In search of the Global South: regional representation in digital activism research

The diffused and global nature of many digital contexts often renders regional representation invisible in digital activism research. This raises questions around whether marginalised communities are prominent in a field that is largely focussed on explorations of grassroots and counterpublic movements. In response to this issue, we conducted a mixed-methods systematic review of empirical journal articles (N=315) published on this topic. The corpus was created by running queries spanning 21 relevant keywords describing digitally enabled activism (e.g. digital activism, online activism) on the Scopus database. The final corpus consisted of 315 articles published between 2011 and 2018. This corpus was tested on a range of attributes including methodological approaches as well as factors for evaluating regionality with a focus on regionally disadvantaged communities (towards capturing the “Global South”). Coded categories included the choice of case study, its origin and location, the country of origin for lead authors, and the platforms being studied. While there was no expectation that all of these categories can necessarily reliably be coded on a regional or ethnic origin, this part of the coding was conducted towards capturing a general sense of diversity and spatial representation in digital activism research, above all in relation to the emergence of software-based digital methods. Results indicate that the majority of articles in the corpus focused on activist campaigns and groups in the Global North, with non-region-specific social media groupings such as hashtag publics particularly prominent. In comparison, there was a paucity of articles focused on case studies drawn from Global South countries. These trends were particularly evident in platform-based digital activism research, where data was sourced from sites like Facebook and Twitter. As such, there were correlations between a high percentage of Global North activists and the preponderance of certain social networking sites and their affordances in research (e.g. Twitter hashtag studies) as well as scholar bases in the Global North. This means that researchers may need to rethink (a) where and how disadvantaged and less visible activist groups are represented online, (b) what these hindrances mean for democratic participation, grassroots movements, and counterpublics, and (c) to what extent scholar and fieldwork location impact representativeness in research. The paper concludes by proposing a future research agenda for digital activism researchers which redresses this imbalance in favour of digital activism research from and within the Global South. Specifically, we argue that researchers should diversify their methodological approaches (e.g. towards capturing contextualised data) and the platforms they study in order to capture how digital activism operates in contexts outside the Global North.