Expedient, Affective, and Sustained Solidarities? Mediated Contestations of Islamophobia in the Case of Brexit, the Christchurch Terror Attack, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This article advances research on mediated solidarity, by analyzing the contestation of Islamophobia on the social media platform Twitter, in the context of Brexit, the Christchurch terror attack, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a unique longitudinal dataset, gathered over a 5-year period, we elucidate how evolving relations between platforms and trigger events can enable solidarity networks to shift dominant narratives. Taking each event in turn, we demonstrate how on initial analysis these events appear to generate solidarities that fall within a spectrum of solidarity. Brexit produced “expedient solidarities” where Islamophobia was leveraged in support of wider political identities and commitments. The Christchurch terrorist attack engendered “affective solidarities,” wherein expressions of empathy gained visibility but gave way to a long tail of hate. Finally, in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, we analyze how sustained solidarity networks arose through antagonistic exchanges with nationalist movements that propagated Islamophobic misinformation. Yet our longitudinal and comparative methodology allowed for a more complicated picture to emerge, which troubled existing typologies of digital solidarity. The broader implications of our findings for social media research are therefore twofold. First, we underline the empirical value of mixed methods approaches, as these complex forms of solidarity only became legible through combining computational, qualitative, and quantitative methods. Second, we argue for the theoretical importance of conceiving how the entanglement of platform affordances and events gives rise to multi-dimensional solidarities that offer the potential to sustain counternarrative content over time.