dis-alignments in their more established relationships unfold now that they had another group to help them deal with those changes and know that they were right in what they were asserting. Keane describes Goffman’s (1967) notion of “face-work,” in which your face depends on others affirming that you are the kind of person they take you to be presenting to them. What is crucial is the role of the other persons. You cannot simply assert yourself; your self-presentation requires uptake by others on the basis of what it is they take you to be presenting. Agency is distributed across the social interaction in two respects, since you depend on others to recognize your ‘line’ and their ability to do so depends on what they think you are doing. The vulnerability of the self is a function of this distribution. At stake is not necessarily just social status. It can be that element of self-knowledge that depends on seeing yourself from the outside. (2016, p. 102) The acts of affirmation that we have examined in the above texts weren’t only performed in the serious work of endorsing candidates and positions and so on; the group also, importantly, spent time in endless “play” online. Some of it was simultaneously serious, as with Lucy’s serious compliment to Dona in the chapter’s introductory sequence and Lucy’s serious description of her metamorphosis while using, in both, highly comedic gifs to complement her otherwise serious statements. But much of their play together was just ludic—meant to help each other blow off steam, take a moment in an overly busy day to giggle at a ridiculous Zoolander gif, and in so doing reinforce their affective bonds while recognizing that they were all equally overtaxed. They played together and supported each other in order to “to lower the costs of activism in relation to fatigue, reinforce internal cohesion, and foster collective identity” (Treré 2019, citing Benski et al. 2013; Flesher Fominaya 2007; Romanos 2013). On Facebook, we have established, one’s identity becomes indicated through their visible social connections as well as through the ways in which they select what to post about and how they position themselves and design their audience regarding that information. Connecting these ideas to activism per se, Milan (2015, p. 893) states that: By providing always [sic] on platforms in which interactions are practiced on a recurring basis, they amplify the ‘interactive and shared’ properties of

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collective action. In other words, they continuously activate the relationships that maintain collective identity and joint action, rather than merely allowing for ‘personalized identities’ to emerge (citing Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 744). They foster an extension of activism, and of the collective experience in particular, into the private sphere of individuals and their quotidian, strengthening the symbolic nexus between activism and personal life. Over time, it seemed that the group of leaders featured here as focal participants became each other’s inner circle of friends, participating in non-activism related events like a chili cookoff in summer 2018 for which they all dressed up as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to a “friendzzzgiving” gathering that Lucy, Dona and Joseph posted pictures of and tagged each other in after elections in November 2018 (November 10, 2018). These individuals’ changing identities and shifts in “civic consciousness” could not happen alone; rather, they had to happen intersubjectively, as part of a group that recognized each other in their actions and their changes as certain types of people, forming a new identity together. Bennett & Segerberg state that “In this interactive process of personalization and sharing, communication networks may become scaled up and stabilized through the digital technologies people use to share ideas and relationships with others” (2012, p. 746). In Chapter 3, we saw this group of activists, speaking as individuals in their posts, leverage personal stories in order to take thematically similar moral political stances. These moral stances, examined cumulatively across their individual posts, indeed amplified their mission and vision. In this chapter we have examined their more explicitly collaborative acts by looking within and across their responses to each other’s posts both in and outside of their hidden Facebook groups. In the following chapter, we will examine how all of these interactions overlapped, online and offline, in the group’s navigation of scale—both upscaling and downscaling—as a part of their moral political agenda.

References Agha, A. (2007). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, R. & Briggs, C.L. (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88. Bennett, L. & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5): 739–768. Benski, T., Langman, L., Perugorría, I. & Tejerina, B. (2013). From the streets and squares to social movement studies: what have we learned? Current Sociology 61(4): 541–561. boyd, d. (2010). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (ed.) A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, pp. 39–58. New York: Routledge.

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Dennis, J. (2019). Beyond Slacktivism: Digital Participation on Social Media. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Eckert, P. & McConnell-Ginet, S. (1998). Communities of practice: Where language, gender, and power all live. In J. Coates (ed.), Language and Gender, pp. 484–494. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Eckert, P. & Rickford, J.R. (eds.) (2001). Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Flesher Fominaya, C. (2007). The role of humour in the process of collective identity formation in autonomous social movement groups in contemporary Madrid. Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 52: 243–258. Gnach, A. (2018). Social media and community building. In C. Cotter & D. Perrin (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Language and Media, pp. 190–206. New York: Routledge. Georgalou, M. (2020). Discourse and Identity on Facebook. New York: Bloomsbury. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Goffman, E. (1979). Footing. Semiotica 1/2: 1–30. Gumperz, J. & Hymes, D. (1972). Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Heath, S.B. (1983). Ways with Words. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Herring, S.C. (2004). Computer mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online communities. In S.A. Barab, R. Kling, & J.H. Gray (eds.) Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning, pp. 338–376. New York: Cambridge University Press. Keane, W. (2016). Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lempert, M. (2009). On ‘flip-flopping’: Branded stance-taking in U.S. electoral politics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(2): 223–248. Leppänen, S., Møller, J., Nørreby, T., Stæhrc, A., & Kytölä, S. (2015). Authenticity, normativity and social media. Discourse, Context and Media 8: 1–5. Milan, S. (2015). From social movements to cloud protesting: The evolution of collective identity. Information, Communication & Society 18(8): 887–900. Osberg, M. (2020). How men’s rights activists swallowed the world. Jezebel. Retrieved 10/17/ 2020from https://jezebel.com/how-mens-rights-activists-swallowed-the-world-184534822 3?utm_campaign=Jezebel&utm_content=1602616508&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&u tm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR3EH0IE66UXc0FfSi0_m7Q6kaB7aoDxosr1teH0cjfY Ig5fmx8NwEjczlc. Page, R. (2018). Narratives Online: Shared Stories in Social Media. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Prochazka, O. & Blommaert, J. (2019) Ergoic framing in New Right online groups: Q, the MAGA kid, and the Deep State Theory. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Paper 224. http s://www.tilburguniversity.edu/research/institutes-and-research-groups/babylon/tpcs. Romanos, E. (2013). The strategic use of humor in the Spanish indignados movement. 20th International Conference of Europeanists, Amsterdam, 25–27 June. Scollon, R. & Wong Scollon, S. (2003). Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. New York: Routledge. doi:doi:10.4324/9780203422724

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Treré, E. (2019). Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms. New York: Routledge. Webber, K., McGee, T., & Becker, S. (2019). To save Houston’s schools, fight the TEA. Houston Chronicle. Retrieved 10/21/2020 from https://www.houstonchronicle.com/op inion/outlook/article/To-save-Houston-s-schools-fight-the-TEA-13504780.php. West, L. & Trester, A.M. (2013). Facework on Facebook: Conversations on social media. In D. Tannen & A.M. Trester (eds.), Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media, pp. 133–154. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

5 “25 DOORS PLEASE” Keeping Boots on the Ground and Fingers on the Phone in a Networked Nation

5.1 “25 doors please” When, after the 2018 midterm elections, the national news immediately turned all its attention to the 2020 presidential race, the group made a pact to not talk about the presidential election. They decided to penalize each other “25 doors,” meaning that they had to blockwalk and knock on 25 doors endorsing any of various local or state-level campaigns and issues they supported for every time they mentioned the 2020 presidential race. In other words, they were penalized for talking about a national race that was well in the future with a punishment that forced them to focus on local outreach regarding much more immediate issues and imminent races. As time went on, this pact loosened quite a bit, but in the beginning they stuck to it—playfully but also in seriousness as they wanted to keep everyone’s focus on the local issues and candidates that the national news was simply swallowing up. When Joseph made a post about the 2020 race in early 2019, he was penalized by his activist friend, B, the inventor of said penalty, for mentioning it. In Joseph’s post he wrote: I’m going to say this, one time. I don’t care who gets the democratic nomination, as long as it’s not a Russian agent. I will fully support WHOEVER it is. As far as who I support during the primary, I have no idea who it is. I won’t know till we get closer to the time, and I will fully VET all candidates. I cannot take another 4 years of Trump. Purity politics will get us all fucking destroyed. Don’t ask me again till a month from the primary. (Joseph, Personal, February 19, 2019)

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B immediately chimed in with his punishment, a curt and tongue-in-cheek “25 doors please ”. Lucy chimed in also, again relying on her compendium of pop culture references, here reaching all the way back to the 1985 movie Better Off Dead, in which a paperboy constantly stalks John Cusack in pursuit of two dollars that Cusack owes him. She used this figure to teasingly compare B to the boy, as he persistently chastised all of his activist friends for making any mention of the presidential campaigns by demanding his 25 doors payment. In this conversational sequence, the group were playfully bonding around their serious commitment: there was too much attention on the national scale— we needed to keep working to downscale people’s attention toward the local: knocking on doors, getting our boots on the ground, creating sustainable community connections. In this chapter I plan to look at participants’ utterances specifically as they relate to their active attempts to negotiate the scales in which they lived and organized. I will look within and across their posts as they acknowledged the importance and prevalence of the national political chronotope that had originally motivated their activities at a macro scale, while also attempting to draw people’s attention to local and statewide scales of political action. This re-scaling was part and parcel of their moral political project, alongside many organizations doing the same in their own locales nationwide. As they emphasized the importance of this re-scaling for the sake of building stronger and more politically resilient community and political relations, they relied on the affordances of networked communications in order to navigate their local, state, and national chronotopes in ways that are increasingly common in this social media and internet networked era.

5.2 Nationalized Politics, Localized Activism, Translocal Collaborations: A Re-Scaling Is Afoot At the grassroots, local activists and organizations have begun to coordinate nationally and translocally as modes of communication—namely “free” social media websites and communication platforms—have allowed for activities to become connected in ways that challenge notions of space, notions of time, and notions of how political representation should situate itself amid these changing dynamics. Kavada (2015, p. 873, citing della Porta & Mosca 2005; Earl et al. 2014) describes these new constellations of activism as facilitating “‘organizing without organizations’, as it permits the coordination of collective action without costly and complex organizational infrastructures.” By creating movements with no real leaders, or very decentralized leadership, at various levels of scale, new formations of local and translocal organizations and activities are able to affect politics at various scales without relying on one easily targeted person or one relatively un-nuanced, overly broad message. We saw this with the growth of the Tea Party in the Preface, where one original national call

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to action by a news commentator instigated the formation of hundreds of local organizations around a common goal but with no national leader per se. PSR/H and fellow ally organizations like Indivisible, whom PSR/H leaders worked very closely with as we have seen in previous chapters, organized themselves in quite similar ways. In fact, Indivisible’s organizing guide, which was used in PSRH from the very beginning as a guide for how to build a grassroots movement, is said to have been largely borrowed from the Tea Party’s strategy both in terms of tactics and in terms of operating similarly across the nation in an entirely de-centralized and leaderless fashion (cf. Brooker 2018; Indivisible Team 2017; Skocpol & Williamson 2016). In these ways, contemporary, internet coordinated movements might actually be conceptualized differently—perhaps not less nationally, but with more investment in a local autonomy that is deeply networked, through local, translocal, and nationwide collaborations that are not coordinated at any “macro” level or with any “topdown” hierarchical structure. This seems to have played itself out in different ways for the left and the right, though. While in recent history the Tea Party movement laid the groundwork for such local/translocal/national networking among decentralized local organizations, that movement became generally driven, if not outright co-opted, by large-scale, centralized operators such as Fox News and the Koch brothers. In fact, as Skocpol & Williamson (2016) conclude (and as noted in the Preface), the Koch empire is now a stronger force than the Republican Party. The left, though, while suffering no dearth of support from nationally scaled organizations and benefactors, has generally represented a far wider constellation of moral and political orientations, and so it has not been able to consolidate under one unified network, party, or financial operator in the same way as ended up happening on the right. Klein (2020) indeed points out that there are great challenges that present themselves when overly diverse coalitions come together such that they are unable to unify like the right did under the influence of far right money. On the progressive left, which is the part of the American political left under consideration in this book and which does not represent the entirety of “the left” as described above, a recent and very successful example of nationally scaled organizations collaborating at grassroots levels is presented in the 2019 documentary Knock Down the House (Lears 2019; Stout 2019) featuring, most famously, now Bronx congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The documentary follows multiple national-scale organizations such as Justice Democrats1 and Brand New Congress2 as they target specific local districts in the 2018 congressional elections in order to flip them blue (Democrat) and/or to shift already blue seats leftward toward more progressive stances (as happened in the case of Ocasio-Cortez). Another similar organization, Ascend,3 even courted Dona after she completed a run for a local schoolboard position in spring of 2019. The organizations mentioned above are just three of many progressive organizations that conduct their political mobilization operations on a national scale by emphasizing the winning of targeted local elections.4 Klein (2020) describes such activity as a “feedback loop” of nationalization going local, and the local basing itself

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more on the national than more locally specific, and far less “sexy,” issues (see also Holbrook & Weinschenck 2019; Hopkins 2018). But there is also important positive potential here, at least as viewed through the eyes of an organization such as Pantsuit Republic: as nationwide organizations reach down to lift up local grassroots workers, we may also see important local and less partisan issues being uplifted thanks to the local and translocally networked organizing of groups like them. While activities such as those conducted by the national organizations named above exemplify Klein’s (2020) and Hopkins’s (2018) points that local politics have taken on the rhetoric and division of national debates, it also demonstrates that there is acknowledgment at all scales of the political spectrum that an emphasis on local and state-level issues will draw people to participate in or care more about politics generally speaking. Political actors at all levels are actively negotiating the scales and morals within which our politics operate.5 These activities on the contemporary left have been concerned with relying on local, translocal and nationally coordinated networks in order to return to or recreate a less partisan politics driven by personal relationships and inclusive policy goals (Alter 2018; Gose, Skocpol, & Williamson 2020; Skocpol & Williamson 2016). As the participants themselves frequently put it, we needed to stop thinking about politics in terms of national presidential frontrunners, and start walking, organizing, and sacrificing our personal time in our own communities, because regardless of the national political frontrunner, no large-scale and sustainable change could be made without local and statewide seats filled with people who adhered to the morals that we needed to see in our political representatives— “compassion, decency, family values,” as Dona described it. “Looking forward to the day that those words are nonpartisan” (Dona, Personal, August 26, 2018). As I explained in Chapter 1, nationhood is morally and politically formed and transformed over time through various discursive activities across ever changing technological and media configurations. In this chapter I will demonstrate some of the ways in which the members of PSR/H leadership, while a) constantly trying to drive their membership towards local politics and local actions (above and in Section 5.3 below), also b) acknowledged their participation within a national movement amid their adamant pushes for local engagement (5.4); c) aligned themselves with and against nationally visible moral figures who helped to specify and index their moral political self-positionings within the nationwide chronotope (5.5); and d) collaborated translocally in order to share tools of the nationwide Resistance and boost the visibility of issues they were invested in, even occasionally scaling all the way up to receiving attention on national news broadcasts and websites (5.6). All of these activities, I argue, were ways of situating themselves within a national political chronotope that they found entirely unacceptable, while simultaneously trying to re-scale people’s attention and political engagement toward local and state-level politics, levels at which they felt grassroots political actors could have a more direct effect on everyone’s daily lives and at which they could therefore maximize the political impact they could make

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in order to push back against the abhorrent policies that were coming down at primarily federal and state levels.

5.3 Localizing Action The group coalesced, more or less, around the terms “#resist” and “Resistance,” as well as plays on the word: “Resistmas” and “re-sisters” as we will see below. The term—or the idea of “resisting” instead of proactively organizing for a future that extended beyond Trump—was not one that everyone agreed on, but it nevertheless remained salient in their activities as a label for this current political movement and moment. It is notable though that the term “Resistance,” which came to be used to describe a national movement, described a movement of mostly small, local groups working together in their communities, at the “grassroots,” in order to move toward the national changes they wished to see implemented. In the following excerpt (Image 5.1) we see exactly this combination of activities in a post Lucy made to the state group. She begins in line 1 with a call

IMAGE 5.1

“Good morning Re-sisters!”

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to “re-sisters”—a play on the term “resist,” combining it with the fact that the PSR group was women-led and predominantly consisted of women—“sisters,” a term frequently used to indicate affective closeness among women who are not kin. This is, as in the “story announcements” we saw in the previous chapter, an explicit definition of her audience and a call for their attention before beginning a small story recounting recent activities she has been engaged in in order to introduce her stance, which takes the form, from her position of leadership, of a motivational call to action grounded in reports of people needing help running local elections. Text 5.1: “Good morning Re-sisters!” 1 Good morning Re-sisters! 2 I have been knee-deep in local school board elections here in the Houston area. I am just 3 wondering if you are looped in with races going on in your area. 4 Please know that these local races make a huge difference in policy (protections for 5 LGBTQIA+, undocumented students, less emphasis on STAAR testing, school to prison / 6 pipeline, etc.). Here the elections are being held on May 4. They could use contributions of time 7 or otherwise. 8 9 [Tags four other state board members including me, and creates a poll for people to respond to]: 10 Involved in a local school board election: [12 votes] 11 I am not sure but I am going to find out!: [4 votes] 12 Helping with local mayoral race: [1 vote] 13 City Council: [1 vote]

(Lucy, PSR, April 14, 2019) In line 2, Lucy provides a very small story describing her recent local activist activities: she is “knee-deep in local school board elections here in the Houston area.” She then uses a politeness hedge, “I am just wondering if,” in order to formulate what essentially serves as a suggestion, or a request made using negative politeness (Brown & Levinson 1987)—that people educate themselves on their local political candidates (lines 2–3)—“you are looped in on races going on in your area.” Lucy’s initiation of this post is already from a position of leadership in the PSR group (by this time, April 2019, she was now co-chair of PSR—Dona had stepped down after finishing her two-year term), which carries with it an epistemic stance of authority, as we have seen in previous chapters. In line 4 she further invokes epistemic authority that is grounded in her recent activities as she stated them in line 2 (being knee-deep in local elections). By introducing her phrase “please know,” she is clarifying that she is providing information she already knows to be true, based on the activities that she has been personally engaged in: local races make a huge difference in the lives of various vulnerable student populations (lines 4–6). This act of emphasizing her

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knowledge on the matter reinforces her justification for making demands of her audience—she is knowledgeable on the topic at hand, and as members of PSR they should be, too. She goes on in line 6 to localize her post, re-scaling her audience to the Houstonian subset of PSR membership: “here” in Houston, elections will be held on May 4. That is, you (statewide) should all know about your local candidates, and you (Houstonians), here is the day you specifically need to know by. Lucy then makes another request/command, here addressed to the “you” of her local audience. In line 6 she again uses negative politeness techniques—here in the form of a third-person modal construction—to suggest actions Houstonian PSR members could take: “They could use contributions …” Her final line consists of two emojis—a rainbow and a smiley face “which act as a positive politeness strategy by connoting that she has friendly intentions in the writing of this post and the commands/requests within it. Aside from the text in this post, two other communicative elements are present. First, Lucy has tagged multiple members of leadership—her co-chair and three other members of the PSR state board. By doing so, this aligns her with the rest of state leadership and implies that we also endorse her message. She has invoked a broader authority to speak on this matter beyond just her own, and likely this act of tagging has also drawn more attention to the post as with other types of “bumping” activities. The final modality that Lucy used was a frequent behavior of hers in her PSR and PSRH posts—the addition of a poll to her post. In the poll that she provided—which Facebook positions, as with images, below the text of the post—a few response options were presented (I note here that respondents are allowed to add their own options in a poll, so I cannot know which ones or how many of them Lucy herself posited): “Involved in a local school board election”; “I am not sure but I am going to find out!”; “Helping with local mayoral race”; and “City Council.” In this group of 20,000-plus members, only 11 “acknowledged” the post through “like” and similar buttons. Many of these 11 were also members of leadership. Of the few people who responded to the poll, a large number of them were also members of leadership or people highly involved in the organization’s activities. That is, this post served to signal virtues about what the members of the group should be doing, but it was unclear, based on responses to this post, how many onlookers—those who viewed but did not overtly respond to the post—actually got out and did something. In this example, we have seen Lucy explicitly remind people of the importance of their local elections and getting active within them. She invokes epistemic authority from her position as leader, and she signals a virtue of investment in local politics within her small story recounting her own involvement in local school board elections. Such a combination of virtues plus positionality allowed

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her to assume the authority to make suggestions of what type of activities the rest of PSR membership should be engaged in. In addition to this, she used language including indexicals (“here”) that re-scaled her conversation mid-post from addressing the entire statewide group to just Houstonians. While this on one hand re-scaled her address to the local audience, it also maintained her statewide audience as, again, “ratified overhearers,” acting as an example for them of how they might proceed: if Houstonian campaigns need help, likely yours in Austin or Brownsville or El Paso do as well, so please go find out about them. The poll that Lucy added to her post is also an act of direct address that explicitly invites people to demonstrate how they are participating. Far from just a tool for tallying numbers, it also serves to signal a virtue and enact peer pressure: if some members show that they are getting involved in these ways, then maybe another onlooker will decide that they can, too. As this post and the chapter’s introductory vignette show, this group valued localized action over talk about federal/national-level politics. However, Lucy’s use of the word “resist” also indexes her alignment with a national movement born of the Trump presidency.

5.4 A Nationwide Community of Localized Resistance Despite each member’s incredibly intense schedules making connections within PSR and across other organizations, creating events, planning protests, distributing information, contacting elected officials, running for office, and so on, the role of PSR State was generally a bit nebulous—but this was not an accident or an oversight. Dona shared with me multiple times that it was in large part her preference that there be scant top-down definition of what PSR really was. The primary written definition of the group’s agenda lay within its mission, stated on its website: “Engage and empower the diverse people of Texas to rally behind progressive solutions to oppression.”6 And in Dona’s own words regarding her initial representational goals in the group: as far as um the Pantsuit Republic network I was very deliberate in making it decentralized from the beginning because I believed and continue to believe wholeheartedly that change really that is, um, sustainable, uh right that’s long lasting, enduring, that happens, um because it is something thatthat people locally buy into and they are actually the ones who make that happen. not only that they’re buying into it they’re actually, uh producing that change right they’re pushing that change forward. um so I did not think that I was in any position being, yknow somebody in Houston Texas to tell somebody in rural east Texas or in rural west Texas or in San Antonio or in Dallas or in, yknow Brownsville. like a- anything about how

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they should be organizing their communities and how they should be fighting, for or fighting against, um whatever kind of policies right that were affecting their communities. (Dona, Interview 2, November 20, 2018) And so the main goal as Dona declared it was that a) the nature of the group should indeed be undefined beyond the general mission written above because b) members should be the ones to decide that they would like to do something to address whatever causes they saw as fitting under the umbrella of the group’s general mission, according to the issues and values that they themselves were invested in. Over the course of her tenure as chair of the organization, though, Dona did reveal some more of her thoughts about what the organization meant to her and what her aspirations were for the group’s members. In a post early in the group’s formation, she took a step back to reflect on the group’s development to that point and to encourage people to get involved in the areas of their communities that they were unfamiliar with in order to build bridges and expand their own horizons: A philosophical perspective for a moment—I was at the right place at the right time and started Pantsuit Republic (the state group), from which many groups spun off (but quite frankly were always independent endeavors by design). The state group decided early that we wanted to ally with a handful of powerful nonprofits who already had the infrastructure to support much of what we expected we would need for real progressive change—not just a Trumpian resistance. We instantly connected with ACLU TX [American Civil Liberties Union Texas], PP [Planned Parenthood], NARAL [National Abortion Rights Action League], Annie’s List, and many others since for the purpose of not duplicating existing efforts. … … As radical inclusion and intersectionality were founding principles for PSR, we always hoped those in our network would embrace/support groups by and for vulnerable/marginalized communities when they needed our numbers to amplify their message/appeal. But, this cannot be imposed. None of us has infinite time or resources. We cannot do everything. But, rather than selecting always to go to the events that serve others who look like you, consider going to the events that serve others who look nothing like you. Have a little more humility and tolerate a little more discomfort. Each of us should ask ourselves to apply this to our own choices. (Dona, PSRH, February 14, 2017)

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In later interviews, Dona addressed the notion that the group’s nebulousness had indeed lessened their organizing and activating power. She compared PSR/H to Indivisible who, while consisting of many nationally decentralized groups, maintained a platform that was very top-down. She stated that if you adopt the Indivisible guidebook,7 according to the national leaders of Indivisible who authored that book, then “you are us.” Dona’s preferred approach instead was that if you have an idea, then “we are you” (Interview 4, June 13, 2019; to note, Indivisible Houston’s leader claimed that despite this top-down structure, IH was a very locally driven and much more diverse iteration in comparison to other Indivisible groups nationally). Such desire for a bottom-up structure for her organization, however, did not prevent Dona from networking and collaborating with other progressive and grassroots organizations throughout the nation. As the movement, and as Dona’s networking, grew, she described various ways in which PSR collaborated with other movements taking place on a national scale, and the translocal and networked ways in which she had connected with all of them. In interviews, she mentioned that PSR was a member of various formal and informal activist networks that were national or translocal in scope, and that in collaboration with these groups she had taken several trips to Washington, DC, and one to Chicago for a national event at which she had been invited to speak alongside well-known leaders like Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, and more: The various activist networks I collaborate with, um they, include, as I said Together We Will, um, also the Action Together Network, um, Pantsuit Republic the network, uh Indivisible, um:, and then I mean a loc- a lot of like activists- like individual activists who have kind of dynamically formed groups, um that are often issues oriented but sometimes it just has to do with the people in the group um who enjoy working together and so it can cut across issues, they don’t- we don’t necessarily have names for what those networks are, um. … also as a function of being part of these national networks I um, often have opportunities to engage nationally I’ve gone to Washington DC probably about, I dunno five times in the last couple years? um, and that is often to do immigrant rights related work. um, most recently though I was invited to participate in a national women of color civic engagement panel in Chicago that included like Alicia Garza, um and Ai-jen Poo with National Domestic Workers Alliance, um people from Color of Change, people from, um Pantsuit Nation, people from, uh, gosh so mit was a number of organizations APEN, which is, I- the Asian Pacific Environmental Network I think, in California, um, yeah so that- they

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were actually looking to support women of color candidates. so that would be nationally. (Dona, Interview 4, June 13, 2019) Her listing off of so many different organizations and national figureheads indicates what this contemporary moment of leaderless political organization looks like. “Leaderlessness” does not mean that there is no organization or shared consultation occurring at larger scales of interaction; rather, it means that people are using their networked communications to connect at local levels with various types of individuals and groups that they are able to connect with over time as they tap into anything from their own personal connections to public, private, and secret Facebook groups of similarly oriented organizations anywhere else in the nation. Joseph pointed out that it was very motivating to know that all of the group’s hyperlocal work was indeed part of a larger national movement (for various other networked organizations involved in the greater “Resistance” movement see Han & Oyakawa 2018): how is PSR connected to other groups around the nation? so we are a member of the Indivisible Network, um there is communication that Dona does with lots of other groups, um, yeah I have contacts with other activist groups um other … gun reform groups … so, it’s not, super strong we do have a relationship um on the education side um with Jitu out of Chicago [see Chapter 4], and, his group, so um we do push things um in that way,(.) but there’s so much to do in Texas. um, and it’s enough for us to try to keep the lines of communication open with Planned Parenthood in Texas, and with the Indivisible groups in Texas, and the so-called PSR groups in Texas, um, so that’s already a full-time job. LAUREN: … do you think that those connections … do you find them helpful in any way even if it’s just for like enthusiasm? or … JOSEPH: it’s definitely helpful and it’s it’s it’s some- it’s a way to reinforce that we’re not in this alone, um, we’re actively working on things that have a wider impact even if we can’t see that from our, y’know hyperfocused lens, um, and, it’s absolutely necessary to talk to these other people who are going through the same experiences and, realize that, we’re not crazy we’re not doing things the wrong way, um it’s effective, um, if we bring one extra person to the table, then we’re doing the right thing. (Joseph, Interview 4, June 23, 2019) LAUREN: JOSEPH:

As Joseph pointed out, these types of connection were inspiring, and helpful for strategy, but the work was here in Texas, locally run and driven by local issues and people. As all these groups grew in their own locales all over the nation and continued to communicate and network with each other post-2016, a nationwide movement became quite clearly noticeable—not just to activists but to journalists as well.

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In the following excerpt, Lucy overtly addresses the nationwide “Resistance” movement’s growth and recognition by sharing an image of the October 18, 2018 issue of Time magazine featuring a cover article titled “The Wave Makers: How the Outraged Got Organized” with an accompanying image of Trump’s back, as he walks off the page, getting chased down by a collection of “I Voted” stickers (the widely recognized oval-shaped sticker Americans get after they vote in person at a polling location) in the form of a wave. In the text of her post she wrote, to frame the shared image and link: Text 5.2: #freedomfighters 1 2 3 4

What we are doing statewide is getting noticed and part of a national trend. #GETIT #freedomfighters [article’s web address] (Lucy, PSR, October 18, 2018)

In her post, Lucy has used the hashtag phrases #GETIT and #freedomfighters in order to “enhance social affiliation around values” (Zappavigna & Martin 2018, p. 4) among the PSR statewide group. While #GETIT serves as a motivational phrase and sets the expectation that one of the values of this group is to “go get it,” meaning, here, to passionately pursue the goals of PSR, #freedomfighters acts to identify Lucy, those reading the post (the members of PSR), and the activists featured in the article as “freedom fighters,” a term generally applied to anyone who resists oppressive forces of power (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2020). The daily work of local organizing is long and painstaking, and it is sometimes very difficult to see whether or not the work bears fruit. Lucy’s implication here, as with Joseph’s statement above, is that upon seeing that the local work one is doing is a part of a national movement of similar activities that are indeed bearing fruits, one should feel more motivated to persevere. Lucy would like to encourage those PSR members reading her post to continue in that direction—they are indeed a part of a national community of like-minded actors. In the Time article that Lucy linked to, the author describes the national scale of the movement: Some of these activists call themselves “the Resistance.” Trump and his allies call them an “angry mob.” On the ground it’s just called participatory democracy. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers, allied with thousands of autonomous groups, are doing the grunt work of propelling their neighbors to the polls, using tactics tailored to their communities. Suburban moms are knocking on doors in North Carolina battlegrounds; racial-justice organizers in Georgia are mobilizing black voters in churches and restaurants; college students in Pennsylvania are using social media to reach new voters. In Texas, immigrant-rights activists are

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helping Latino voters get their paperwork in order. Teenage gun-safety advocates from Florida are on bus tours to register other newly eligible voters. (Alter 2018) The Resistance was here; it was leaderless, and it had sprouted up throughout the nation based on a shared sense of outrage and a desire to localize political conversations and generate sustainable community bonds. Knowing that fellow, nameless citizens across the nation (cf. Anderson 1983/2006) were engaged on the same path was indeed information that could keep Lucy and her fellow “Pantsuiters” persisting.

5.5 Moral Indexical Figures: Bonding around National Icons Situating these activists and their organizations as part and parcel of a much larger, nationwide and translocal social and political movement not only places them as collaborators with each other and other local activists locally and across the nation, but also with various nationally known moral and political figures who served as figureheads and indices for the moral and political aspirations of the group. Treré states: imaginaries are inextricably related to practice. They are ideas and understandings about the social world, but they constitute at the same time a ‘constructed landscape of collective aspirations that serves as a staging ground for action’ (Appadurai 1996, p. 31). Imaginaries operate as forms of powerknowledge, enabling and constraining specific social actions because they ‘provide a map of the social as moral space that is delineated along existential, normative and utopian dimensions’ (Herman 2010, p. 190). (Treré 2019, p. 107) Such social and moral spaces are populated by ideas, activities, and people who, via various routes of mediatization, come to be seen as emblematic executors of those ideas and activities (Zappavigna 2014 relates this to Goffman’s “ideation”). Through the information they shared with me in interviews and in their Facebook posts to their social networks, the participants flagged various actors who they politically and morally aligned themselves with, and in so doing they indexed their involvement and investment in a nationwide movement of progressive actors who were working toward an immediate cause of removing Trump and far-right office holders from power at all levels of government. It is important to know, then, which morally indexical public figures the group aligned themselves with in order to demonstrate their own moral political alignments within the national chronotope (cf. Lempert 2009)—the identities and ideals with which this locally acting group aligned themselves within the national moral political conversation. Page (2018) refers to these

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widely recognizable moral indexical figures as “stance objects” or, relying on Tann’s (2010) terminology, “bonding icons.” That is, in referring to these prominent individuals on social media, the participants and fellow members of PSR/H took stances toward these “icons” in ways that, again, come together to unite them within a singular, progressive in-group, nationally. Among these were Georgia politician Stacey Abrams, former First Lady Michelle Obama, Massachusetts Senator and 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate Elizabeth Warren, Georgia Representative and highly revered activist John Lewis, and religious leader as well as leader of North Carolina’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, famous for his “Moral Mondays” online sermons. Participants attended speeches these individuals gave at local events and then very enthusiastically entextualized those moments online, tagging each other or sharing similar pictures or content and certainly attitudes and positive evaluations with each other and toward the speakers across their posts. In the case of individuals like MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (elected to this position in 2018 amid the new wave of progressive representatives elected in many locations throughout the country, see Section 5.2), there was no shared inperson moment, but the group regularly bonded around what they said on their various mass and social media platforms. When the group collectively referred to these people, they indexed a constellation of nationally scaled figures who aligned with and thus further formed the ideological framework for this movement’s morals and motivations. By referring to them interdiscursively—posting individually about these people, tagging each other in their posts about them, and so on, they enregistered themselves as certain types of people, generally recognizable as “progressive” leaders, acting locally within the national chronotope.

5.5.1 “Y’all this woman is after my heart”: Aligning with Moral Indexical Figures Members of the group often posted about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known for her outspoken “social democrat” identity and her very astute, millennial ability to use social media to strong political advantage. In December 2018, with the header text Y’all this woman is after my heart. (Jess, Personal, December 18, 2018) Jess shared the following screenshot of a tweet sequence between Ocasio-Cortez and Texas junior Senator Ted Cruz (on whom more below) that had been circulating on various social media platforms:

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IMAGE 5.2

Snowflakes

In the image, a tweet originally shared by Cruz states Snowflake, believing online propaganda: “OMG w/o net neutrality, the Internet is gone!” Informed observer: “You know, the FCC issued that rule in 2015. The Internet grew up wonderfully free from govt regulation & this restores the status quo ante.” Snowflake: “Uh, never mind …” Ocasio-Cortez’s public response to his tweet follows: “Snowflake?” Aren’t you a sitting Senator? Also, Comcast paid you $36k to write this tweet. Campaign contributions are public record.

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In her response to Cruz’s tweet, Ocasio-Cortez has first chastised him for using such a polarizing and derogatory term—“snowflakes,” a term used by many people on the right to portray people on the left (and primarily progressives) as overly emotional, sensitive, and irrational actors—to label people on the left who oppose his view on internet regulation. Second, Ocasio-Cortez points out that the reason he is writing this post in favor of internet privatization is because he is being paid a large sum of money by an internet provider corporation—Comcast—who are very much invested in freeing themselves from government regulation. Jess’s post containing this image, liked by 75 people including many PSR/H members, portrayed an admiration for, and thus a stance of alignment with, Ocasio-Cortez’s sharp retort and “call-out” of what must have been Cruz’s ulterior motives in writing his post. In January 2019, when Ocasio-Cortez released a magazine image of herself featured among a subset of the new female congressional representatives elected in 2018, Jess wrote I know we have so much farther yet to go. But this, still, is everything. It fires me up to begin again. To keep going and never look back (Jess, Personal, January 2, 2019) The Huffington Post article she shared below her caption was titled “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Reveals Powerful Portrait of a New Wave of Congresswomen,” and the portrait itself was of Ocasio-Cortez alongside several other newly elected Democratic women of color in the federal House of Representatives. “AOC,” as she came to be affectionately called in an act of reclamation after an incident where Trump named in her in a rally and mocked her hyphenated Hispanic name as being too long and hard to pronounce, was a figure who very rapidly became a national icon for progressive and intersectional feminist values after her upset victory over the Democratic incumbent of her federal district in 2018. Due to her sharp tongue and strategic use of social media, as I mentioned above, she was achieving great national visibility and showing, alongside other new and similarly aligned progressive legislators, that for groups like ours, there was hope for a “progressive wave” at the highest levels of government and in the general national conversation that was being distributed through mass media. In sharing this post and commenting on it, stating that it “fires her up” and motivates her to “keep going and never look back,” Jess was performing stances of both alignment and motivation. Jess saw promise for a shift toward progressive and feminist values at the top of the United States political hierarchy (the federal, national level), and it kept her motivated to keep working locally to reinforce that national shift. She was not alone in this—most of her PSRH leadership friends positively acknowledged her posts among the 29 likes/reactions she got.

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Not long after this post, an old video was unearthed and leaked—with the goal of creating a scandal—of Ocasio-Cortez dancing on a rooftop as a college student. In response to the leaked video, AOC, unphased, released another video of herself on social media doing a little shimmy in homage to the video on her way into her office in the Capitol. Lucy posted a link to an article featuring the video with the comment: “For all the dancers and BA [badass] women … [tags Jess]” (Lucy, Personal, January 4, 2019). Jess responded with a gif of a turned-on teacher pulling down her glasses to take a look, and I responded below that “This is so much spectacular.” Many other members of leadership liked or loved the post. Joseph posted the same link on his own Wall that day, and Samantha commented, “I love her so so much.” Later, Joseph even posted a video of himself humorously lip synching a song, and he satirically commented above the video that there were probably many old videos of him lurking around, but he would not be shamed. Above are several examples of how the group bonded around one nationally visible figure who provided a readily available model for the political and moral ideals that this group of activists adhered and aspired to. The group members’ posts aligning themselves with individuals like AOC “wrote into being” who they were as a moral political community within the national political chronotope. Individuals like AOC, Lewis, Abrams, and several more were the national figureheads of the progressive branch of the “Resistance” movement. By aligning themselves with these figures across their posts, and by cheering each other’s positive references to these figures, the group made clear who their moral and political goals aligned with along local, state, and national scales.

5.5.2 #nooneisabovethelaw: Dis-alignment and Daily Reminders Among figures of dis-alignment for the group, local and state-level politicians who aligned themselves with the far right were common targets. Common nationally known figures that they strongly opposed were their own federal Senate representatives, Texas junior Senator Ted Cruz and Texas senior Senator John Cornyn, as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and of course Donald Trump himself. As we have already seen in Jess’s share of Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter response to Cruz above, the group had a particular interest in him as his public presence was the loudest and generally, through the lens of this group, the more vocally nefarious of our two Texas Senators. In the below excerpts I will provide two examples of discursive sequences that demonstrate the various ways the group aligned with each other and with national moral political stances by dis-aligning with particularly Cruz and Trump.

Cheering a Protest of Cruz Ted Cruz—a resident of Houston, and also, as I described above, a very visible far-right politician nationally—was a frequent target of the group. I first met

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Dona, and met Joseph for the second time, at PSRH’s first protest of Cruz at his downtown Houston office in January 2017. In April 2017, PSRH and local progressive ally organizations put together a “Ted Cruz is Missing Town Hall,” in which they called out his absence from Houston in general and especially from meeting with “regular people” instead of wealthy Republicans and likely donors who already agreed with him. They also all showed up and organized to protest a rally that featured both Cruz and Trump as headliners in October 2018, before the midterm elections. The group were very vocal and active about their distaste for Cruz and his political beliefs and actions online, as well. On September 25, 2018, Joseph shared a news article from the Austin American-Statesman titled “Activists chase Ted Cruz out of restaurant over Kavanaugh sexual misconduct allegations, video shows.” He shared it with no commentary, which I will call line 1 for the coming analysis. Text 5.3: Activists chase Ted Cruz out of restaurant 1 [ø] In the article that Joseph has linked to (Hall 2018), the action is explained: Activists chased U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife out of a restaurant while chanting “We believe survivors,” in reference to the sexual misconduct allegations against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a video posted Monday night shows. A group called Smash Racism DC posted the video just after 9 p.m. and said it took place at a Washington, D.C., restaurant … Cruz is on the Senate Judiciary Committee that will hear testimony Thursday from Kavanaugh and the woman who said he sexually assaulted her. The author concludes the article with the tweet that Smash Racism posted after the event: BREAKING. Activists just chased @TedCruz out of a fancy Washington DC restaurant, chanting “We Believe Survivors!” Cruz has been friends with creep Kavanaugh for 20 years. Now Cruz is on judiciary committee hearing his testimony. Fascists not welcome! #CancelKavanugh pic.twitter.com/7mx6Tc32za —Smash Racism DC (@SmashRacismDC) Then Jess shared the same post, re-entextualizing it onto her own page with the following header:

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2 I actually fantasized about something like this (yes I used the right word) and 3 then DC activists made it come true. It’s so good y’all. (Jess, Personal, September 25, 2018) Later that evening, Joseph, after apparently receiving some blowback across himself and other Friends who had posted similarly, felt it necessary to make a statement about the blowback they were receiving.

IMAGE 5.3

No, Ted Cruz doesn’t deserve peace

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4 5 6 7 8 9

No, Ted Cruz doesn’t deserve peace. He’s made it clear he doesn’t care for the lives or well being of his constituents, or fellow Americans. No Justice, no Peace. One of the GOP deserve a moment of peace in public. They are public servants that are only interested in serving their special interests. If I have to worry about my friends, family, or neighbors having their rights stripped, they don’t get a ‘quiet night out’.

The first comment below his post spoke to the resistance the group had been receiving from others. One of Joseph’s Facebook Friends wrote: 10 I think this kind of stuff just makes Democrats look bad. 11 I’m all for peaceful demonstrations, but this seems uncivil In the subthread that ensued the group immediately responded with a shared stance of disagreement. Joseph wrote: 12 I disagree. The gop is fine with not giving peace to 13 others. I honestly don’t care if they don’t get any. Then Jess: 14 Good thing I’m not a Democrat And Lucy: 15 While we’re being civil, they’re putting kids in cages. So fuck that In this series of posts and comments, the group again posted intertextually and collaboratively, first sharing from each other the same article about Ted Cruz getting run out of a restaurant, as we saw with Jess’s and Joseph’s posts above. In their separate headers on both of their shared posts, Joseph commented with [ø] silence (line 1), and Jess commented (lines 2-3) with a more explicit and very positive affective stance toward what the DC activists did: “I actually fantasized about something like this (yes I used the right word) and then DC activists made it come true. It’s so good y’all.” Given prior experience with both Joseph as well as the group’s general attitude towards Ted Cruz (an extremely negative one), Joseph’s silence can be taken (cf. Gricean [1975] implicature) to express a similar stance—one of alignment with the DC protestors’ action. When Joseph then shared a commentary that entextualized the conversation that had ensued from members of their collective having each individually shared their positive assessments of the protest action (Image 5.3), he tagged Lucy, Jess, and two other ally activists whom the group worked very closely with. By doing so he entextualized the conversation that had ensued from their posts about

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Cruz’s restaurant experience, and further responded within that conversational frame, positioning himself and his collaborators collectively as agreeing unequivocally that Ted Cruz did not deserve a quiet night out as long as Joseph had to “worry about my friends, family, or neighbors having their rights stripped” (line 8). When the first commenter opposed Joseph’s stance, those he had tagged (as well as a couple of Joseph’s other Friends) immediately stepped in to align themselves with Joseph and against the commenter, variably taking strong moral and affective stances of disagreement and dis-alignment towards the actions that Cruz had been in support of as a legislator, “not giving peace to others” (Joseph, lines 12–13) and “putting kids in cages” (Lucy, line 15). Jess dis-identified herself (and by insinuation Joseph and Lucy) with the commenter’s labelling of the protestors and those who would agree with them as Democrats: “Good thing I’m not a Democrat” (line 14). This statement implies a message somewhere along the lines of, “While Democrats are concerned with looking polite, (we) progressives are out here trying to make a change no matter whose feelings this hurts.” Through this sequence of texts, the members of the group variably personalized their relation to the news reported in the Statesman article: Jess had “fantasized” about it, Joseph felt that Cruz was a man who put himself, his friends, and his family under threat and therefore deserved no peace since Joseph and people he cared about had none either, and Lucy incorporated her investment in immigration issues again with her comment about Cruz’s support for child detention and family separation. While Cruz serves to connect the local and state level to the national level—he was both a local Houston resident and a national, federal senator representing the state of Texas—other figures, like McConnell and of course Trump, appealed to them purely within the framework of the national chronotope and the political upheaval that was marked by Trump’s 2016 election.

@-ing Trump Direct address of Trump was not common overall among the group. There was, though, much discussion about what effects Trump’s presence and his morals (or lack thereof) and political acts were having on both the political and public expression of hate. The issues and events the group addressed in their posts ranged from the 2017 Virginia White supremacist “Unite the Right” rally after which Trump claimed that there were “very fine people on both sides” (Coaston 2019, and more on this below), to the presence of avowed White nationalist Stephen Miller in the White House (Rose 2019; Wickenden 2020), to the 2018 targeted sending of bomb packages to prominent Democratic political figures’ offices by an avid Trump supporter (Weiser & Watkins 2019). In addition to such conversations, though, there came to be one reliable conversation directly at/about Trump, and that was sometime in mid-2018 when

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Lucy decided to start a daily Twitter agenda in which she would tweet something about her activist activities and goals at President Trump every single day. Lucy’s original goal in doing this, as she stated, was to try to get blocked by Trump and to make a display of it, since he was regularly blocking his critics. This came on the heels of her actually getting blocked by a state-level representative from her district. Blocking of any followers of a politician’s social media account had been deemed illegal in a federal court, and so Lucy was in essence daring these legislators to keep breaking the law and ignoring her view as a constituent. She explained this in one of the tweets in her series: Day 162 For 162 days I’ve tried to chronicle these times w/a daily tweet. Initially it started to see if I’d get blocked by @realDonaldTrump. A daily reminder of our resistance and that NO ONE, regardless of social station, IS ABOVE THE LAW. It is government by the PEOPLE. (Lucy, Personal, October 14, 2018) Lucy’s tweets at Trump came to consist of a mish-mash of what she and PSR/H were doing locally, her attitude towards what was happening under the Trump regime, and how her work in the community acted against Trump’s national agenda and ultimately toward removing him from office. Because I collected only the group’s Facebook feeds and the links that they shared on that platform, including to the Twitter and Medium posts that they shared onto Facebook, the only @RealDonaldTrump posts I collected from Lucy were the tweets that she shared on Facebook. Still, these re-entextualized tweets were quite numerous, and I felt as if they served to not only share with her Facebook Friends what she was tweeting about on Twitter—and perhaps to encourage them to follow her on Twitter—but it also served to signal her activist virtues within the national chronotope, and motivate both herself and her Friends locally and translocally who collaborated in activism, organizing, and an anti-Trump agenda. Perhaps this virtue signaling also acted more passively to continue to pressure non-like-minded friends to get on board— politically active alongside her. The content of Lucy’s tweets, all begun with a header of what day of her Twitter campaign she was on, ranged from comments stating that there was indeed a nationwide movement and that she was a part of it, working every day to get Trump and his supporters out of office (Day 126), to descriptions of what work she herself was doing at the grassroots level in order to get Trump out of office (Day 315), to invitations to people reading her tweets to ask her how they might get involved (Day 316): Day 126 All across our nation, ordinary people are organizing to protect democracy.

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I LOVE DEMOCRACY. And it’s worth all the work. We are making it happen in #November. Because of love. No one is above the law, @realDonaldTrump, when you are motivated by hate/ greed. (Lucy, Personal, September 8, 2018)

Day 315 School board meetings MATTER. When decisions are made about educating our children on the local level, make sure you USE YOUR VOICE. And may it go all the way up to other levels of govt. #nooneisabovethelaw @realDonaldTrump (Lucy, Personal, March 20, 2019) Day 316 If you look around and say, hey I think things can get better, great! If you need help getting connected and figuring out where to start to make changes, reach out to me. We have to tell these electeds that #NoOneIsAboveTheLaw @realDonaldTrump (Lucy, Personal, March 21, 2018) Through such posts as those made with respect to Cruz and Trump above, the group reiterated that their work in their local communities was part and parcel of a national chronotope where major ideological battles were being waged, with dramatic effects on people’s lived realities. By personally and collectively disaligning with them, they also upscaled their political identities by demonstrating that they were doing their intensively local work while also aligning and disaligning this work with iconic actors who served as the major figures in our national, grand narrative debates about moral and political alignments and outcomes.

5.6 Scale and Scalability: Local Meetings, Translocal Networks, National Politics In a final sequence of posts in this chapter, I will explore below how the group occasionally made very astute use of local, translocal, and national networks in order to bring issues to people’s attention at as broad of a scale as possible. This led at least a couple of times to them even achieving a national spotlight with their protest events. In the coming example of such translocally “scaled up” (Postill 2018) activity, I will highlight a particularly impressive

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instance of Dona’s translocally networked organization of a visit to an immigrant detention center in south Texas which achieved a brief spotlight on national news.

5.6.1 Project Lifeline: Bearing Witness at the Border In this sequence of posts I intend to show not only the translocally networked nature of an event that Dona worked to put together entirely from Houston (and likely mostly from her living room), but I also hope to bring together the themes that I have discussed in the previous two chapters in order to show how individualized small stories, stance-taking, virtue signaling, and moral political alignment and collaboration, along with the interlinking of several scales of sociopolitical organization, come together around one single event. On September 28, 2018 (and having required a significant amount of her time leading up to it), Dona hosted a two-day event consisting, on the evening of the 28th, of concurrent panels held in San Antonio and Houston, where faith leaders, medical professionals and lawyers from various locations all spoke to the atrocities that were happening in detention centers where immigrant children were being held. Specifically, they spoke to medical and legal implications of such imprisonment as well as the moral principles of both of these sets of professionals as well as of the invited religious leaders. The group collectively stood quite strongly opposed to what was happening with respect to family separation and imprisonment in Texas and throughout the country at the behest of the federal government and with the collaboration of many private actors as well. Dona described the event to me later in an interview: we very deliberately invited physicians and faith leaders to lead in that because, our feeling was that those are two groups that are respected, and off- offer an apolitical or at least nonpartisan view of the problem and can really talk about the problem as being one of um human rights and y’know basic medical services and the lack of providing that. like physicians can speak to that, right? (Dona, Interview 3, January 31, 2019) Dona posted an invitation to the event in the PSR group on July 24 (early relative to the date it actually happened on—the event was originally planned for August 21 but was then pushed back to September 28 for reasons of which I am unaware). The body of the post consisted of a shared link plus preview image invitation to the event (Image 5.4), and Dona’s introductory framing header read as follows:

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IMAGE 5.4

Walk with me

Text 5.4: Walk with me 1 Walk with me for a minute—Then join me on August 21. The government 2 missed the first deadline for reunification on July 10. They will likely miss the 3 second deadline for reunification on July 26. The brain’s response to the 4 same incessant (even terrifying) stimulus is adaptation. I fear over time that 5 we will lose the motivation to take moral action. I am VERY political. But I am 6 not talking about political action here. These people do not have secure 7 access to food or water. These conditions of detainment in any other country 8 would comprise a humanitarian crisis. Since there is no way the US 9 government could be unwilling to rectify this problem, they must be unable.

This relatively short, nine-line text is packed with semiotic work that appeals to Dona’s audience’s emotions as well as their trust in science and in international norms for decency in cases of detention in order to frame their interpretation of

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the invitation previewed below it. I will not go into them in detail here as we have already seen a plentiful number of such analyses and I would like instead to focus on some cross-post relations that I will add here below. The invitation itself, linked below Dona’s text, basically serves as the final utterance of her narrative. Following directly after her last sentence, I paraphrase: if the government is “unable” to secure the needs of the children they have detained, then something must be done about it and here is what I, Dona, propose: an event titled “Bear Witness and Deliver Aid to Children Detained by Immigration.”

IMAGE 5.5

Send us well wishes

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As the event took place, Lucy, who had helped to collect donations for the caravan prior to the event, entextualized the event and her presence there by posting a pair of images to her own Wall (Image 5.5; I did as well, not pictured here). In the caption to her original post to her own Wall, she stated: Text 5.5: Be the change you want to see. 1 Be the change you want to see. 2 ✊❤ 3 13,000 immigrant children in detention, 3 times the amount two years ago. Lucy then re-entextualized this entire post from her Wall into the PSR page, adding a new header for her different audience (PSR membership instead of an audience on her personal Wall). In the header within PSR she wrote: 4 Project Lifeline: panel tonight, leave for the border before dawn tomorrow. 5 Send us well wishes as we travel. ❤ 6 #engage #educate #elevate (Lucy, PSR, September 28, 2018) In authoring this pair of posts she also continued her alignment with Dona, who was and had been posting information about the event both within and outside of PSR/H, thus further thickening their identity as a “with”—as leaders in the PSR/H movement. On the second day of the event, groups from the two cities caravanned down to a detention center in McAllen, Texas (approximately five hours directly south of Houston), bringing food, water, and blankets that they had collected via donations in the month leading up to the event. At the detention center, they stood before a security guard outside, offered him the supplies, and stated that if our government was not able to provide secure and humane conditions then we would be happy to help. If they were not willing to accept the help, then they must not be willing to provide humane conditions.

5.6.2 Boosting Their Signal: Gaining Translocal and National Attention Of course, the food was rejected, but the event was recorded and broadcast in a live feed on the Facebook page of a Houston-based activist journalist friend of Dona’s (called The Talk on Main St.; see Image 5.6 below). That video got over 94,000 views. Also, a week before this, Hope Frye, Dona’s collaborator and the leader of the San Antonio caravan, had stated in an interview featured on NBC’s national news website that the goal of the event and their public offering of supplies was to say, “We know what you are doing. We call you out. Not on our watch’” (Gamboa 2018).

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IMAGE 5.6

Do not allow these atrocities to die with the news cycle

Postill (2018) notes that grassroots groups have learned that in this current era of digitally networked scales and chronotopes, they need to find new and better ways to “scale up” their visibility. Reaching thousands of people, even, in an era so saturated with media, is still usually not enough to start to make a shift in public opinion. Through conducting translocal actions like this that eventually, here, did reach a national audience, Dona and her collaborators were navigating exactly this problem of scaling up—she was finding ways to leverage her networks (and this is not the only time that she succeeded at it) to garner national attention—if only in the form of a brief spot on a nationally visible and generally trusted news source.

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Project Lifeline and the collaborations borne of it were a product of Dona’s translocal connections with both nationally prominent organizations and, in this specific circumstance, lawyers, doctors, and faith leaders from Houston and all over the nation. She leveraged these connections in order to bring together a mostly Texan translocal event in San Antonio and Houston, and then had them all travel in person to meet at a shared destination, at a single detention center in South Texas, in order to engage in a protest that, in its internet broadcast, could be picked up anywhere in the world of course, but that was mostly broadcast among her and her activist friends’ social networks, and to this one influential national news source (NBC). In the sequence of texts presented above, we have seen most of the themes that have been discussed in this book coalescing. Dona collaborated translocally, largely from her home in Houston, to create an event that had substantial translocal and even some level of national reach, and that took place both online and offline. In posting about the event, she relied on personal biographical elements told in the form of very brief narrative asides and insertions into her statements (“I am VERY political”; “The brain’s response …”) in order to both explain the reasons for her stance on an issue or event as well as appeal to the affective, moral, and political leanings of the audience to whom she was writing. Lucy, in posting her own version of the events, aligned with and intertextually reinforced Dona’s message both in the PSR space as well as on her own Wall, and also built intertextually, across her own posts, on her own biographical narrative that she had been telling in small stories over time within and outside of PSR/H. In order to achieve all of these effects on Facebook, the two individuals relied on a variety of the multimodal semiotic affordances available on Facebook—the use of group spaces, the juxtaposition of texts with shared links or images, live feeds, “attending” headers, hashtags, Friend tags, and so on. In this multi-post example, then, we have seen how these actors displayed personal biographies, group alignment, and moral political principles and activities, through socially networked communication, at local, statewide, and national levels. They coordinated local actions in face-to-face meetings or online from the comfort of their own homes, they held a local in-person event and a translocal caravan, and they entextualized their events online, and managed to attract national media attention, all with the interest of generating sustained political change at local and state and national levels.

5.7 Resist! A Moral Political Project of Re-Scaling the Nation For the leaders of PSR/H, the local and face-to-face was where real change could be made—and it helped to have support from all of the local, translocal, and national-level support networks that the group described, referred to, interacted with, and even created over time, and to be inspired by actors on a national stage who were invested in the same moral and political outcomes as they were.

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As such, much of the work that the group engaged in, even at local levels, was related to a national cause. It kept them going to know that they were not acting alone “out here in Texas,” but that instead they were a part of the “Resistance,” a nationwide movement of people acting alongside their neighbors in every state and every town, who were just as alarmed as they were at the top-down atrocities that were taking place. They were working together with fellow citizens whom they had never met in order to salvage the morals and ideals of their “imagined community” (Anderson 1983). PSR leaders networked with other local progressive organizations, and particularly Dona had networks that were translocal across similarly founded activist/ organizing groups that had formed throughout the nation after November 8, 2016. Sometimes this led to national collaborations, sometimes to translocal ones across towns or across states. So amid the fractal political hierarchy that the groups did still remain nested within—the (global/)national/state/local political frameworks that continue to constitute the fundamental structure of our government— the group also acted locally, translocally, and nationally in ways only afforded by the existence of socially networked media in order to work toward the change that they wanted to see both locally and throughout their nation-state. When federal elections came up, they remained very important to the group, but leadership really wanted to focus their attention on the fact that local politics are crucial to establishing sustainable progressive values at all levels of government and throughout our wider society. In pursuing this goal, outreach via Facebook afforded them the power to connect across their very large locality and state, to affect primarily local elections, and this type of change was just as, if not more important than “top-down” federal elections that more powerfully captivated the nation. As such, Facebook became the most powerful tool that they could find for sharing information, news, and organizing activities for local, state, and federal level political seats and issues. Ultimately though, whenever these organizers acted in specifically local terms, their activities were inevitably conditioned by the national scale chronotope. This was indeed Trump’s America, and Trump’s America was not acceptable because it was a threat to all forms of and hopes for justice and equality, and it was ultimately a threat to our democracy. In order to “save democracy,” we needed to “resist” with every fiber of our being, make sacrifices in our time and lifestyles, and proactively build community and local political structures. The best way to save, reinforce, and expand our democracy was to act locally and translocally, outside of, but upon traditional federal, state, and local institutions, in order to reclaim the moral space that was “our nation,” and to indeed keep the “moral arc of history” bending toward justice, which Dona stated that we could do as long as we acted (Dona, Interview 4, June 13, 2019). These activists were fighting at a local and statewide level, for a national cause, and relying on many translocal networks in between, under the premise that, thanks to such networked affordances, all of these scales were now inseparable.

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It has been my aim in this chapter to demonstrate that contemporary, internet-coordinated movements might actually be conceptualized differently— perhaps not less nationally, as indicated by their frequent alignment with national figures, but with more investment in a local autonomy that is more directly related to now-nationwide issues and conversations than a monolithically conceptualized movement driven from the top or the center. Kavada (2015, p. 873, citing della Porta & Mosca 2005; Earl et al. 2014) describes these new constellations as facilitating “‘organizing without organizations’, as it permits the coordination of collective action without costly and complex organizational infrastructures.” By creating movements with no real national leaders, the local gains autonomy and priority in advancing a translocally conceived agenda, and movements can live on at a national scale without relying on one easily targeted person or one relatively un-nuanced message. As Graeber concluded among his own community of activists, ultimately, “the democratic practice they’ve developed is their ideology” (2004, p. 11). So our scales—both temporal and physical/geographical—are in great shift thanks to these new technological affordances, and to deal with these new communicative realities, our political activities and outreach are being conducted accordingly. Strategies can no longer only consist of building bridges face-to-face locally, or of course of only watching our favorite cable news channels for hours on end. New national-to-local and local-to-national, and local-to-local-across-great-distances, communications and coalitions have formed, and our politics are following suit. The most effective way to make immediate and sustainable change, as this group and many other members of the Resistance saw it, was to reach out to your friends and neighbors, to form networks across your community, and to confront and replace the local and state-level lawmakers who affect our lives on a much more immediate basis than those battling on the ideological fronts of national partisan politics. For this group, the national, despite how it conditioned their motivation to exist and to act, was indeed crucial for motivation and a high-scale framing of the issues that they fought for and against, but action on that level had to take a back seat to the local and networked. In the case of these activists, a metasemiotic and moral part of their moral political project was indeed to re-scale the world around them, acting within and upon many technologies such as smartphones and social media platforms, that had already done a lot of re-scaling for us all. Such navigation of scale and chronotope is indeed also a part of the moral politics of now.

Notes 1 2 3 4

https://www.justicedemocrats.com/about/ https://brandnewcongress.org/About-Brand-New-Congress https://www.ascendpac.com/our-work These three organizations were formed very soon after the 2016 elections, but such organizations have existed for much longer, especially among far-right groups (Skocpol & Williamson 2016).

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5 See also Oehmler & Zoorob (2020) for commentary that Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 Senate campaign was simultaneously a local and a national one, amid massively intensified state GOTV operations including the activities undertaken by PSR/H and the wider Indivisible network. Johnson et al. (2010) also, citing Sanchez (2008), point out that a part of the Obama 2008 campaign strategy was, at a national scale, to leverage and create social networks in which they could connect people at the local level and enable them to build the campaign’s movement at a grassroots level. 6 http://pantsuitrepublic.com/ 7 https://indivisible.org/guide Given the groups’ close connections, it is fitting here to provide a brief description of Indivisible and its network. Indivisible started as a Google Doc which spread quite virally through social media early on after Trump’s election (but after both PSR and PSRH had formed). The two individuals most prominently associated with the group’s founding and formalization are Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, a husband and wife duo who were former congressional staffers (Brooker 2018; Indivisible 2020; Karpf 2018; Pressley 2019). As Indivisible and associated groups formed—Berry & Chenoweth (2018) cite a total of 3800 local Indivisible chapters having emerged by February 2017, and Karpf (2018) later cites the existence of up to 6,000 local associated groups— a Facebook page called The Indivisible Network was created, connecting whoever wanted to participate among these local groups around the nation. The Indivisible Network’s Facebook page defines itself under “General Information” on the group’s “About” page as: The rhetoric of the past election cycle has insulted, demonized, and threatened many of us—Muslims and those of diverse religious faiths, immigrants of all statuses, Native people, Black and Brown people, people with disabilities, people who identify as LGBTQIA, survivors of sexual assault—and our communities are hurting and scared. We are must ask—how do we move forward in the face of national and international concern and fear. In the spirit of democracy and honoring the champions of human rights, dignity, and justice who have come before us, we join indivisible to show our presence in numbers too great to ignore. Indivisible is sending a bold message to our new government, and to the world that we are watching and holding our new government and Congress accountable. We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us. We support the advocacy and resistance movements that reflect our multiple and intersecting identities. We call on all defenders of human rights to join us. We are currently looking forward to working with people who want to start their own group and other established groups to resist Trump’s agenda that goes against the principles, morals, and values of America. And we would like to work with you to start a group or your group to expand your base, sit-ins, marches, and coordinate Nationally with you and other groups. This is the first step towards unifying our communities, grounded in new relationships, to create change from the grassroots level up. We will not rest until Trump’s and Congress grave threat to democracy, freedom, human rights, equality, and the welfare of our country and all our people ends. TOGETHER WE ARE ONE. (Indivisible Network 2017) This mission of this nationally coordinated network clearly spoke to the mission of PSR, as well as to many other grassroots activists after Trump’s election.

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References Abramowitz, A.I. & Webster, S. (2016). The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. elections in the 21st century. Electoral Studies 41: 12–22. Alter, C. (2018). How the Anti-Trump Resistance Is Organizing Its Outrage. Retrieved 02/29/2020 from https://time.com/longform/democrat-midterm-strategy/?fbclid= IwAR1isV1rTP0NzLhBmIoKKBJhGGoCO49IGEWqE_cR4z5B8k3-vO-AjT3sl8c. Anderson, B. (2006) Imagined Communities [revised edn; first published 1983]. New York: Verso. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Berry, M. & Chenoweth, E. (2018). Who made the Women’s March? In D.S. Meyer & S. Tarrow (eds.) The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement, pp. 75–89. New York: Oxford University Press. Brooker, M.E. (2018). Indivisible: invigorating and redirecting the grassroots. In D.S. Meyer & S. Tarrow (eds.) The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement, pp. 162–184. New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Coaston, J. (2019). Trump’s new defense of his Charlottesville comments is incredibly false. Vox. Retrieved 03/04/2020 from https://www.vox.com/2019/4/26/18517980/ trump-unite-the-right-racism-defense-charlottesville. della Porta, D. & Mosca, L. (2005). Global-net for global movements? A network of networks for a movement of movements. Journal of Public Policy 25(1): 165–190. Earl, J., Hunt, J., Garrett, R. K. & Dal, A. (2014). New technologies and social movements. In D. Della Porta & M. Diani (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Advance online publication. Retrieved from http://www.oxfordha ndbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199678402.001.0001/oxfordhb-97801996784 02-e-20. Gamboa, S. (2018). ‘Not on our watch’: Lawyers fight to keep Trump from dismantling migrant child protections. NBC News. Retrieved July 23, 2020 from https://www. nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/not-our-watch-lawyers-fight-keep-trum p-dismantling-migrant-child-n910391. Gose, L., Skocpol, T. & Williamson, V. (2020). Saving America once again, from the Tea Party to the anti-Trump resistance. In T. Skocpol & C. Tervo (eds.) Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance, pp. 191–212. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Graeber, D. (2004). Direct Action: An Ethnography. Chico, CA: AK Press. Grice, H.P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Arts, pp. 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Hall, K. (2018). Activists chase Ted Cruz out of restaurant over Kavanaugh sexual misconduct allegations, video shows. Austin American-Statesman. Retrieved 02/21/2020 from https://www.statesman.com/news/20180925/activists-chase-ted-cruz-out-of-restaurant-o ver-kavanaugh-sexual-misconduct-allegations-video-shows?fbclid=IwAR0twSd6wd tIu3ogMrOkbK7hf9hYhFr_zGEDThxRUUotRXoTuQ6pLWHmxWI. Han, H. & Oyakawa, M. (2018). Constituency and leadership in the evolution of resistance organizations. In D.S. Meyer & S. Tarrow (eds.) The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement, pp. 230–245. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Herman, A. (2010). The network we all dream of: Manifest dreams of connectivity and communication or, Social Imaginaries of the wireless commons. In B. Crow, B. Longford, & K. Sawchuk (eds.) The Wireless Spectrum: The Politics, Practices, and Poetics of Mobile Media, pp. 187–198. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Holbrook, T.M. & Weinschenck, A.C. (2019). Information, political bias, and public perceptions of local conditions in U.S. cities. Political Research Quarterly 73(1): 221–236. Hopkins, D.J. (2018). The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Indivisible. (2020). Board. Retrieved 04/09/2020 from https://indivisible.org/board. Indivisible Team. (2017). Indivisible: A practical guide for resisting the Trump agenda. Retrieved 04/05/2020 from https://indivisible.org/campaign/indivisible-guide. Indivisible Network. (2017). About. Retrieved 04/03/2020 from https://www.facebook. com/pg/IndivisibleNetwork/about/?ref=page_internal. Johnson, T.J., Zhang, W., Bichard, S.L. & Seltzer, T. (2010). United we stand? Online social network sites and civic engagement. In Z. Papacharissi (ed.) A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, pp. 185–207. Routledge. Karpf, D. (2018). The many faces of Resistance media. In D.S. Meyer & S. Tarrow (eds.) The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement, pp. 143–161. New York: Oxford University Press. Kavada, A. (2015). Creating the collective: Social media, the Occupy Movement and its constitution as a collective actor. Information, Communication & Society 18(8): 872–886. Klein, E. (2020). Why We’re Polarized. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lears, R. (2019). Knock Down the House. Netflix. Lempert, M. (2009). On ‘flip-flopping’: Branded stance-taking in U.S. electoral politics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(2), pp. 223-248. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. (2020). Freedom fighter. Retrieved 07/16/2020 from http s://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freedom%20fighter. Meyer, D.S. (2018). Conclusion: Trumpism, the Resistance, and the future of American democracy. In D.S. Meyer & S. Tarrow (eds.) The Resistance: The Dawn of the AntiTrump Opposition Movement, pp. 246–264. New York: Oxford University Press. Oehmler, E. & Zoorob, M. (2020). The Texas-sized impact of Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign. In T. Skocpol & C. Tervo (eds.) Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance, pp. 237–258. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Page, R. (2018). Narratives Online: Shared Stories in Social Media. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Postill, J. (2018). The Rise of Nerd Politics. London: Pluto Press. Pressley, A. (2019). Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin. Time 100 Most Influential People. Time. Retrieved 04/09/2020 from https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-peop le-2019/5567710/leah-greenberg-ezra-levin/. Rose, J. (2019). Leaked emails fuel calls for Stephen Miller to leave White House. National Public Radio. Retrieved 03/04/2020 from https://www.npr.org/2019/11/ 26/783047584/leaked-emails-fuel-calls-for-stephen-miller-to-leave-white-house. Sanchez, L. (2008). Commentary: Obama’s high-tech edge in presidential politics. Retrieved 07/31/2020 from www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/09/01/sanchez.obama/ index.html?eref=rss_topstories. Skocpol, T. & Williamson, V. (2016). The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Updated edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Stout, N. (2019) Power and vulnerability in Knock Down the House: An interview with Rachel Lears. Anthropology Now 11(1–2):90–100. Tann, K. (2010) Semogenesis of a nation: An iconography of Japanese identity. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Treré, E. (2019). Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms. New York: Routledge. Weiser, A. & Watkins, B. (2019). Cesar Sayoc, who mailed pipe bombs to Trump critics, is sentenced to 20 years. New York Times. Retrieved 03/04/2020 from https://www. nytimes.com/2019/08/05/nyregion/cesar-sayoc-sentencing-pipe-bombing.html. Wickenden, D. (2020). Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration plan. New Yorker. Retrieved 03/04/2020 from https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/politica l-scene/stephen-miller-the-architect-of-trumps-immigration-plan. Zappavigna, M. (2014). CoffeeTweets: bonding around the bean on Twitter. In P. Seargeant & C. Tagg (eds.) The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet, pp. 139–160. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zappavigna, M. & Martin, X. (2018). #Communing affiliation: Social tagging as a resource for aligning around values in social media. Discourse, Context and Media 22: 4–12. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.08.001.

6 BIOGRAPHIES, STANCE, AND MORAL POLITICS Saving the Nation in the Social Media Age

6.1 Destabilized Communicative and Participatory Structures Dennis (2019) points out that as politics have transitioned to internet and social media spaces, our definitions of participation and of what mobilizes people to get involved are being called into question. As new types and formations of groupings come to exist online, people organize around them in ways that emphasize their own identities and focus on specific issues. “There are good reasons to think that many citizens, especially younger ones, are more interested in civic engagement, lifestyle politics, and citizen-directed advocacy than they are in institutionalised forms of participation” (p. 75), and thus we need to be prepared to analyze political participation with the understanding that there has been a “diversification of participatory styles” (p. 78). Dennis further states that studies focused on conceptualizing participation as directly related to top-down political institutions are destined to see democracy as failing or on the decline due to their failure to observe the realities of daily and micro-participation. In this book, I have assessed the Facebook activities of seven activists, members of the leadership teams of Pantsuit Republic Texas and Pantsuit Republic Houston, as a part of their activities along this “continuum of participation” in which opportunities for democratic engagement have expanded: it seems quite perverse to suggest that just because these actions require less effort than other forms of activism did in the past, these citizens are somehow acting inauthentically. If these actions help to reduce costs at the individual level and enable a broader, more diverse range of citizens to participate in substantive action repertoires, should they not be valued? These tools are evidently not designed to ‘save the world,’ and to judge them in such terms

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is disingenuous. No form of communication will bring about systemic political change, but, in both activist contexts and day-to-day life, social media can be of benefit to citizens. (Dennis 2019, p. 201) This is to say that aspects of identity and activity have changed as social media have become a common-to-ubiquitous part of people’s lives—and electoral politics still need an injection of enthusiasm, of this I harbor no doubt. But with this study I have rejected ideologies that fetishize the impact that social media and the internet more broadly have had on political life. I have shown here that the individuals featured in this book, though they related quite tenuously to the politics of Facebook itself, most certainly took advantage of its affordances while they were there in order to expand the scope of their activism—to advertise their moral political project both individually and with each other by sharing their stories, presenting their stances, and showing the actions that they were taking both online and offline in order to re-shape American democracy—both literally, in terms of the scales at which people invested themselves in politics (local, state, national levels) and also figuratively, in relation to the moral political values that informed their progressive, intersectional feminist mission.

6.1.1 Social Media’s Effects on the Scales of American Politics I have treated social media communication in this book as a powerful tool and one that expands our possible repertoires of political participation (cf. Blommaert 2018). These types of communication complement both face-to-face interactions as well as what are now considered traditional media such as television and radio. In our more personalized and “narrowcasted” (Graeber 2004; Van Dijk & Hacker 2018) online communications, information is diversified through what is seen on social media, and people are able to interact around this information, including by asserting their own beliefs or activities in and around the topic, activities often referred to pejoratively as “virtue signaling.” Regarding the effects of such behaviors within social media spaces, Dennis claims: “What may seem to be a loweffort, self-indulgent act in isolation could in fact lead to further involvement, a process in which the interdependency between different acts sheds light on the normative value of democratic engagement” (2019, p. 49). In the words of Goldfarb, it is these sets of micro-interactions that constitute the very meat of social change: “consequential political life develops in small spaces where dialogue generates political power” (cited in Radsch 2016, p. 3). And further, if “the fundamental power struggle is the battle for the construction of meaning in the minds of the people” (Castells 2015, p. 5), then, as Prochazka & Blommaert (2019) say, this “knowledge activism” in online spaces must be “serious business.” Treré notes that it indeed seems nearly impossible these days to have a social movement without an online complement: “there is no protest action without its

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digital equivalent, no act of contention without a correlated and interconnected digital component (2019, p. 151). Now, here, activists can act locally, but communicate on various social media platforms and then decide to meet in DC or Chicago or San Diego to share stories and strategies, or all decide to stay home and coordinate massive marches and protests in their own backyards all across the nation simultaneously. When they act together they do not necessarily do so as part of the same organizations—they are not centralized or run nationally—but they recognize that they have shared interests and would benefit from gathering and sharing. Groups like PSR can tap into ally networks locally, translocally, and nationally in order to align their organization’s mission and activities with those of other organizations they wish to support or receive support from. As this has been happening, our institutions and the conceptualization of the nation haven’t deeply changed over time, but the ways that citizens and activists work in and around these structures in order to make them work more and less in their collective favor have changed significantly (cf. Bimber 2003; Meyer & Tarrow 2018; Skocpol 2003). It is conceivable that today’s activists and organizers are able to “jump scales” (cf. Blommaert 2007, 2010; Carr & Lempert 2016; Zentz 2017), and to simply re-scale or be re-scaled by available technological affordances, more easily than in prior eras. Formal and informal organizations can jump from local to translocal and national very quickly with the right social and social media-based networks, and they can gather people both locally and nationally with unprecedented speed and dexterity. All of this, though, to the activists considered in this book, only mattered if it was complemented by “boots on the ground,” face-to-face, interactions, meetings, and door-knocking. Amid all of this very dynamically networked movement, collaboration, and communication, maybe we could say that the local-to-national spectrum is now much more integrated than it used to be. It is rescaled in terms of both time and space in such a way that there is no local that is not national anymore (cf. Billig 1995; Hopkins 2018). But that does not mean that there is simply no more local politics— it means that our communities and identities are ever more revolving around nationally conceptualized movements and identities, and that local-to-national and vice versa refractions are becoming essential elements of both activism and politics in general (Atkinson & Kenix 2019; Gal 2002). The nation is ever more “networked” (Castells 2004, 2015; Skocpol & Tervo 2020), and its multiple scales are ever more flexible—they are hierarchical at times, and at other times the hierarchized planes very much flatten together (cf. Gal & Irvine 2019). As we saw in Bimber’s descriptions of technological waves in Chapter 1, our technological affordances move in and around the relatively permanent structures of big government, and as he and others claim (Castells 2015; Postill 2018; Tufekci 2017; Van Dijk & Hacker 2018), our current technological infrastructure allows us to organize in novel ways in space and time. Political organizing can happen at large scales, and be organized around singular moments of protest; national political organizations can organize at a national level in order to

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improve grassroots mobilization; independently operating activist groups can connect translocally, locally, nationally, as needed and desired; and all of this has allowed for many groups to decentralize and operate simultaneously at various scales instead of building hierarchies and coalescing around singular leaders or figures (cf. Meyer & Tarrow 2018). Because of this flattening and networking of the various scales on which national life operates, grassroots, local, and face-to-face mobilization remains more connected than ever to the national chronotope.

6.1.2 Chronotopes and Scales of the Resistance In this book I have spoken little of overt nationalism, but I have made clear throughout that the enormous cascade of people into PSR after November 8, 2016 was entirely related to Donald Trump’s election victory, the term “resistance” was entirely in reaction to the same, and the leaders of PSR/H made it quite clear that they were acting, on primarily local and state levels, to reform a politics gone bad at all levels nationwide. As Blommaert & De Fina (2017), invoking Gal (2002, 2016) describe, chronotopes have fractal qualities and they are present on different scales. So not only were the temporal scales of the chronotope that we, the members of PSR, found ourselves in quite multilayered with respect to the history of the United States, the history of technological and material innovations, and so on; it was also recursively layered in present time in spatial and geographic ways, from the national all the way down to very local politics and social constellations. The massification and corporatization of media over the last century or so has managed to draw many people’s attention to the moral politics of national, “highscale” (Heyman 2000) issues such as immigration rights, voting rights, racial justice, and so on. While large-scale, nationally and internationally scoped, corporate media have ridden the wave into social media communications and kept our focus on such national issues, social media and the advanced technologies of mobile phone and internet communications have enabled many people, activist or not, to nationalize (and globalize) the scope of and awareness around the personal nature of such high-scale issues. One of the most prominent examples of this is the issue of racial justice and police bias. Trayvon Martin’s and Michael Brown’s murders in 2012 and 2014, respectively, were the focus of much social media “boosting,” with the sharing of photos and phone calls surrounding their deaths, followed by the video and image capture of Sandra Bland’s 2015 arrest, the live-streaming of the murder of Philando Castile in 2016, and the posting of the video of the eightminute and 46-second murder, in Minneapolis, of Houston’s own George Floyd in 2020, to name, quite unfortunately, just a few of these events. With such localized media personalization accompanied by its simultaneous potential for instant massification, we are able to see, as a friend said to me after the broadcast of George Floyd’s death all over social media and national news in

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the summer of 2020, that we are all complicit. It is this notion that motivated the actors featured in this book to act, and it is also through this tension among personalized media use, networked participation, physical mobility, and hypernationalized political focus that a conscious attempt to re-shape the scope and scale of politics has also formed a significant portion of the moral political activism of this group and others like it. Many groups of late have recognized and acted on the importance of local politics, even if it is with nationwide interests in mind. The Tea Party’s strategy from their inception was to act locally to gain seats that would empower them generally within the government and also within the Republican Party (Alter 2018; Skocpol & Williamson 2016). Their localized work was so successful, in fact, that when Indivisible was formed, as I pointed out in Chapter 5, their activist toolkit was very much borrowed from the strategies of Tea Party activism (Brooker 2018; Indivisible Team 2017). Other nationally scaled progressive political action committees (PACs) and nonprofits have recognized the importance of these types of grassroots movements as well: Ascend, Brand New America, and Justice Democrats, on the electoral side, function nationally to seat progressives locally, and Together We Will and Action Together, the grassroots support organizations that Dona was connected to, as well as all of her informal translocal and national networks including Indivisible, function effectively at a national scale in order to reach out and build up local grassroots organizers. In the final sections below I revisit the themes that I have addressed with the data in this book—that of primarily the Facebook posts of these seven activists— and particularly those of Dona, Joseph, Lucy, and Jess—accompanied by several research interviews and questionnaires I conducted with them, as they sought to “resist”—to change the moral political order of Houston, Texas, and the United States of America. I will first revisit the theoretical frameworks that I used in analyzing their data before zooming back out to the technological and geopolitical chronotopes that they were both situated within and acting upon.

6.2 A Framework for Analyzing Stories and Stances on Facebook With a goal of examining how a small group of progressive activists situated themselves within and navigated the technological, social, and political chronotopes that they circulated through, in the texts examined in this book I have combined social semiotic, conversation, and narrative analytic tools in order to examine complexly multimodal and multilayered small and shared stories on Facebook. The stories that we have seen throughout this book have been quite long and complexly multimodal, incorporating lengthy texts that contain multiple stances and small biographical stories written textually, presented in images and videos, and shared across Facebook pages and group types. The authors of these posts used their small stories, and the stances that they justified with those small stories,

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to create commonality around a certain moral and political mission, both in the large “secret” and “backstage” spaces of the PSR/H groups and also in the more “frontstage” and more ideologically diverse communities of their own personal Facebook Walls, Pantsuit Republic community pages, and beyond. In order to understand such complex communication practices and the constraints leveraged upon them on the platform that they were using, I relied on previous explanations of how to understand the layout of Facebook posts (Bezemer & Kress 2017); explanations of entextualization of texts and experiences from offline to online contexts (boyd 2015; Georgakopoulou 2017a; Leppänen et al. 2017; Tagg & Seargeant 2017); and explanations of Facebook’s “pre-authorship” of texts (Chovanec & Dynel 2015; Eisenlauer 2014; Giaxoglou & Georgakopoulou 2020; Page 2018). Based on such understandings as well as my own experiences on Facebook in general and more specifically in engaging intensively with the data that this book is based upon, I created a framework consisting of three levels of analysis. The first level dealt with the pre-textual construction of texts on Facebook. In order to understand these conditioning factors for how people presented themselves and their stories in their posts, I formulated a mnemonic that I call the Seven A’s: authorship, audience, acknowledgement, alignment, affiliation, amplification, and algorithms. These seven terms are designed to capture who writes a post (authorship), who they write a post for (audience), who responds to a post and in what ways (acknowledgment), how participants in post-response sequences align themselves in relation to each other and the ideas that they are sharing (alignment), who a poster explicitly associates themself with (affiliation), how posters and respondents ensure that people will see posts (amplification), and what algorithms ensure that posts will be seen or prevent them from being seen by potential audience members (algorithms). Secondly, I combined this mnemonic with an analysis of stances taken in small story narratives. Stances were analyzed, first, at four levels related to what, who, and how a post author or respondent positions themself, and second in relation to the type of stance that they are taking—what attitude, belief, or positionality they are presenting to the world through the navigation of these four levels. The four levels of stance focused our attention on 1) participants’ use of linguistic resources in formulating stances throughout their narratives, 2) their stances toward their own narrative texts, 3) toward their audience, 4) and toward larger-scale discourses of identity and politics (Barton & Lee 2013; Georgalou 2020; Jaffe 2009). The types of stance-taking I became interested in upon inductively engaging with the data I collected related to how participants used elements of their own biographies in order to assume epistemic stances on issues that they wanted to address; how they used these epistemic stances in Chapter 3 in order to take evaluative, moral, and affective stances toward political issues of the moment; how they conveyed stances of (dis-)alignment in portraying a localized group identity (Chapter 4) and addressing public political issues at various scales related to a

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locally and nationally scaled political identity that was morally aligned with certain nationally visible activists and politicians (Chapter 5). Through all of these chapters, I occasionally commented on how the participants used stories and moral and evaluative stances in order to motivate their audiences to act or keep acting in progressive political ways—to keep their movement moving. The third level consisted of the more macro level considerations of chronotope and scale that I applied to the participants as they acted within and upon the contexts in which they communicated. What follows is a brief summary of the above levels of analysis as they were employed in each chapter. In Chapter 3 I examined some narratives that Dona and Lucy shared as they took various types of stances within complex and multilayered narratives in which they revealed small biographical stories about themselves that were relevant to the moral and political stances they wanted to portray. The tellings of these small stories helped them to accomplish stance work that portrayed the moral political frameworks that they were building for themselves and across each other as they built up their progressive organization in this new Trump era. Their very personal texts, while individually written and expressed, worked together across speakers to form the face of the movement—to amplify their cause (Dennis 2019). In deploying their small, biographical stories in an effort to take epistemic, moral, and evaluative stances on various issues, topics, and activities—to indicate why this fight was personal for them, and to signal virtues through their beliefs and actions that they felt others and especially PSR/H members should follow, they spoke to moral and ethical themes that they embraced as a group and wanted to push forward as a movement. In Chapter 4 I moved from the individual to the group, exploring how this group of activists collaboratively accomplished stance work through co-tellings as they entextualized events and ongoing conversations on Facebook and took cooperative stances of alignment with each other in formulating a specific group identity that situated them among the progressive activist community in Houston, Texas. As they shared posts together, posted links on each other’s Walls and conversation threads, and collaboratively displayed opinions about who has rights to speak, who qualifies as a valid progressive candidate, and how their activist identities were leading to changes in the ways they functioned in the world, the group took cooperative stances of alignment toward each other, and stances of dis-alignment toward group outsiders, as they shaped their group identity as a specific organization of progressive activists among the wider activist community in Houston. In Chapter 5, then, we examined how the group collaboratively navigated the contradictions of their nationally scaled political atmosphere. Acknowledging the national political chronotope and the critical juncture in national politics that ultimately drove them to act, they aligned and dis-aligned themselves with a national movement (generally labelled the “Resistance”) and with nationally visible political actors. They also, though, regularly called for a localized downscaling of

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political action while astutely relying on translocal networks in order to bring issues to people’s attention locally, translocally, and nationally. That is, drawing on Bimber (2003; see also Postill 2018), the group navigated the tensions that existed between national, state, and local institutionalized hierarchies of politics and media, manipulating the informational flexibility of this current information era in order to spread the message of their moral politics, and thereby make political change, as widely as possible. They acted locally and translocally, thanks to internet and social media platforms, in order to make cumulative national change alongside other organizations that were acting similarly throughout the entire country.

6.3 Saving the Nation in the Social Media Age In all of the stories that I have shared in this book, we have seen narrative elements that would simply not have been (as) salient in another era or if Hillary Clinton had won the Presidency in 2016. As such, I return to our quote from Blommaert in Chapter 1, as cited by Sinatora (2019, p. 3), that in momentous chronotopic shifts, which consist of rapid alterations of entire frameworks of meaning and morals, “nothing can be said anymore in the way it could be said before” (see also Blommaert 2018; Heller 2011). In fact, in this national context after the night of the 2016 presidential election, no one—Trump supporter, Clinton supporter, or anything outside or in between—could even be who they thought they were before. The abrupt change in the configurations of moral and political values in our national context indeed required these new activist leaders who, through their own ocular lens (Green 2009; Spencer-Bennett 2018), saw this momentous shift as a deep and immediate threat to people’s safety and the guarantee of democracy in any shape or form in their country, to reformulate who they were, to reformulate their life activities, and to draw on old stories in new ways in order to set a moral political tone for themselves as well as for the groups they were now leading. Although Trump was a symptom and not the disease—which had been coalescing well before Trump was elected (cf. Klein 2020; Skocpol & Tervo 2020; Skocpol & Williamson 2016), during the time period of this research project, his and his supportive Republican Congress’s specter, their actions, and the symbol of what they represented in relation to the United States of America as a nation loomed over all of us and really instigated the formation and subsequent growth of these organizations. Klein (2020) explains how national politics have become local politics over recent decades—this is to say that local politicians have aligned more and more with the party lines of national parties, and state parties have also aligned their platforms more with local parties. Thus, local votes are tending more to rely on ideologies that align with nationally scaled moral and ideological issues than with local ones like, say, who will control development on Houston’s flood plains and

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help our neighborhoods avoid disastrous flooding in the future, or who will keep funding majority Black and Brown schools instead of enforcing punitive measures until the schools are destroyed and replaced with charters. While the bureaucratic structures of the state, at all levels, remain quite stable, and relatively hierarchical or fractally recursive (Gal 2002; Gal & Irvine 2019) in nature—national, state, local—the ways in which we act upon them continue to shift throughout and across information eras. Our “places” are not the same as they used to be—our local is inherently translocal and networked online and offline; the personalized experiences that we access from the palm of our hand range at once from a national conversation—tweeting at Trump, coordinating a mass action across multiple states related to immigrants’ rights or gun control—to a local or personal one—organizing community outreach in a time of need, planning a blockwalking outing for a city council candidate, organizing a citywide march, planning a group trip to the state capitol. These are the ways in which the social actors featured in this book acted on their worlds, and these are some of the structures within which they acted. PSR/H’s attempts at re-scaling the nation and national politics toward smallerscale local levels and networked communities is part of a moral project that holds as its premise that personal and community-level investment in politics is what will a) make our communities more resilient, b) get more progressives into local offices that can more readily resist heinous top-down right-wing decisions, and c) filter across localities across the nation in a way that will shift the nation “blue”-ward—toward a more progressive vision of commitment to each other, through not only personal but also governmental interventions, in communities across the nation.

6.4 Resistance as a Lifelong Moral Commitment Keane (2016) describes: there are dimensions of political life that cannot be understood without some grasp of the moral and ethical impulses behind them. As we have seen, this is especially clear in the case of activists whose political commitments cannot be directly explained in terms of their own self-interests … Moreover, ethical transformation can be an important outcome of political movements, even if those movements fail in their immediate goals. (pp. 187–188) As she was getting ready to pass the leadership torch to Lucy and the other incoming co-chair in November 2018, Dona wrote a sort of farewell note to the PSR group: On November 6, 2018, mid-term election day, Pantsuit Republic will celebrate its 2nd anniversary. I started this Facebook page before Trump had

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won the presidential election of 2016. Many people are surprised by this fact. I did not start PSR as a reaction to a Trump presidency. I started PSR because I realized the power of this digital platform to motivate, educate, and organize a demographic that had been historically silent/silenced. And I saw the power of that even in a Clinton presidency. The leadership team with whom I have been privileged to serve has been uncompromising in our commitment to recruiting moderators who were and continue to be predominantly women of color. We have been deliberate in inclusion along almost every conceivable axis of diversity. We centered the work of PSR around the issues about which our polled FB members cared most deeply. We focused education and advocacy efforts on local and state government, which were run by the likes of Trump before Trump. We studied the history of social movements and the quickly evolving funding landscape for political nonprofits and decided that this revolution would not be funded, incorporating PSR as for-profit but writing into its by-laws that leadership would not be paid. The for-profit model would allow the group (if it chose) to (for instance) incubate social impact organizations led by its intensely creative and industrious members to ultimately render PSR self-sustaining. We pushed for a cultural shift in civic consciousness. Eat. Drink. Sleep. Play. Help. Vote. We refused a global and indiscriminate partisanship. We learned that the most impactful organizations are driven from below and supported from above. We spawned local groups and emphasized the importance of in person engagement, as we discovered the limits of the digital platform. We fought the sanctimonious burial of fetal remains. We helped crush SB6 and mitigate the effects of SB4. We freed Blanca. We raised $85,000 for undocumented families displaced by Harvey. We stood firmly opposed to the dismantling of the ACA. We fought family separation months before the vile policy took effect and again once it captured broad interest. We helped provide women with the courage to run for office and linked them to the resources to make that happen. We provided crucial support to March For Our Lives student organizers in Texas and recruited two students to our state Board to ensure we stay relevant. We brought our rural and urban sisters together for the March for Black Women Houston. We supported efforts to expose the inhumane conditions of detention for over 134,000 migrant children a year. We created an experimentally driven postcarding effort and microgrants program adopted nationally (even when in the latter case, the idea did not resonate here). We built coalitions. We bridged divides. But really … We have done nothing worth remembering, if we cannot pass the torch to others who will keep the flame burning just as bright. To that end, I would like to nominate the talented and ferocious [tags Lucy] and [tags M] to

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replace me as Co-Chairs of PSR for 2018–2020. Per our by-laws, we will democratically elect new leadership by November (executive decision: November 6, 2018). Lucy and [M] will post to introduce themselves and their ideas in short order. Only dues-paying members are eligible to run and to vote. Please join us! Your support allows us to nourish and grow this space and community. Thank you for indulging me for two years. I hope we created something that both brought you joy and moved you to action. [Photo of my future. {attaches a picture of her two daughters}] Dues-paying members: [tags approximately 30 people including leadership members] (Dona, PSR, October 15, 2018) As these individuals took and led agentive action on their worlds and the ever shifting ground under their feet, they were tired, but no less committed, and for the long haul. As Joseph stated in his final interview: “I’ve seen what not paying attention to the people in power can do. and I just don’t see myself walking away from it, ever” (Joseph, Interview 4, June 23, 2019). When Dona rolled off from her leadership role in PSR, she committed herself to going back to a focus on healthcare and immigration issues. Dona and Joseph ran for local schoolboard positions in spring 2019. When Dona lost her bid (as did Joseph), she stated afterwards to me that she had generally had little expectation of winning—what she had wished to do was to work with fellow progressives to make inroads in bringing progressive ideas to the fore in her community, and in that she felt like she had succeeded. Under Lucy’s leadership, state team meetings became less regular than Dona’s preferred once-a-month calls. I rolled off my secretary position in August 2019, and around this time Lucy also stepped away from her leadership duties in order to pursue her immensely time-consuming 2020 county commissioner candidacy. I stayed on the board’s communication channels after I stepped away, but the conversation generally died down. This is not to say that the activities of the group members died down—quite the contrary, they were all quite busy—but the place that the state board held amid all of their individual activities remained unclear to me, with only the future continuity of the statewide Facebook page seeming certain. Jess rolled off of PSRH leadership in January 2019 after just over two years of leadership there and committed herself to work in education and racial equity: My focus will be on education advocacy/activism and anti-racism/equity for black women and girls … I’ll be working more intensely with HISD Parent Advocates/Save our Schools Coalition and of course Houston Rising [an organization committed to political advances for Black women]. (Jess, Interview 2, January 19, 2019)

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Joseph stayed on in both PSR and PSRH and eventually stepped in as the temporary PSR co-chair in Lucy’s position while she campaigned, and Samantha stayed on in PSRH as well, trying to rebuild an education committee under new leadership. When I asked Dona in June 2019 how she envisioned the state group’s future, she stated that she was unattached to what would come of it, and that she hoped that it would serve a purpose for as long as it needed to. When its purpose was done, then it should simply cease to exist or change in form as necessary. Lucy, despite her need to step away during her campaign, was convinced that it would stay alive, and as I stepped away the group maintained a goal of seeking PAC status. In an interview in August 2018, Joseph himself wrote: I just wanted to share that Activism and community organizing are hard. Lots of people feel passionate about change, but few show up to lead the work. It’s essential that everyone involve keep finding ways to motivate others, to share the burden, and to inspire people to take their civic duties seriously. (Joseph, Interview 1, August 7, 2018) After I wrapped up data collection in August 2019, and stepped down from the board in September, Joseph began to post that “we at the center of this movement” are in dire need of new members to come in and fill these central roles because we are exhausted (see also Brooker 2018 for similar difficulties among Indivisible activists). Melucci writes: evidence shows that the more closely the individual is integrated in a group, the greater will be the degree of her/his political participation. Political participation is an expression of belonging to a certain social group, and the more secure the affiliation is, the more intense also the participation. (1996, p. 299) It is very much apparent to me that the group’s affective links, and the blending of their activism into their personal lives, are what kept the group going and thickened their identities to the point that their activism became their “lifestyle” (or the “change in civic consciousness” that Dona so frequently endorsed). This is to say that the work was exhausting and even draining at times, and their mutual support (and extensive collaborative play) was crucial to keeping them going, as their activism became a commitment not only to a cause but, crucially, to each other. Despite their exhaustion and their need for more people to make their way to the center of their movement, it was clear that the mission of civic engagement that the leaders in this group had adopted since November 2016 did not have an end in sight. They had become committed to transforming their ethical worlds through (not so new to them anymore) lifestyles of civic engagement and to transforming, through their online narratives and their tireless offline activities, the scales and values of politics that shaped their collective lives.

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IMAGE 6.1

My just-turned-one-year-old daughter at the March for Black Women, Emancipation Park, Houston, March 16, 2019

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Hopkins, D.J. (2018). The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Indivisible Team. (2017). Indivisible: A practical guide for resisting the Trump agenda. Retrieved 04/05/2020 from https://indivisible.org/campaign/indivisible-guide. Jaffe, A. (2009) Introduction: The sociolinguistics of stance. In A. Jaffe (ed.) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, pp. 3–28. New York: Oxford University Press. Keane, W. (2016). Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Klein, E. (2020). Why We’re Polarized. New York: Simon & Schuster. Leppänen, S., Kytölä, S. Westinen, E. & Peuronen, S. (2017). Introduction: Social media discourse, (dis)identifications and diversities. In S. Leppänen, E. Westinen, & S. Kytölä (eds.) Social Media Discourse, (Dis)identifications and Diversities, pp. 1–36. Routledge. Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Meyer, D.S. & Tarrow, S. (2018). Introduction. In D.S. Meyer & S. Tarrow (eds.) The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement, pp. 1–25. New York: Oxford University Press. Page, R. (2018). Narratives Online : Shared Stories in Social Media. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Postill, J. (2018). The Rise of Nerd Politics. London: Pluto Press. Prochazka, O. & Blommaert, J. (2019) Ergoic framing in New Right online groups: Q, the MAGA kid, and the Deep State Theory. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies. Paper 224. https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/research/institutes-and-research-groups/babylon/tpcs. Radsch, C.C. (2016). Cyberactivism and Citizen Journalism in Egypt: Digital Discourse and Political Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sinatora, F.L. (2019). Chronotopes, entextualization and Syrian political activism on Facebook. Multilingua 38(4): 427–458. Skocpol, T. (2003). Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Skocpol, T. & Williamson, V. (2016). The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Updated edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Skocpol, T. & Tervo, C. (2020). Introduction: Understanding current transformations in American politics. In T. Skocpol & C. Tervo (eds.) Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance, pp. xviii–xxvii. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Spencer-Bennett, J. (2018). Moral Talk: Stance and Evaluation in Political Discourse. New York: Routledge. Tagg, C. & Seargeant, P. (2017). Negotiating social roles in semi-public online contexts. In S. Leppänen, E. Westinen, E., & S. Kytölä (eds.) Social Media Discourse, (Dis)identifications and Diversities, pp. 211–234. New York: Routledge. Treré, E. (2019). Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms. New York: Routledge. Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and Tear Gas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. van Dijk, J. & Hacker, K.L. (2018). Internet and Democracy in the Network Society. New York: Routledge. Zentz, L. (2017). Statehood, Scale and Hierarchy: History, Language and Identity in Indonesia. London: Multilingual Matters.

EPILOGUE

So where from here? As with the examination of any social process, there is no end or conclusion. In this instance, amid a global pandemic and an increasingly autocratic state, all futures remain far from certain. In spring 2020, as I wrote this text for the first time, the treatment of the coronavirus pandemic by the dominant right-wing members of the government at all levels exacerbated the xenophobic tendencies of many Americans (Kandil 2020; Tavernise & Oppel 2020) and threatened the lives and the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, while simultaneously forcing variations of federal and state-level big government solutions to be offered, though still with great hesitation from the now almost entirely ultra-right Republican members of Congress who vehemently opposed government aid, even despite the great depression and massive wave of death lingering right under their noses. As Republican Senator from South Carolina Lindsey Graham pointed out on March 25 when the Senate aid package was being put together, replete with big business bailouts and only with aid for individual workers after much pushing from the left, “You’re going to have all these well-trained nurses, they’re going to make $24 an hour on unemployment. You’re literally incentivizing taking people out of the workforce at a time when we need critical infrastructure supplied with workers” (Mathis 2020). Meanwhile, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on the same day that 40,000 healthcare professionals had volunteered to work without pay to help confront the dire situation (NBC New York 2020). The Trump administration’s removal of Obama-era pandemic responsiveness measures (Budryk 2020; Rice 2020) forced the country into unprecedented levels of crisis, unemployment, indigence, lack of healthcare, and death. As the crisis was playing itself out, it seemed to me that the logical ends of both of the movements that I have discussed above were meeting their makers—the anti-science and

Epilogue 215

expert-skeptical views of the right were causing unprecedented amounts of death and destruction; the right’s uncritical trust in businesses was leading to corporate bailouts that threatened to further disenfranchise at least one-third of the entire workforce (Silverman 2020); and elections were put at risk with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden declaring: You know, we voted in the middle of a civil war, we voted in the middle of World War I and II. And so, the idea of postponing the electoral process is just—seems to me, out of the question. (Epstein 2020, Flegenheimer 2020) As the extreme depression, isolation, and all-out “apocalyptic” wars between healthcare providers and the uncontained virus took hold (Rothfeld et al. 2020), we were faced with the ultimate conclusion of an increasingly authoritarian Trump presidency. His numbers throughout the presidential campaign period remained inconceivably high considering his consistent disdain for the scientific leadership that would have actually kept us all much safer, with a 49% job approval rating and very high ratings across the board for his handling of the coronavirus outbreak (Easley 2020). His potential re-election would certainly embolden him and his administration to keep stripping people of their rights and safety. By the end of spring 2020, it felt as if we were faced with either the end of democracy and the institution of an anti-scientific banana republic, or November elections would proceed, Biden would claim the presidency if the right coalitions banded together in favor of democracy over all else (cf. Tarrow 2018), and expertise, law and order would be re-implemented at least from the top. After Dona reached her first of several peaks in COVID-19 symptoms in late March 2020, she wrote: Dear America, For anyone who does not take COVID-19 seriously yet, yesterday I boasted about how I felt better and must be on the mend. Day 9 post symptom onset and self-isolation, which has been a deceptively mild course of scratchy throat, sputum production, sour stomach, temperature dysregulation without fever, but a touch more concerningly since Friday, progressively worsening cough, shortness of breath, and reduced clarity in my thinking. … … I am not ideologically attached to ‘big’ or ‘small’ government, which is in reality a false choice anyway. I am attached to leaders who have the humility to know how to show up and when to step back. We need multidisciplinary leadership, statewide lockdown, immediately coordinated testing and PPE procurement, economic disaster relief to individuals and families (not corporate stimulus packages), radical repurposing of economic activity with social distancing/isolation advisories and soaring unemployment. Crisis can

216 Epilogue

spur reform. But in America, that will require that those of us who have allowed ourselves to become complacent or who hold tight to what is personally convenient and comfortable, unite against the dangerously ignorant or diabolical egos who have led us into this disaster. Or we can do this all over again with the next pandemic. So last night, I woke up after sleeping 1.5 hours. I felt like I was drowning— anxious and unable to breathe. Hope I am around to see us do this better. Signed, Dona Kim Murphey, MD PhD (Dona, Personal, March 25, 2020) Biden did win the presidency in November, and Dona is still around, despite a terrible and at many times nearly death-defying experience with COVID-19. Throughout all of this more recent chaos, she developed, along with other PSR/H collaborators and allies who also happen to be medical professionals, a public Facebook group that serves as a pandemic fact-checking collective. As soon as it was established, membership quickly shot above 8,000 members, and as of February 2021 they have nearly 14,000 members from all over the US. I can think of no better way to end this book than with her words above and with a note that the activist networks continue, locally, translocally, and nationally, across networks far and wide, and amid new and sometimes unpredictable and overwhelming challenges, to #Resist.

References Budryk, Z. (2020). Obama officials walked Trump aides through global pandemic exercise in 2017: Report. The Hill. Retrieved 03/26/2020 from https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/ 488069-obama-officials-walked-trump-aides-through-global-pandemic-exercise-in-2017. Easley, J. (2020). Gallup: Trump job approval rating matches all-time high. The Hill. Retrieved 03/26/2020 from https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/489285-ga llup-trump-job-approval-rating-matches-all-time-high?fbclid=IwAR2U5rtYLD0nXp hhMQQz3NDFaFHLthGHkSENE8TzKfsNJcokR_MURbsQ3yw. Epstein, J. (2020). Biden says ‘no need’ to postpone November vote over virus. Bloomberg News. Retrieved 03/26/2020 from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ 2020-03-22/biden-says-no-need-to-postpone-november-vote-over-virus. Flegenheimer, M. (2020). Is all of 2020 postponed? The New York Times. Retrieved 03/ 26/2020 from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/us/politics/coronavirus-2020election-primary.html. Kandil, C. (2020). Asian Americans report over 650 racist acts over last week, new data says. NBC News. Retrieved 03/26/2020 from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asia n-america/asian-americans-report-nearly-500-racist-acts-over-last-week-n1169821. Mathis, J. (2020). Human beings are not walking dollar signs. The Week. Retrieved 03/ 26/2020 from https://theweek.com/articles/904930/human-beings-are-not-walkingdollar-signs.

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NBC New York. (2020). 40,000 health professionals sign up to volunteer as part of NY’s surge healthcare force. Retrieved 03/27/2020 from https://www.nbcnewyork.com/ news/coronavirus/40000-health-professionals-sign-up-to-volunteer-as-part-of-nys-surgehealthcare-force/2343909/. Rice, S. (2020). The government has failed on coronavirus, but there is still time. The New York Times. Retrieved 03/26/2020 from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/op inion/corona-virus-trump-susan-rice.html. Rothfeld, M., Sengupta, S., Goldstein, J., & Rosenthal, B.M. (2020). 13 deaths in a day: an ‘apocalyptic’ coronavirus surge at an N.Y.C. hospital. The New York Times. Retrieved 03/ 26/2020 fromhttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-hospita ls.html. Silverman, J. (2020). Coronavirus economic relief proposals are overlooking the 57 million Americans who are self-employed. Fortune. Retrieved 03/26/2020 fromhttps://fortune. com/2020/03/20/coronavirus-economic-relief-gig-economy-self-employed/amp/?fbclid= IwAR0LLJfPoWtnYEUa1R6lS9SzTTtqm1mBAUzXA8FW8aRrHXngNqoup5MBEWE. Tarrow, S. (2018). Rhythms of resistance: The anti-Trumpian moment in a cycle of contention. In D.S. Meyer & S. Tarrow (eds.) The Resistance: The Dawn of the AntiTrump Opposition Movement, pp. 187–206. New York: Oxford University Press. Tavernise, S. & Oppel, Jr., R.A. (2020). Spit on, yelled at, attacked: Chinese-Americans fear for their safety. The New York Times. Retrieved 03/26/2020 fromhttps://www. nytimes.com/2020/03/23/us/chinese-coronavirus-racist-attacks.html.

APPENDIX A Data Coding and Collection Information and Examples

Data Coding and Collection Decisions: Facebook Posts Collection I collected primarily two forms of data for this project: 1) screenshots of Facebook activities (13,000+); 2) interviews with focal participants (14 total). These were sparsely supplemented with notes taken after in-person and telephonic state board meetings. My focus for the analyses featured in this book was on themes that occurred across posts in Facebook, supplemented by information collected in our research interviews. After collecting so much data, the question of how to handle it qualitatively of course arises. My desire to collect data from my participants in a synchronic fashion required that I collect their posts over a long period of time. Additionally, the question of synchrony is also brought to focus in this work because while I was indeed participating in activities mostly online and some face to face with the group, the social media posts I collected were collected in archived form. That is, I did not collect posts as I saw them in the day to day on Facebook. That would be impossible as it would require me to spend all of my time on Facebook, 24/7 (see Varis 2014), and with that I still wouldn’t have seen all of the participants’ posts. So instead, I collected the data well after they’d already been posted. This meant that I would set aside many hours, approximately every two months from September 2018 through May 2019, to collect all the posts that the participants had made within the PSR and PSRH secret groups since their inception, and activism-related posts from their personal Walls starting from September 2018. I ended all screenshot collection at the end of May 2019 as the screenshot overwhelm became more than I could bear, and I used the rest of the summer for

Appendix A 219

coding, analysis, and the two face-to-face closing interviews that I conducted with Dona and Joseph. In the sections below I will explain my data collection and coding decisions with regard to screenshots of Facebook activities first, and then interview activities. Regarding Facebook data, I collected posts, in the form of screenshots, from the personal Walls of participants and from their activities within the secret PSR and PSRH groups. I conducted this collection during one- to two-week periods approximately every three months from September 2018 through May 2019. This led to a total of four data-collection events. For each data-collection event, I collected the previous three months of the participants’ posts that were relevant to their activism. This included a broad variety of posts from opinions expressed about national political figures and events to activities and events that they were conducting and organizing in Houston and throughout Texas. As I discuss in Chapter 2, such a data collection highlights the mixed diachronic-synchronic nature of ethnographic social media research (cf. Varis 2014): while I viewed a large number of these posts as they happened on a daily basis, I did not collect all of them as they happened; I collected them in “chunks,” in archived form using Facebook’s archive function on their timeline wherein you can select a month and year of someone’s timeline to look at whenever you want to.1 For data from their personal Walls, I collected eleven months’ worth, from July 2018 to May 2019—from Dona, Joseph, Lucy, and Jess. From the PSR and PSRH groups, I collected the entire history of the posts of these four individuals, which consisted of posts from November 2016 through May 2019. For the other three participants, Sarah, Kara, and Samantha, I only collected their Facebook activities within PSRH spaces, or comments they had made in response to the posts that Dona, Joseph, Lucy, and Jess had shared (that is, their comments that were collected in the response threads of Dona, Joseph, Lucy, and Jess’s posts). The reason that I did not collect posts from the personal Walls of Sarah, Kara, and Samantha was because they were less active in posting in general, both within and outside of PSR/H spaces, and they were also less active in the research project more generally due to their other commitments in work and life. As I realized, early on in data collection, exactly how much data I was collecting across all participants I decided to limit theirs to just their PSRH activities. In the end, this collection and participation imbalance led to this project being largely about Dona, Joseph, Lucy, and Jess, with occasional appearances from Samantha, who was more active in responding to the posts of her fellow team members than she was in authoring her own posts. In total, I collected over 13,000 screenshots of Facebook activity across all seven participants. In addition to original posts, I took screenshots of the full conversational threads in the comments sections below each post as well as any webpages that were linked to in the post. I see this as akin to Scollon & Scollon’s (2003, 2004) recommendation that in linguistic landscape photography, a photo should be taken not just of the element one is interested in analyzing, but of its entire surrounding context as

220 Appendix A

well. In the case of social media research, “surrounding context” often consists of hyperlinked texts as well as conversational threads. When I originally took my screenshots, I organized them in folders on my computer, arranged by person and per Facebook page/group (Personal Wall, PSRH, PSR). That is, there were three groups for Lucy: “Lucy Personal,” “Lucy PSR,” “Lucy PSRH,” and so on for all participants, depending on which groups/pages I collected their posts from. Because I did not collect the same data from each person, given, as I explained above, their varying levels of participation a) in PSR and PSRH, b) on Facebook generally, and c) in this research project specifically, the groupings of screenshots I collected differed in type and quantity per participant. As it was not my goal to collect an equal number of posts per participant as my analytical interests were entirely qualitative in nature—I wanted to know what topics the group posted about as a whole and over time—I do not treat this uneven distribution as problematic. After arranging all of the screenshots in folders on my computer I then imported the images, folder by folder, into a coding program called Atlas.ti. After uploading the images, I sorted them into the same groupings that I had created in my folders on my computer (Lucy PSR, Lucy Personal, etc.). Of the 13,000-plus screenshots that I collected and uploaded into Atlas.ti, I only coded the participants’ original posts and not response threads or screenshots of links that they had shared to other web pages. This led to a total of 6,896 coded screenshots (this is to say that the actual number of posts I collected was closer to this latter number than to the total number of screenshots. See Table A.1 for the distribution of coded screenshots across participants). Due to the burdensomely large file size that such a large number of image files created in Atlas.ti, after I finished coding I removed the screenshots that had not been coded and only kept them on my computer in their original folders for reference during analysis. In Images A.1–A.3 I exemplify the difference between a “codable” screenshot and those that I did not deem worthy of coding. Image A.1 constitutes an original post from Dona. This is a post I coded for the following themes (explained in TABLE A.1 Coded screenshots per participant, by location and quantity

Personal Wall

PSRH Secret FB Group

PSR Secret FB Group

Dona

✔(570)

✔(939)

✔(295)

Joseph

✔ (1214+47)

✔(1035)

✔(119)

2

Lucy

✔(1310)

✔(169)

✔(210)

Jess

✔(264)

✔(187)

✔(193)

PSRH Education Committee

Samantha

✔(31)

✔(53)

Sarah

✔(53)

✔(53)

Kara

✔(154)

Appendix A 221

the next section where I elaborate on the codes I inductively decided to use): “call for participants”; “protest/rally/gathering”; “resist”; “share”; “text”; “xenophobia/immigration.” Image A.2 shows the one response that was written below Dona’s post. This is an image that I did not code. Image A.3 shows the web page that Dona linked to in her original post (in this case, this was a Facebook Community (public) page and not a webpage external to the Facebook platform). This was also not coded but kept for later reference should I need it.

An original post from Dona. Original posts were coded in Atlas.ti Source: Dona, Personal, September 25, 2018

IMAGE A.1

222 Appendix A

IMAGE A.2

Screenshot containing the one response to Dona’s original post (Image A.1 above). This was not coded but instead kept for reference

Amid so many posts, I considered multiple times only limiting my data collection to Dona, Joseph, and Lucy, but I decided to stick with my initial goal of pursuing all of them with the interest, over time, of examining all of the different ways of participating and levels of investment that form an activist movement. This being said, I still have the most robust information from these three individuals. Such preferential focus is also reflected in my interviews, described below and in Appendix B, and these three participants have ultimately received the main focus of analysis and discussion in this book.

Appendix A 223

IMAGE A.3

The webpage that Dona linked to in her original post. This was not coded but instead kept for reference

Coding Regarding how codes were decided upon, the process was entirely inductive and iterative, relying on the practice of “grounded theory”—that is, I looked for themes within the data instead of imposing themes on the data (Markham 2009; see also Guest et al. 2012; Tagg & Seargeant 2020). I had been reading around within publications about activism, online activism, and online communication, and none really were speaking directly to my data. Sveningsson (2009) points out the unpredictability and uniqueness of studying any given online context, and such uniqueness makes this type of data an ideal site for inductive coding. In order to arrive at my codes, I conducted a first round of coding with a large number of posts across participants to decide on them. I initially decided on three main areas for codes: 1) Modality: did the post consist of text, a share from another post or page, a live or pre-recorded video, or some combination of these? 2) Topic: what were the topics within the post? These were usually myriad, ranging from gun safety to intersectionality to feminism, to personal stories, to Trump, and much, much more. 3) Intertextuality/interdiscursivity: were the participants speaking to, with, or across each other? Did they tag each other in their post or did they respond to the original poster’s post? I did not include in my codes whether or not the participants “liked” or “reacted” to the original posts, as that just became far too much detail across far too many posts. Suffice it to say that the participants were ever present in reacting to one another’s posts. This was a consistent and regular part of their co-construction of their group identity. Once I figured out most of the codes that I would use, I re-started so that I could code everything as consistently as possible. Below in Table A.2 the reader will find the final list (including my definitions) of the 58 codes that I employed in my analysis of these texts.

224 Appendix A

TABLE A.2 Final codes used in analysis on Atlas.ti

Share—sharing of meme/image/statement not originally authored by poster/animator; includes sharing of own posts on other sites like Twitter & Medium Gun safety—posts related to gun violence, gun safety, etc. Race—issues related to race, racism, race-based assault Sex/-ism—issues related to sex, gender, sexism, including gender-based assault—includes feminism (Toxic) masculinity—issues related to norms of masculinity Allyship—statements about/activities related to supporting marginalized groups, or about allying/collaborating with other activists/activist organizations Calling out—naming an individual who’s anti the poster’s beliefs (referee may/may not be known to author/poster) Call for participants—invitation to people to join an activity/play a specific role Picture—poster posts original picture that they or a Friend took Video—poster shares own vid, usually FB live that gets stored on the Wall as a regular post; can also be uploaded video Text—poster’s own written text Protest/rally/gathering—post from/about a protest or a public event related to contesting violence/marginalization/etc. Or from a rally or meeting, e.g. for a candidate Activism/community organizing—actual mention of activism or community organizing (not civic engagement) Fundraising—related to raising funds or goods for those in need Xenophobia/immigration—posts related to immigration or bigotry toward migrants (inc. family separation/detention and deportation) Patriotism—mention or invocation of patriotic feelings or acts Representation—representation (or lack thereof) of diversity/minorities Police—mentions of police/policing Health—related to health/healthcare Prisons—commentaries related to prisons Abortion stance—commentary related to abortion/pro-life/pro-choice stances Security—posts related to security on online platforms Intersectionality—mentions of or direct references to intersectionality/intersectional feminism Religion—posts addressing religion, whether discrimination based on religion or problems within the institutions of a religion Schools/education—content relating to schooling and education Entitlements—mention of benefits programs like SNAP, WIC, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Class—relating to socioeconomic class Money/finances/taxes—content relating to money Rural/urban—rural/urban divides or partnerships Voting—importance of voting, reminders to vote, voter suppression Elections—issues directly related to an election, including discussions of a candidate (Continued)

Appendix A 225 TABLE A.2

(cont.)

Trump—posts directly addressing Trump/-ism Resist—explicit mentions of “resist” or “resistance” (including signifying images) + calls to persevere Real-time—commentary on live event that poster is present at Local government—matters related to local gov’t any branch State government—matters related to state gov’t any branch Federal government—matters related to federal gov’t any branch Natural disaster—related to natural disasters Climate change—related to global warming/climate change Pollution—relating to unnatural/human or corporate made pollution or contamination Humor—a post/content related to politics and having a humorous or satirical comment/ approach Tag—when participants tag each other in posts, or when they comment in each other’s threads Shared content—when participants share similar content/events/texts Social media—explicit mentions of social media (good, bad, or neutral) Profile—updates or allusions to poster’s profile content Poll—participant posts or shares a poll Fact check—mention of need to or lack of fact checking/vetting/clarification Code of conduct—matters related to people’s behavior within the FB spaces Mission/vision—mention of PSR’s reason for being Connection—mention of importance of meeting people face to face/connecting in person Personal story—anytime a participant includes a personal narrative Edit—when a poster edits their post after originally posting it, and mentions this edit either within the post or within the comments below Campaign—campaign related post Terrorism—post discussing or referring to a terrorist act Fascism—post describing directly/indirectly fascist activities Media/mass media—includes news media, entertainment media, e.g. songs, shows Self-care (added this 08/03/19)—post referencing taking care of self amid activism activities Stance (added 08/20/19)—attitude toward/authority to speak about something.

As I stated above, I coded only original posts; that is, no response threads were coded (save for a very few exceptions for instance where a participant may have clarified their post immediately in the thread below), and no images of linked pages were coded (that is, if someone posted a link in their original post to a website, I kept a screenshot of that page that they had linked to for my own information, but I did not make any effort to code it—see Image A.3). If any participant commented in a conversation thread under any other participant’s original post, I included the code tag, 3 so that I would know for those posts to go back and look through the thread to find the indicated comment.

226 Appendix A

In the end the codes were imperfect as the topics broached were vast, but they were sufficient to what became my main focuses of: a

b

c

the participants’ own presentations of “small stories” (Georgakopoulou 2006, 2013; see Section 1.4), or small bits of narrative that they used to reveal contextually relevant details about themselves that authorized them to take various stances on pertinent issues; interdiscursivity and group identity formation—how they spoke with and across each other to create some sort of interdiscursively constructed mission and vision for the group over time; and re-scaling the national political chronotope—how, despite the groups’ decidedly local and state-level focuses, their actions were driven by a sense of patriotism and the ever-present specter of what was happening at the federal level under the Trump administration.

My final landing on these focal points was thanks to the inductive and iterative coding process I engaged in with the data in alternation with reading about online communication across multiple disciplines’ literatures over time, and having a semester’s worth of conversations about such readings in spring 2019 with a group of graduate and undergraduate students in a course that I had built around this project, titled “Socializing the Nation in the Internet Age”. Facebook posts cited in this book are labeled as, e.g., “(Dona, Personal, September 25, 2018)” for posts made on personal Walls; “(Jess, PSRH, November 9, 2016)” for posts in the PSRH secret group; and “(Lucy, PSR, November 18, 2016)” for posts in the PSR secret group. The final type of data I present in this book are interviews.

Interviews As described above, I spent my work days taking screenshots of my participants’ online activities—categorizing them, documenting any links or videos that were shared within the posts, and so on. As I collected the posts, I gleaned enough information to keep formulating interview questions based on what I was seeing in the posts as well as the information the participants had given me in previous interviews. Some selected interview question sequences are provided below in Tables A.4–7. In terms of interview format, I would send participants a Word or Google document with a list of questions. They mostly responded in writing, but Dona preferred to respond through audio messages using Facebook Messenger, and Joseph sent me one interview response through private message in Marco Polo, a video chat app that the group had begun using together. Sarah also responded to her one interview in an audio recording through Messenger. I found responses in the audio and video formats to be far superior to those given to me in writing, and I attribute at least two well-known factors to this: 1) writing simply takes more time and so we give less

Appendix A 227

information; 2) we think more about what we’re going to say when we put things into writing, instead of the ad libbing we do when speaking. I conducted two final interviews face to face with Dona and Joseph. I had wanted to also interview Jess and Lucy face to face, and had decided to pursue these four individuals for the following reasons: they were the most visibly active online and in organizing, I had had the most personal interactions with them, and the remaining three participants were either less active, no longer active, or had not responded to other interview requests due to their significant work and life burdens. However, because of all of our busy schedules, I did not do the final interviews with Lucy and Jess, so I ended up with a total of four interviews via various media for Dona and Joseph, three written interviews for Lucy, two for Jess, one audio recording for Sarah, one written interview for Kara, and no interviews for Samantha as she was unable, amid work and life burdens, to find the time to respond. In total, I conducted 14 research interviews with focal participants. The breakdown of number and type of interviews with each participant is available below in Table A.3. Interview citations in the text of this book appear as, e.g., “(Lucy, Interview 4, June 13, 2019).” TABLE A.3 Number and type of interviews conducted per focal participant

Participant (interview #)

Written document (type)

Audio recorded (type)

Video recorded (type)

✔(FB Messenger) ✔(FB Messenger) ✔(FB Messenger)

Dona (1) Dona (2) Dona (3)

✔

Dona (4) Joseph (1)

✔(Google Docs) ✔(Marco Polo message)

Joseph (2) Joseph (3)

✔(Google Docs) ✔

Joseph (4) Lucy (1)

✔(Google Docs)

Lucy (2)

✔(Google Docs)

Lucy (3)

✔(Google Docs)

Jess (1)

✔(emailed document) ✔(FB Messenger)

Sarah (1) Kara (1)

Face to Face (audio recorded)

✔ (printed, handwritten, and mailed)

228 Appendix A

Regarding the format of the interviews, I began with one generic interview for all participants in Interview 1, with just slight alterations in the questions as per their role within the organization. Subsequent to this first interview, I wrote questions for each participant based on the interactions I had with them and the activities they were engaging in on Facebook and in their general activism activities. I provide examples of these interview questionnaires below in Tables A.4–A.7. For analysis of written interviews, I went back at various times and read and reread the written answers. For the audio-recorded interviews, I listened to them several times, and then I conducted a rough transcription of the interviews only in the areas that were aligning with themes that I had seen arise in my Facebook data. Then, for parts of those audio-recorded interviews that I wanted to use in the text of this book, I conducted a detailed description as presented throughout the book (for transcription conventions, see Appendix B). While I examined the interviews with an eye to the themes that I had entered in the form of codes for my Facebook data, I did not intensively code these interviews. TABLE A.4 Generic Interview 1 form for all participants

Thank you for your participation in this study on the use of the internet in political organizing. The following questions are open-ended, and you may provide as much or as little information as you would like in response to each of them. You are also welcome to answer them in the form of an audio recording if you find that to be more efficient/fast than writing it all down. Please feel free to ask me any questions about the project at any time. Thank you so much for your participation!

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Describe your role in politics/political organizing. How and why did you get into this role? Why did you found Pantsuit Republic? Has the vision you had for it changed since its founding? How so? Why did you choose Facebook as your original organizing platform? What other platforms have you used since then/do you still use now? What is the effectiveness of these platforms in your experience and which do you prefer to use? What are the various activist networks you collaborate with? Which communication platforms do you use to communicate with them? What media of communication do you find work best for the organizing that you do? Which do you prefer to use? What role do you see yourself in in local, state-level, and national politics? Do you communicate with anyone outside of the US in order to accomplish your organizing work? What are your short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals as the head of and a participant in PSR and the greater movement that it is a part of? Is there anything else you would like to share?/Are there any other questions you wish I’d asked you on this questionnaire?

Appendix A 229

TABLE A.5 Joseph Interview 2 questions, sent November 24, 2019, completed November

28, 2019 What makes you decide to share a Twitter post on Facebook? What leads you to choose whether to make an FB post public or private? How would you say your written speech differs between your own personal FB page and PSR FB pages? When did you start pursuing your MA? What field is it in? How do you manage to balance work, PSR activities, and school? What other organizations is PSR connected to? What do you see as PSR’s role in/among all of these other organizations? I’ve recently seen some conflict between PSR leadership and the Women’s March organizers. Could you share about what is the nature of that conflict/how it came about? What activities do you perform in maintaining/running the PSR website? How many visitors does the website get on a monthly basis? What are some pros to FB being PSR’s main platform? What are some cons? Who do you imagine as your audience when you write Medium posts? Who do you hope to reach with these? Is this a different community than your FB community? Why do you keep getting put in “Facebook jail”? What is MeWe and what/who/how are you trying to migrate over to it? Is there anything else you’d like to add? Do you have any questions for me?

TABLE A.6 Lucy Interview 3, sent August 13, 2019, completed August 15, 2019

When did you start tweeting at the president? What motivates you to do so? How do you stay motivated to go to so many activism events? How has the nature of your engagement with social media changed since you joined PSR/since Trump was elected? Has the content of your posts changed? Do you post more frequently or about different things? In April I noticed that you changed your FB profile name. Why did you change it? How many people do you think participate in PSR or PSR-related activities offline? Do you have any impression related to whether these numbers are due to the presence of social media, or do you think it has always been the case that few people actually participate—in short-term or long-term ways—in activist movements? (Continued)

230 Appendix A TABLE A.6

(cont.)

Why do you use the term “resisters”/“resistance”? Who do you use it to refer to? What was the spring schoolboard election experience like for you, now that you had friends running, to whom you lent lots of support? What has your own experience of running a campaign been like so far? What is your future in activism and organizing? It seemed to me that in some posts you were hinting at another activism opportunity coming your way? What’s going on there? How have things changed for you in PSR/H as you shifted into co-chair role? What kind of changes have you tried to make in PSR if any? When you post political/activism related posts, are you generally thinking of yourself as a member of a group of like-minded people, or are you posting solely as yourself? That is, how much do you speak as a member of a group and how much do you speak as just yourself? Would you say that your belief system has changed since you joined PSR/H? How so?

TABLE A.7 Dona, Interview 4, conducted June 13, 2019

How has the nature of your engagement with social media changed since you joined PSR/since Trump was elected? Has the content of your posts changed? Do you post more frequently or about different things? What role do you think the media in general play in relation to groups like PSR or other local organizing and activist groups? Do you find that they are interested in sharing information coming out of your groups, or rather that they are more interested in highlighting the government’s point of view? Can you explain what happened with the Trini Mendenhall voting/translation debacle? What happened that got you all “kicked out”? What was the response to your reaction both in the moment and the days that followed? Was a lawsuit actually filed? Was there any type of resolution? How many people do you think participate in PSR or PSR-related activities offline? Do you have any impression related to whether these numbers are due to the presence of social media, or do you think it has always been the case that few people actually participate—in short-term or long-term ways—in activist movements? Do you find in your activities on FB that you’re posting and interacting as a member of a group of organizers, or as yourself, or how much of each? Does FB individualize you or allow you to interact as a member of a collective (identity)?

(Continued)

Appendix A 231 TABLE A.7

(cont.)

It seems that in more recent posts of yours, you have increasingly emphasized the importance of face-to-face connection, offline. What caused you to start making this call? Also, despite this request, you continue to use FB, both on your personal wall and for your campaign, and now for your public page as well. Can you speak to the usefulness of the platform in this light, or perhaps talk about how in person and FB/social media life complement each other? In Interview 3, you mentioned that organizing and leadership seemed intuitive to you (Interview 3–40), but I don’t think it is to many people. So could you explain, how does activism/community organizing work? How has it worked for you?/How have you navigated and learned this terrain? In something I was reading recently, the author talked about how the most successful movements now will be those that can scale up but also act flexibly. This immediately made me think of Knock Down the House (the AOC documentary on Netflix), where Justice Democrats and another organization with national scope were able to use their large scope to influence local elections. Moving forward, what are your thoughts on the significance of these groups and their potential flexibility, and where does a group like PSR or Indivisible fit into that schema or framework? What was your reaction to the election outcome? I remember in your last interview you mentioned that part of the reason you entered this election was because Houston seemed solidly blue but you weren’t necessarily paying attention to what was going on in your own backyard. Does the election result lead you to feel more committed to working on turning Pearland blue, or not?

Notes 1 This feature seems to have disappeared in the summer 2020 platform update that Facebook released. I did not think to take a screenshot of what such an archival search would look like before the time of writing this section (fall 2020) and so I am unable to provide an image of what this looked like when I was culling the data. 2 Joseph had both a personal page and a backup personal page because his primary page continually got disabled by Facebook based on their algorithms for acceptable speech. These bans were purposeful in the sense that he used banned language (“Men are trash”) to show that Facebook’s algorithms for monitoring language were unacceptable (that is, a phrase like “Men are trash,” naming an entire category of people, would be deemed inappropriate, but a post containing a subcategorization of people, like “Black children are trash,” would not be banned) (cf. Angwin & Grassegger 2018; Huddleston 2017). 3 This code term came to encompass the actual act of “tagging” on Facebook, wherein someone can add a Facebook Friend’s name to their own post to indicate that they are either physically present with them or present with them in spirit (see Chapter 3). The code originally started out as an attempt to indicate when a participant had actually tagged another in a post, but I decided to expand its meaning to cover both actual tags and also cross-participant communications in conversation threads, in accordance with my analytic goals.

232 Appendix A

References Angwin, J. & Grassegger, H. (2018). Facebook’s secret censorship rules protect white men from hate speech but not black children. Retrieved 02/27/2020 from https://www.propublica. org/article/facebook-hate-speech-censorship-internal-documents-algorithms?utm_campa ign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1498647278. Bezemer, J. & Kress, G. (2017). Young people, Facebook, and pedagogy: Recognizing contemporary forms of multimodal text making. In M. Kontopodis, C. Varvantakis, & C. Wulf (eds.) Global Youth in Digital Trajectories, pp. 22–38. London: Routledge. Georgakopoulou, A. (2006). Thinking big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis. Narrative Inquiry 16(1): 122–130. Georgakopoulou, A. (2013). Small stories research and social media practices: Narrative stancetaking and circulation in a Greek news story. Sociolinguistica 27: 19–36. Guest, G., MacQueen, K., & Namey, E. (2012). Applied Thematic Analysis. Los Angeles: Sage. Huddleston, Jr., T. (2017). Facebook’s hate speech rules make ‘white men’ a protected group. Fortune. Retrieved 11/23/2020 from https://fortune.com/2017/06/28/faceboo k-hate-speech-censorship-policies/. Markham, A.N. (2009). Producing work that is meaningful across time, space, and culture. In A.N. Markham & N.K. Baym (eds.) Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, pp. 131–155. Los Angeles: Sage. Scollon, R. & Wong Scollon, S. (2003). Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203422724. Scollon, R., & Wong Scollon, S. (2004). Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. New York: Routledge. Sveningsson, M. (2009). Question three: How can researchers make sense of the issues involved in collecting and interpreting online and offline data? In A.N. Markham & N. K. Baym (eds.) Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, pp. 69–87. Los Angeles: Sage. Tagg, C. & Seargeant, P. (2020). Context design and critical language/media awareness: Implications for social digital literacies education. Linguistics and Education. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.linged.2019.100776. Varis, P. (2014). Digital ethnography. Tilburg Papers in Cultural Studies. Paper 104. https://pure.uvt.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/30479758/TPCS_104_Varis.pdf

APPENDIX B Presentation of Data

In this book, data are primarily presented from the sources that I have described in Chapter 2 and Appendix A: 1) interviews—written, audio recorded remotely, video recorded remotely, and audio recorded face to face; 2) a secret Facebook page called Pantsuit Republic; 3) a secret Facebook page called Pantsuit Republic Houston; and 4) participants’ personal Walls on Facebook. With such a diversity of data sources it is important to label them properly and clearly, and so after quotes from these sources the reader will see the following information in parentheses: 1) Interviews, no matter what type as indicated above, are labeled, e.g., “(Lucy, Interview 4, June 13, 2019).” 2) Posts from Pantsuit Republic’s secret page are labeled, e.g., “(Dona, PSR, June 13, 2019).” 3) Posts from Pantsuit Republic Houston’s secret page are labeled, e.g., “(Joseph, PSRH, June 13, 2019).” 4) Posts from personal Walls are labeled, e.g., (Jess, Personal, June 13, 2019). The representation of data used in this book has required various norms. I have re-written the texts of all posts that I present in the book in order to provide a consistent and accessible presentation of data. However, as the semiotic “look” of posts online is very important to a reader’s understanding of interaction in those contexts, I have supplied various screenshots in an attempt to display the wide variety of types of posts that participants made over time, such as: shared links with commentary, live or recorded videos plus commentary, pictures taken and posted by participants with commentary, shared posts with/without commentary, and so on. I have not, of course, supplied a screenshot of every single post that I describe because that would be burdensome for printing and formatting. For all of the posts that I have shared, I have typed out the texts of the posts in an effort to mimic the layout as precisely as possible. This means that all line breaks present in my type-outs are present in the original post, all typos, spelling, or grammatical errors are present in the original post, and so on. I have only provided accompanying

234 Appendix B

images of their posts when they posted multimodally—that is, if it was a text-only post, I did not reproduce it here for the simple reason that the inclusion of those images as well as all the rest would simply be unwieldy. In the screenshots I have provided in the text, I have blurred the last names of focal participants, except for Lucy, who uses an alias. For her I have blurred her whole name and replaced it with her alias. For non-participants, their entire names and profile pictures are blurred and, if they are discussed in the data analysis, I have replaced their names with initials that do not correspond to their actual names. Also represented in my typed representations of these Facebook texts are: 1.

2.

the emojis they used. In the transfer from Facebook to Microsoft Word in the writing of these texts, the form of some of the emojis sometimes changed—that is, the Word emoji of a dog: is a different breed than the default dog emoji on Facebook, the default checkmark on Word: ✔ is black instead of blue, and so on. These changes are quite minimal and I don’t find that they detract from the basic meaning and communicative effects of the original posts as they were presented on Facebook. “Tags”—when someone mentions a “Friend” on Facebook by name, they are given the option to select that person, and that person will receive a notification that the author has “tagged” them. In a post, the tagged person’s name appears in blue, as a hyperlink directly to their profile. In screenshots, these tagged names appear exactly as such. When I typed out the posts, though, I translated those tagged names from different colored text, as they appeared in the original posts, into the bracketed phrase: “[tags Jess]” (see text and Image B.1 below). 8 I came here to make a post about allyship and then 9 saw this. Thanks [tags Jess]!

IMAGE B.1

Tagging other participants

Appendix B 235

When a non-participant is tagged in a post, I use a letter that does not correspond to their name: “[tags X]” (see text and Image B.2 below).

IMAGE B.2 Nested brackets Source: Dona, Personal, October 26, 2018

[tags Dona] is authentic. I was speaking to [tags X] about how grateful we are for COMMUNITY. Dona, you have been instrumental in building that. Thank you. (Lucy, Personal, September 12, 2018) When a participant has already used brackets and tags someone, I use curly brackets inside of the straight brackets. Indulging in boba after canvassing for [tags Sri Preston Kulkarni], who is bringing compassion and reason back to public office. [photocredit: to the amazing {tags photographer}] (Dona, Personal, October 26, 2018) 3.

“Likes”—Particularly in Chapter 4, where I am looking at collaborative communication, I occasionally list the number of likes/acknowledgment reactions

236 Appendix B

4.

that the post receives. This practice can also be found in Georgalou (2020). “The post received 132 likes/loves, including from most of leadership, indicated their collective endorsement of this position.” All text from posts, when first presented, is presented in block quote format using formatting as similar as possible to the original post. This means that line breaks follow the original, and emojis are represented as similarly as possible to the original post.

IMAGE B.3

I thought I was the only one

Text B1: I thought I was the only one

5.

I thought I was the only one … but I saw a post where a mother relayed a similar sentiment: I have felt this guilt about the relief I have with my daughter’s skin tone. She is half Caucasian, and not dark like her mother. She will be able to “pass”. I struggle with the divide and animosity pertaining to “otherness” and don’t wish that struggle for my daughter. What I really desire is a world devoid of profiling and rancor. In the meantime, I am determined to fight for respect and peace. And, I vow to teach her to do the same. (Lucy, PSR, November 18, 2016) Numbering of lines is only used when a line-by-line analysis is provided in the text.

Appendix B 237

For oral interviews and transcribed oral texts within posts, I have presented the data in a minimally detailed format as the narratives provided rarely required detailed presentation. I have therefore used only the following transcription characters (see Jefferson 2004 for a complete list of conversation analytic transcription symbols) as need has arisen: falling intonation representative of the end of a clause/sentence/thought comma [,]: pause in utterance colon [:]: extended sound: “these are h:igh numbers for protests” [h∙]: in-breath: “that took h· decades.” hyphen [-]: word that has been cut off: “tho- those conversations are happening there” laughter pulse [@]: “for the other like smaller activist groups that kind of dynamically form and disband even @sometimes@, and form again” >inward caratsit will never take hold!< italics: emphasized speech: “they will just come up with some way around it” period [.]:

References Georgalou, M. (2020). Discourse and Identity on Facebook. New York: Bloomsbury. Jefferson, G. (2004) Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G.H. Lerner (ed.) Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, pp. 13–34. Philadelphia, PA: Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

INDEX

Abbott, Greg, 134, 134–35 Abrams, Stacey, 177, 180 acknowledgment see “Seven A’s” of Facebook posts advertisers, 93n8 affiliation, 72–80, 135; see also “Seven A’s” of Facebook posts algorithms, 81–84; see also “Seven A’s” of Facebook posts alignment, 27, 129–30, 155–57, 176–86; see also “Seven A’s” of Facebook posts amplification, 82–84, 83, 150, 152–53; see also bumping; “Seven A’s” of Facebook posts Androutsoupolos, J., 51 Arab Spring uprising, 9 Ascend, 166, 194n4, 203 assimilation, 112–19 attending tags, 75–77, 76, 77, 135; see also events; tags audience, 24, 89, 147–55; see also “Seven A’s” of Facebook posts authorship see “Seven A’s” of Facebook posts autobiography, 22; see also narratives; small stories B (group member), 164–65, 173 Bachmann, Michele, xv “backstage” spaces, 12, 21, 37, 57–58, 131–32, 147, 151, 159, 204 Bamberg, M., 80

Barber, William J. II, 177 Baym, N. K., 51 Biden, Joseph “Joe,” 215, 216 Bimber, B., 7–8 Black Lives Matter, 31, 173–74 Bland, Sandra, 202 Blommaert, J., 14, 15, 18, 50, 200, 206 boyd, d., 50 Brand New America, 203 Brand New Congress, 166, 194n4 Brokaw, Tom, 113–19 Brown, Jitu, 132, 133–34, 138 Brown, Michael, 84, 202 bumping, 82–84, 83, 150, 157 buttons, reaction, 80–81, 81, 88, 92n7, 131–32; see also Facebook caps lock, 158 Castells, M., 15, 19–20, 200 Castile, Philando, 202 chronotopes, 4, 13–18, 85–86, 176–77, 205–7 citizen journalism see journalism, citizen Clinton, Hillary, 3 comments, 81, 85–89, 131–32; see also Facebook communities, 16, 21–22; see also groups copyright, 92n5 coronavirus pandemic, 214–16 Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), 31 Cruz, Ted, 177–79, 178, 180–84

Index 239

De Fina, A., 15, 90 Democrats, 182, 183, 184 Dennis, J., 125, 199–200 disalignment see alignment Dona (study focal participant): study biography of, 33; activism on behalf of immigrant family, 120, 120–24, 121; activism on behalf of Project Lifeline, 187–92, 188, 191; announces visit by Jitu Brown, 132–33; establishes pandemic fact-checking collective, 216; interviews with, 226–27, 230–31; invokes aspects of identity, 110–11, 119–24, 120; opinions about Facebook, 47–49; participates in protest against Cruz, 181; posts and comments, 219, 220–23, 221, 222, 223; quoted on activism as lifestyle change, 100–101; quoted on authoring posts on Facebook, 71; quoted on coronavirus pandemic, 215–16; quoted on decentralized nature of PSR, 171–72, 173–74; quoted on experience of establishing PSR, 104–10, 105; quoted on Facebook’s use of algorithms, 82; quoted on founding of PSR, 47–48; quoted on moving on from PSR, 210; quoted on networking with physicians and faith leaders, 187; quoted on political values as nonpartisan, 167; quoted on privacy considerations, 58–59; receives complimentary post by Lucy, 129–30; reflects on the growth and accomplishments of PSR, 207–9; relationship with author, 31, 32; runs for schoolboard position, 166, 209; tagging practices of, 75, 75; translocal networks of, 171–74, 187–92, 193; video narratives of, 100–101, 102; visits immigrant detention center, 186–92, 188, 189, 191 Dong, J., 50 education, 132–41, 166, 168, 168–71 elections: federal, 164–65, 193; local, 166, 168, 168–71 emojis, 80–81, 81, 168, 169, 170; see also buttons, reaction entextualization, 86, 132–41, 159 ethnography: ethics of, 56–63; home ethnography, 49, 52–53; of online cultures, 49–52 events: attending, 135; attending tags for, 75–77, 76, 77; commentaries about,

134, 135–41, 136, 137, 138; entextualization of, 132–41, 159; invitations, 132–34 Facebook, 63–64; advertising on, 93n8; affordances and constraints of, xvi–xvii, 47–49, 84–86; algorithms of, 81–84, 93n8, 93n9, 125n2, 150, 157, 231n2; buttons, reaction, 80–81, 81, 88, 92n7, 131–32; comments, 81, 85–89, 131–32; “Facebook jail,” 49, 231n2; “Friends” on, 38n8, 159; groups, 57–63, 64–68, 66, 92n3; as microblogging platform, 22, 24; misinformation and disinformation on, 38n7; posts see posts; “Seven A’s” of Facebook posts; privacy levels of, 57–63, 92n3; sharing Twitter posts on, 185; small stories on see small stories; users’ attitudes toward, 47–49 “fake news” organizations, 84 feminism, intersectional, 3, 53–54, 147–54, 159 Floyd, George, 202–3 focal participants: overview and introductions, 33–36 (see also individual participants); activism as personal and relational for, 119–24; ethnic identities of, 33–35, 111–19, 112, 114; fundraising efforts of, 122, 132–33, 139, 140; nonactivism friendship activities of, 161; parents among, 33–35, 111–13, 112; racial identities of, 33–35, 111–13, 112; “thick” identities of, 110–19; use of video by, 102, 113–24, 114, 120, 121, 135–36, 138, 140 Fox News, xv–xvi, 166 Friends (on Facebook), 38n8, 72–75, 73, 74, 159; see also Facebook Frye, Hope, 190 fundraising, 122, 132–33, 139, 140 Garza, Alicia (Black Lives Matter), 173–74 Georgakopoulou, A., 22–23, 90 Ghodsee, K., 55 gifs, 129–30 Gilmore, P., 55 Gnach, A., 131 goals, moral political see moral political goals GoFundMe, 122, 132–33, 139, 140 Goldfarb, J. C., 200 Graham, Lindsey, 214

240 Index

grassroots movements: (dis)alignment with national icons, 176–86; alignment with national ideologies, 206–7; collaboration between groups, 173–76; as leaderless, 9–10, 165–66; local focus of, 164–76, 186–94; platforms and communication tools used by, 7–10, 12, 165–66; political organization of, 165–68; shifts in, 8–9; translocal networks and, 186–94, 207 groups: constructive processes of, 19–21; core members versus general membership, 21; discourse of, 147–54, 149, 150; “frontstage” and “backstage,” 12, 21, 37, 57–58, 131–32, 147–49, 151, 159, 204; identity construction, 125–26, 129–32; moral political stances of, 159–61; privacy levels of, 92n3; shared experiences of members, 132–41, 154–61; see also events Hacker, K. L., 4–5, 7, 15 hashtags, 77–80, 78, 79; see also tags header tags, 73, 73–74, 74; see also tags Herring, S. C., 130–31 Hine, C., 50 HISD see education identity: chronotopes and, 18–19; construction of, 19–21, 102–4, 125–26, 130–32, 154–59, 160, 207–11; group identities, 19–21, 125–26, 130–32, 158, 190, 205–6; reflexivity and, 23–24; small stories and, 22–23, 102–4; stances and, 23–24, 110–24, 125–26; “thick,” 21–22, 110–19, 158, 190 immigration: activism regarding, 30, 119–24, 120, 121, 186–92, 188, 189, 191; activists’ relationships with, 113–19; detention centers, 48, 186–92, 188, 189, 191; family separation, 48, 119–24, 120, 121; Project Lifeline, 187–92, 188, 189, 191 Indivisible, 31, 34, 135, 166, 173, 195n7, 203 information: distribution of, 7–8; structures of, 8–10 Infowars, 84, 93n9 intersectional feminism see feminism, intersectional Intersectional Human Rights and Religious Tolerance (IHRRT), 29–31 intersectionality, 3, 29–31, 53–54, 147–54, 159

interviews: format and platforms, 226–31 in-text tags, 75; see also tags Jess (study focal participant): study biography of, 34–35; alignment with AOC, 177–80; alignment with Joseph, 181–84, 182; disalignment with Democrats, 182, 183, 184; disalignment with Ted Cruz, 181–84, 182; forms PSRH, 29; identity shifts as a result of activism, 158; interaction with Joseph’s post, 87–88; interviews with, 226–28; moves on from PSRH leadership role, 209; posts and comments, 219; posts reminder the PSRH is female-centering, 148–52, 149; quoted on accommodating parent activists, 53–54; quoted on initial growth of PSRH, 28–29; quoted on plans for future activism, 209; shares event photos and commentary, 136, 136–37, 139–40; shares link to town hall event, 133; use of hashtags by, 78, 79 joking, 86–90, 87, 89 Joseph (study focal participant): study biography of, 33–34; aligns with AOC, 180; chastised for posting about 2020 election, 164–65; disaligns with Ted Cruz, 181–84, 182; identity shifts as a result of activism, 154; interviews with, 226–28, 229; invokes aspects of identity, 111; opinions about Facebook, 49; participates in protest against Cruz, 181; post analyzed as proof of concept, 86–90, 87, 89; posts and comments, 219; quoted on accommodating parent activists, 53; quoted on citizen journalists’ effectiveness, 10; quoted on connection between local and national activism, 174; quoted on organizing as having become a way of life, 209; quoted on the work of activism, 210; quoted on virtue signaling as a form of positive peer pressure, 25; relationship with author, 31, 32; relationships with other group members, 130; runs for schoolboard position, 209; shares event video, photos and commentary, 137, 137–40; supports Jess re reminder the PSRH is femalecentering, 149–54; suspended by Facebook, 231n2; takes unpopular stance and is supported by group leadership, 141–47, 142, 145; as the tech guy, 29; use of attending tag, 76, 135

Index 241

journalism, citizen, 9–10 Justice Democrats, 166, 194n4, 203 Kara (study focal participant), 29, 35–36, 59 Keane, W., xvii, 160, 207 Klein, E., 206 Knock Down the House (documentary film), 55, 166 Knope, Leslie (TV character), 129–30, 154, 155–56 Koch brothers, xiv–xv, 166 Kroon, S., 13 Lears, Rachel, 55 lens, ocular, 19 Leppänen, S., 131 Lucy (study focal participant): study biography of, 34; advocates involvement in local issues, 168, 168–71; aligns with AOC, 180; aligns with Dona, 190; aligns with Joseph, 165, 182, 182–84; as co-chair of PSR, 169, 207, 208–9; communicative strategies of, 168–71; defines her audience, 168–69; disaligns with Ted Cruz, 182, 182–84; disaligns with Trump, 185–86; enables author’s maternity leave, 53; entextualizes Dona’s Project Lifeline event, 190; identity shifts as a result of activism, 154–57; interviews with, 226–28, 229–30; opinions about Facebook, 48; posts and comments, 219–20; quoted on connections between identity and activism, 111–19, 112, 114; quoted on the power of local work within a national movement, 175–76; quoted on rewards of activism, 119; shares event photos and commentary, 135, 139; tagging practices of, 73, 73–74, 76–77, 77, 78, 78, 135; takes epistemic stance of authority, 168, 168–71; use of gifs by, 129–30, 154–56; use of hashtags by, 78, 78; use of small stories by, 168–71; virtue signaling by, 170–71; writes complimentary post about Dona, 129–30 Mad World News, 84, 93n9 Martin, Trayvon, 202 media: alternative, 9; news, 190 Melucci, A., 210 Messenger, 12, 32, 151 microactivism, 25

microblogging, 22, 24 Milan, S., 72, 131, 160–61 morality see moral political goals moral political goals, 24–28, 102–4, 125–26, 159–61 Muslim ban, 30 Muslims, 30, 86–89 narrative strategies, 4, 104–10; see also small stories; stances narrowcasting, 10 Obama, Barack, xv–xvi, 195n5 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 166, 177–80 O’Connor, B. H., 101 online communications, 14–16; see also social media O’Rourke, Beto, 75, 75, 195, 195n5 Page, R., 139 Pantsuit Nation (PSN), 3 Pantsuit Republic Houston (PSRH): formation and evolution of, xvi–xviii, 2–3, 28–31; author as member of, 2–3, 28–31; identity and values of, 119, 147–54, 190; influence of Indivisible on, 173; interest groups within, 29–30; leadership of, 209–10; as “light community,” 21; local focus of, 164–76, 186–94, 207; other groups and, 30–31, 166; platforms and communication tools used by, 12, 21 (see also Facebook) Pantsuit Republic Texas (PSR): overview of, xvi–xviii, 2–3, 31–32; author as member of, xvi, 31–32; intentional decentralization of, 171–76; leadership of, 169, 207–10; as “light community,” 21; other groups and, 167, 172; platforms and communication tools used by, 12, 21, 32, 47–48 (see also Facebook); values of, 147–54, 172 parents: activists, 31, 32, 53–56; ethnographers, 53–56; focal participants, 33–35 Parks & Recreation, 129–30 participants see focal participants participation: effects of social media on, 199–200 police violence, 202 politics see also moral political goals: rescaling, 206–7 polls: as virtue signaling, 168, 169, 170–71 Postill, J., 11, 50, 191

242 Index

posts (on Facebook): overview of, 66, 68–71, 69; boosting and bumping, 82–84, 83, 150, 157; coding for analysis, 223–26, 224–25; as multimodal, 126n2; presentation of, 233–37, 234, 235, 236; privacy settings for, 57; redaction of, 59–62, 60, 61; “Seven A’s” of, 36, 71–86, 204; as sites of entextualization, 86; see also “Seven A’s” of Facebook posts privacy, 57–63 Prochazka, O., 200 progressivism, 3, 21, 101, 130 Project Lifeline, 187–92, 188, 189, 191 PSN see Pantsuit Nation (PSN) PSR/H see Pantsuit Republic Houston (PSRH); Pantsuit Republic Texas (PSR) public sphere, 15–16 racial justice, 175, 202 ratified overhearers see audience reaction buttons see buttons, reaction Reddit, 56 reflexivity, 23–24 rescaling see scales Resistance (movement), 167–68, 171–76, 192–94, 202–3, 205–6, 207–11 right-wing culture, 56; see also White supremacy Ross, Wilbur, xv Samantha (study focal participant), 2, 35, 142, 143–44, 145, 145–46, 157, 180 Santelli, Rick, xiii–xv Sarah (study focal participant), 2, 35, 226–28, 229 scales, 13, 14, 14;; analysis of, 205–6; narrative engagement with, 109–10; rescaling, 165–68, 190–92, 200–203, 206–7; social media and, 85–86, 200–203; use of social media and mass media to scale up local issues, 9 see also chronotopes “Seven A’s” of Facebook posts: described and explained, 36, 71–84, 204; application of, 84–86; acknowledgment, 80; affiliation, 72–80; algorithms, 81–84; alignment, 71–72, 80–81; amplification, 81–84; audience, 80–81; authorship, 71–72 Signal, 12, 32 Skocpol, T., xiii, xv, xvi, 11

Slack, 12, 32, 151 slacktivism, 10–12, 25, 48–49 small stories: as establishing authority, 113–19, 114; frameworks for analyzing, 203–6; identity and, 22–23, 102–10, 130–32; as means of motivating activism, 168–71, 188, 188–89, 191, 192; moral political missions and, 102–4; relationship to stance work, 23–24, 106–9, 123–24, 125–26, 155–56; see also narrative strategies snowflakes, 178, 178–79 social media: overview, 37n3; as channel for information, 16; controversial practices of, 38n4; data collection by, 38n6; ethnographic research and, 49–52, 57–63; optimism and pessimism about, 4–7; political engagement and, 5–6, 11–12, 16–17, 199–203; (re)scaling and, 14–16, 85–86, 200–203; see also Facebook stance objects, 176–86; see also alignment; stances stances: affective, 27, 85, 120–24, 121; analysis of, 85, 204–5; cooperative, 27, 141–47, 145, 150–54, 155–56, 159–60 (see also alignment); epistemic, 27, 85, 110–24, 120, 151–54, 155; as emergent and situated, 23–24; evaluative or attitudinal, 27, 85; as expression of (dis) alignment, 141–47, 159–60, 176–86 (see also alignment); expressive components of, 24; frameworks for analyzing, 203–6; group, 139–47, 142, 145, 159–60; identity and, 23–24, 125–26, 130–32; moral, 27, 85; motivational, 27; small stories and, 23–24, 106–9, 125–26 (see also small stories); typology of, 27; virtue signaling as, 26; see also narrative strategies stories, small see small stories subjects of study see focal participants Sveningsson, M., 62 Swanenberg, J., 13 tags, 72–80, 73, 74, 134, 135–39, 136 Tea Party, xiv–xvii, 165–66, 203 technology: utopian and dystopian visions of, 5–7 tone policing, 151 Townsend, N., 53, 55 translocal networks, 186–94, 201 Treré, E., 6, 176, 200–201

Index 243

Trester, A. M., 159 Trump, Donald J., xv, 144, 184–86, 214–15; election of, xv–xvi, xviiin3, 1–2, 19, 104–10, 202 Twitter, 12, 177–79, 185–86

White supremacy, xvi–xvii, xvii, xviiin2, 19, 86–89, 87, 89 Williamson, V., xiv, xv, 11

van Dijk, J., 4–5, 7, 15 videos: focal participants’ use of, 102, 113–24, 114, 120, 121, 135–36, 138, 140 virtue signaling, 24–28, 124, 125–26

Zentz, Lauren: analytical and methodological approach of, xvii, 36, 50, 51–52, 90–92, 218–31, 233–38; as engaged in home ethnography, 49, 52–53; as parent, 31, 49, 53–56, 211; participation in PSR, 2–3, 31–32, 209; participation in PSRH, 2–3, 28–31; project conceptualization of, 31–32; reaction to 2016 election of Trump, 1–2

West, L., 159 WhatsApp, 9, 12

YouTube, 137, 137, 139, 140