Crises in Digital Spaces: The Covid-19 pandemic and the emergence of anti-lockdown identities, emotions, cognitions, and motivations
The Anti-Corona project views anti-lockdown protests as part of the rise of radical right-wing discourses and protests such as the recent Capitol riots in the US in January 2021.
It proposes a novel perspective in understanding online anti-publics, studying the broader narrative, expression and visual representation of a recent and popularised political mobilisation, with an aim to understand the social factors including marginalisation, ontological discomfort and moral outrage intertwined with online drivers that turn grievance and alienation into right-wing activism.
Evidence from social psychology and cognitive sciences bolster studies in the online expression on social media platforms, as these disciplines suggest that people have underlying motivations, beliefs and intuitions driving their preferences and decisions, which, in turn, feed their online self-presentation.
The project investigates how social groups can shape radicalisation of individuals and enforce shared group norms, beliefs, and stereotypes and how these social groups expose their unifying ideologies on online platforms and in public spaces. We hypothesise that ontological comfort moralises prudential concerns. Anti-lockdown protesters are morally outraged by the lockdown imposed on them. Anti-Corona investigates to what extent moralising ontological comfort and marginalisation can be considered moral, as it infringes on the freedoms and health precautions of others. To investigate ontological discomfort, social exclusion and marginalisation, the Anti-Corona project produces a solid empirical base using digital, visual, and survey methodologies.