Tragedy is Trending

Tragedy is Trending is written in response to experiences of solidarity shared via the #TheyAreUs hashtag that went viral following the terror attack on Muslim communities in Ōtautahi, Christchurch in March 2019, and questions commonly held assumptions by users about the non-discriminatory nature of Aotearoa New Zealand politics and society. It argues that the use of what the author calls ‘collectivising hashtags’, i.e., hashtags characterised by their use of pronouns to inclusively identify with Others, affords new opportunities for self-expression that may simultaneously empower and compromise affected communities. It explores the clever and imaginative ways that digital counterpublics subvert online interactions through strategic use of digital architecture, labour, visibility, and invisibility when addressing hashtags and social media platforms as racialised performances of self.

This book encourages hashtag activists to think critically about the affecting nature of their online practices and privileges, or risk becoming complicit in the wider relations of power in which discrimination, oppression, and violence fester. As privileged users develop new practices of digital reconstitution in which an embodied online praxis is conceived in affective terms, the author argues that they can instead embrace their own vulnerability, alterity, and precariousness, and move towards a fuller conception of what it means to be human both on and offline.

As an academic study, this book is of relevance to scholars researching and teaching in digital activists spaces, as well as social media and extremism more broadly. It appeals to audiences in Aotearoa New Zealand, addressing government and civil society responses to the Christchurch Mosque attacks, but also reveals international appeal due to the widespread publicity received by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her empathetic leadership. The concept of ‘collectivising hashtags’ developed in this book has interdisciplinary application across media studies, gender studies, political science and international relations disciplines.

Claire Fitzpatrick is a Communications Lecturer at Edith Cowan University. She completed her PhD entitled Humanitys Gone Viral at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand in 2021. Claire specialises in Political Communications and has extensive experience deploying mixed methods to understand how social media networks enable and constrain political behaviour, with a particular emphasis on how deliberative democracy enables the pursuit of individual, activist and regulatory goals. Her reflexive approach to teaching draws on her own interdisciplinary research at the intersections of politics and media, gender and race, and social movements in civil society.