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This chapter analyzes #YesAllWomen, one of the largest, most visible, feminist Twitter events of recent years. Though hashtags and other forms of digital activism are not always taken seriously as politics, in this project we investigate #YesAllWomen and its recirculation through media and public blogs, as an important instance of contemporary feminist discursive activism. Specifically, we argue that the hashtag functioned, first, as a site of collective identity for participants, and we describe some of the ways in which this identity building was achieved, and second, we argue that through its links to and recirculation by other platforms and media, #YesAllWomen also functioned as a public protest or agenda-building event with impact on public discourse beyond Twitter. Our project draws on content and discourse analysis methods to analyze the #YesAllWomen hashtag and to trace its interaction with other discourses such as news and blogs, including an automated content analysis of almost two million tweets and an analysis of a sample of 251 media and blog stories. We note that contemporary feminists are using digital media, in this case a Twitter hashtag, to achieve many of the same discursive goals of knowledge building and critique that have previously been achieved using other communications strategies such as consciousness-raising groups, publishing collectives, media strategies, and zaps.

Purpose: Since the middle of the 20th century, much of the literature on conflict resolution has focused on ways to manage and diffuse conflicts, but there have been recent efforts to include peacebuilding and sustaining processes in these studies. The discussions on peace have, inevitably, raised questions about the definition of violence: there are dissenting ideas about the boundary between violence and peace. Traditionally, the literature on violence focuses on ethnic conflicts, wars, terrorism, and the results of such armed conflicts. This chapter illustrates other “debates” about violence and peace, by focusing on the discourse and explicit activism “in the field.”

Method: The chapter draws on archival sources for examples of protests, discursive politics, and human rights activism.

Findings: The chapter highlights, the ways in which more conventional ideas about violence, and the boundaries between peace and violence have been challenged. It focuses on women's and women-dominated activism to highlight the role of actors whose explicit and unobtrusive actions are not systematically recognized as we study efforts to build and sustain peace.

Following victimisation of many types, knowing one is not alone in their experience, or the reactions to that experience, has been identified as comforting and supportive of recovery in survivors of violence and abuse. Information is often provided by support groups, professionals, or victim/survivor organisations, which still fill a significant gap in the criminal justice system, which offers insufficient support to victims of crime. However, as many victims do not engage with support services or the criminal justice system, they may be at risk of not receiving such crucial support. The rising popularity of so called ‘hashtag activism’ has however provided victims and survivors with a worldwide platform to share experiences, reactions, information, support, and solidarity. This chapter explores the impact of key hashtags, such as #metoo and #BlackLivesMatter, via a critical evaluation of outcomes, including policy, cultural, and legislative impact, to unpick their successes and failures, with a focus on support and community-building, marginalisation and performative allyship.

In the United States, rights-based laws have opened major social institutions to previously marginalized groups, altering the terrain on which social movements act, creating opportunities for disruption, and expanding the forms protest takes. This research is an attempt to add to our understanding of contemporary protest. I use data from 50 open-ended, loosely structured interviews with women feminist PhD sociologists working at U.S. (and 1 Canadian) colleges and universities as a lens through which to examine contemporary protest. These in-depth interviews reveal that the demand-making and discursive protest of feminists in academia is rooted in the empowering intersections of their collective feminist identities and disrupts hegemonic practices in the academy and beyond. My findings indicate that social movement theory must move beyond restrictive notions of potential movement targets, activist locations, and strategies; and past narrow conceptualizations of collective action and movement goals.

This paper aims to explore the methodological and epistemological assumptions that have foregrounded the author's research into discursive activism in Australian feminist blogs, and a discussion of her research methods and why they were appropriate to this study. In particular, it seeks to discuss internet research methods and approaches toward the study of a feminist network online in order to make a case for methodological approaches that are feminist in themselves and aimed toward discursive change. The author recognises the political and personally affective nature of research.

The project design and methodology of the study draws on traditions of feminist online ethnography and feminist standpoint methodology, using a combination of face‐to‐face semi‐structured interviews, modified grounded theory, network analysis, and participant observation.

The author used a community‐curated online “carnival” to minimise problems of researcher navigation, and explore the pitfalls of insider research, and she discusses the success of looking for contradiction as a method of privileging disagreement in research.

The original contribution of this paper is toward the uses of disagreement, contradiction, discursive rupture, and dislocation in modified grounded theory analysis. The theoretical perspectives discussed in this paper are compatible with a view of subjectivity that allows for discursive political agency, and also encourage an ethics of listening and respect for difference that includes considerations of affect, inequality and power relations in the study of online communities.

This chapter explores what it means for adults to claim child rights. Focussing on activism against institutional child abuse, it considers the question of what happens to the mobilisation of child rights discourse when the person claiming those rights is no longer a child. In other words, how is the concept of child rights used retrospectively and what does this reveal, both about childhood and about child rights? The chapter begins with the contention that childhood needs to be understood as not only a concept that speaks to the lives of children, their experiences, and their place within the social structure. Rather, we suggest that a more expansive view enables recognition of the enduring significance of childhood in adults’ lives. We illustrate this argument with examples of the formation of collective identities based on childhood experiences, before turning to the ways that child rights are marshalled by adults in activism, in commissions of inquiry, and in the legal sphere. Throughout the chapter, we consider issues of temporality. We explore the ways in which adult survivors of childhood abuse retrospectively claim rights denied to them in the past and we examine how activism, official inquiries, and legal mechanisms position adults in relation to their childhood selves. We then consider some of the dilemmas that arise with retrospective rights claims; particularly questions of retroactivity in relation to responsibility and redress for past abuse. Finally, we explore the temporal repositioning of childhood and how past and present is bridged. This occurs through survivor activism and, in more formal mechanisms such as inquiries, by focussing on how people are represented as child victims in the past and survivors in the present.