B8223 - CAMPAGNE INFORMATIVE E MOBILITAZIONI SOCIALI NELL'ERA DIGITALE

Learning outcomes

The course aims to develop an in-depth understanding of how social mobilizations and information campaigns develop in highly digitized contexts, characterized by increasing datafication and the rapid spread of emerging technologies, such as generative artificial intelligence. At the end of the course, participants will be able to: (1) describe and discuss the main concepts and different theoretical approaches related to the use of digital technologies and media in the context of social mobilization and information campaigns; (2) identify and analyze the opportunities and challenges that the use of digital technologies and media poses for the organization, implementation, and maintenance of social mobilizations and information campaigns; (3) evaluate and explain specific cases of social mobilizations and information campaigns based on the use of digital technologies and media in our country and in other parts of the world.

Course contents

The course is divided into three parts. The first part presents and discusses some key aspects for understanding the context in which social mobilizations and information campaigns develop, also taking into account some important characteristics of the social actors who organize and participate in them. The second part examines different types of media and digital technologies and how they are used to support social mobilizations and information campaigns, also discussing some new, emerging forms of activism. In this part of the course, the relationship between journalism and activism will also be explored in light of the digitization processes that have developed in recent decades. Finally, during the third part, the group work developed by course participants during the ten weeks of the course will be presented and discussed. The topics covered each week are listed below, with a list of required and recommended readings.

PART 1 - BASIC THEORIES AND CONCEPTS IN THE STUDY OF POLITICAL MOBILIZATIONS AND INFORMATION CAMPAIGNS

WEEK 1

Day 1: Introduction to the course and formation of working groups

Day 2: Some basic definitions of political campaigns and social mobilization

WEEK 2

Day 1: The context of political campaigns and social mobilization: political opportunities

Day 2: The context of political campaigns and social mobilization: discursive opportunities

WEEK 3

Day 1: Resources and organizational structures of political campaigns and social mobilization

Day 2: Political campaigns, social mobilization, and interpretive frameworks

PART 2 - MEDIA AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES IN POLITICAL MOBILIZATIONS AND INFORMATION CAMPAIGNS

WEEK 4

Day 1: Social Media, Digital Platforms, and Activism

Day 2: The Logic of Connective Action

WEEK 5

Day 1: Activism with/on Big and Small Data

Day 2: Informational Activism and Digital Platforms

WEEK 6

Day 1: Analytical Activism and Big Data

Day 2: Citizen Journalism

WEEK 7

Day 1: Data Journalism between Journalism and Activism

Day 2: Video Activism and Journalism

PART 3 - ALGORITHMS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN POLITICAL MOBILIZATION AND INFORMATION CAMPAIGNS

WEEK 8

Day 1: Algorithms and Generative Artificial Intelligence

Day 2: Algorithmic Visibility and Augmented Reality

WEEK 9

Day 1: Generative Artificial Intelligence and Political Mobilization

Day 2: Democracies and Generative Artificial Intelligence

WEEK 10

Day 1: Classroom Presentations

Day 2: Classroom Presentations

Readings/Bibliography

Required reading for regular course attendees

The required reading is listed below, along with a series of recommended readings for each week of the course. The required reading will be made available on the Virtual Platform and may change depending on the needs of the course and new publications available at the start of the course.

All of these readings must be read, understood, and studied by the end of the course in preparation for the final exam.

A person is considered to be participating in the course if they are present at at least 75% of the lessons. Attendance will be taken in class every day starting from the second week of lessons.

Readings for those who do not attend the course regularly

Those who do not attend the course regularly must read, understand, and study:

- all the required readings listed below

- three other texts to be agreed upon with the instructor well in advance of the final exam

Reading List - Week 1

Required

Diani, Mario. 2008. “Modelli Di Azione Collettiva : Quale Specificità per i Movimenti Sociali?” Partecipazione e Conflitto, 43–66.

Recommended

della Porta, Donatella and Mario Diani (2020) Social Movements: An Introduction, Wiley-Blackwell - CHAPTER 1, pp. 17-102

Tilly, C. (1999). “From Interactions to Outcomes in Social Movements,” in Giugni, M., McAdam D., & Tilly C. (eds) How Social Movements Matter, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, pp.253-270

Reading List - Week 2

Required

Kriesi, Hanspeter. 1993. “Sviluppo Organizzativo Dei Nuovi Movimenti Sociali e Contesto Politico.” Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana Di Scienza Politica 23 (1): 67–117.

della Porta, Donatella and Mario Diani. 2006. Social Movements: An Introduction. Vol. Second Edition. Oxford; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. CHAPTER 8

Recommended

Koopmans, Ruud. 2004. “Movements and Media: Selection Processes and Evolutionary Dynamics in the Public Sphere.” Theory and Society 33 (3/4): 367–91.

Reading List - Week 3

Required

della Porta, Donatella and Mario Diani (2006) Social Movements: An Introduction, Wiley-Blackwell - CHAPTER 6

della Porta, Donatella and Mario Diani (2006) Social Movements: An Introduction, Wiley-Blackwell - CHAPTER 3

Recommended

Snow, David A., E. Burke Rochford, Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford. 1986. “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.” American Sociological Review 51 (4): 464–81.

Benford, Robert D., and David A. Snow. 2000. “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611–39.

Edwards, Bob, and John D. McCarthy. 2006. “Resources and Social Movement Mobilization.” In The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, edited by David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi, 116–52. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.

Reading List - Week 4

Required

Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action. Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661

Kavada, A., Askanius, T., Kaun, A., Mattoni, A., & Uldam, J. (n.d.). Tying up Goliath. Activist strategies for confronting and harnessing digital power. In State of Power 2023-Digital Power, 2023.

Recommended

Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Yale University Press.

van Dijck, José and Poell, Thomas, Understanding Social Media Logic (August 12, 2013). Media and Communication, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 2-14, 2013

Reading List - Week 5

Required

Fubini, A. (2023) ‘More than just shifting boundaries. Informative activism from a comparative perspective’, Problemi dell’informazione

Beraldo, Davide, and Stefania Milan. 2019. “From Data Politics to the Contentious Politics of Data.” Big Data & Society 6 (2): 2053951719885967.

Recommended

Odilla, F. and Mattoni, A. (2023) ‘Unveiling the layers of data activism: The organising of civic innovation to fight corruption in Brazil’, Big Data & Society, 10(2), p. 20539517231190078.

Chenou, J.-M. and Cepeda-Másmela, C. (2019) ‘#NiUnaMenos: Data Activism From the Global South’, Television & New Media, p. 1527476419828995

Reading List - Week 6

Required

Karpf, D. (2018). Analytic Activism and Its Limitations. Social Media + Society, 4(1), 2056305117750718.

Kern, T., & Nam, S. (2009). The Making of a Social Movement: Citizen Journalism in South Korea. Current Sociology, 57(5), 637–660.

Recommended

Christian, B. (2012). Test Everything: Notes on the A/B Revolution. Wired.

Couldry, N. and Mejias, U.A. (2019) The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism. Stanford University Press.

Lupton, D. (2019) Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives. 1st edition. Cambridge: Polity.

Karpf, D. (2017) Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy. Oxford University Press.

Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. 1st edition. New York: PublicAffairs.

Reading List - Week 7

Required

Gray, J., & Bounegru, L. (2019). What a difference a dataset makes? Data journalism and/as data activism. In Data in Society (pp. 365–374). Policy Press.

Ristovska, S. (2021). Seeing Human Rights: Video Activism as a Proxy Profession. The MIT Press. CHAPTER 5

Recommended

Elega, A. A., de-Lima-Santos, M.-F., & Mesquita, L. (2024). Geojournalism, data journalism and crowdsourcing: The case of Eco-Nai+ in Nigeria. Journalism, 25(7), 1538–1558.

de-Lima-Santos, M.-F., & Mesquita, L. (2023). Data Journalism in favela: Made by, for, and about Forgotten and Marginalized Communities. Journalism Practice, 17(1), 108–126.

Mar, C., & Kissane, E. (2016). The People and the Technology Behind the Panama Papers. Global Investigative Journalist Network.

Higgins, E. (2021). We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News (2nd prt. edition). Bloomsbury Publishing

Romeo, F. (2025). Forensic Architecture and the Aesthetics of Post-Human Testimony. Digital Journalism, 13(1), 97–114.

Reading List - Week 8

Required Readings

Treré, E., & Bonini, T. (2022). Amplification, evasion, hijacking: Algorithms as repertoire for social movements and the struggle for visibility. Social Movement Studies, 0(0), 1-17.

Silva, R. M. L., Principe Cruz, E., Rosner, D. K., Kelly, D., Monroy-Hernández, A., & Liu, F. (2022). Understanding AR Activism: An Interview Study with Creators of Augmented Reality Experiences for Social Change. Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-15.

Recommended Reading

Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–623. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Etter, M. and Albu, O.B. (2021) ‘Activists in the dark: Social media algorithms and collective action in two social movement organizations’, Organization, 28(1), pp. 68–91.

Milan, S. (2015) ‘When Algorithms Shape Collective Action: Social Media and the Dynamics of Cloud Protesting’, Social Media + Society, 1(2), p. 2056305115622481.

Reading List - Week 9

Required Readings

Kreps, S., & Kriner, D. (2023). How AI Threatens Democracy. Journal of Democracy, 34(4), 122–131.

Ovadya, A. (2023). Reimagining Democracy for AI. Journal of Democracy, 34(4), 162–170.

Recommended Readings

Innerarity, D. (2023). The epistemic impossibility of an artificial intelligence take-over of democracy. AI & SOCIETY.

Jungherr, A. (2023). Artificial Intelligence and Democracy: A Conceptual Framework. Social Media + Society, 9(3), 20563051231186353.

Teaching methods

Lectures, case study analysis, class discussions, group work, class presentations.

Assessment methods

Methods of assessment and evaluation of learning for those who attend the course regularly

Learning will be assessed through both group work and individual work to understand the level of knowledge of the topics covered during the course and the ability to present them coherently in oral form (oral exam), the ability to apply this knowledge to a real-life scenario by developing and presenting a concrete case (group work), the ability to develop critical reflections in writing on the topic of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the context of social mobilization and political campaigns. More specifically:

Group Work

- Development of a communication strategy linked to a political/information campaign on the topic of climate change in Italy to be presented through:

1) a short oral presentation of 15 minutes, with the support of slides and other materials, during the last week of the course (15% of the final grade);

2) a short written report of 3-5 pages to be submitted on the day of the oral presentation (15% of the final grade).

The communication strategy must also be developed with the help of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools and may include, as elements of the communication strategy itself, one or more tools based on GenAI.

Please note: detailed instructions on group work, class presentation, and written report will be given at the beginning of the course, during the first week, and during the course. The grades received for this method of learning assessment through group work will be the same for each member of the group. No exceptions will be made, and it is up to the group members to organize their work in the best possible way, distributing it equally among all members.

Individual work

- Short written paper (minimum 2,000 - maximum 3,000 words) that critically reflects, based on what has been learned during the course and through the readings, on the use of GenAI in group work and, more generally, on the opportunities and challenges it presents for organizations that organize political campaigns and social mobilizations (20% of the final grade)

- Oral exam focusing on the content - duly studied - of the required readings and all lectures (50% of the final grade)

Assessment and evaluation methods for those who do not attend the course regularly

Learning will be assessed through the following methods:

- Final paper (6,000-7,000 words, excluding bibliography) discussing one of the topics covered during the course through the comparison of two case studies, to be agreed in advance with the instructor (50% of the final grade)

- Oral exam focusing on the content - duly studied - of the compulsory readings and three additional textbooks, one in Italian and the others in English, which will be communicated by the teacher on the Virtual Platform at the beginning of the course (50% of the final grade).

Students with SLDs or temporary or permanent disabilities

It is recommended that you contact the relevant university office (https://site.unibo.it/studenti-con-disabilita-e-dsa/it) in good time: they will propose any necessary adjustments to the students concerned. These adjustments must be submitted 15 days in advance for approval by the teacher, who will assess their suitability in relation to the course objectives.

Teaching tools

PowerPoint presentations, multimedia content, platform Virtuale

Office hours

See the website of Alice Mattoni