City Research Online

Abstract

The article examines the U.K.movement People’s Assembly against Austerity. It probes the extent to which opposition to austerity expressed on Twittercontributes to building bridges among disparate social groups affected by austerity politics and to enabling their jointcollective action. The studyaims toadd to the scholarship on anti-austerityprotests since the credit crunch. Numerous of those protests have been accompanied by vibrant activity on social media. Rather than to propose yet another examination of participant mobilisation on social media, theanalysis delineates and seeks to evidence a processof social learning among the social media following of a social movement.Relying on a combination of social network, semantic and discourse analysis, we discuss movement social learning as a diffusion process transpiringin the communication over an extended period of substantive and organisational issues, strategy and critical reflections that crystallised a cohesivein-group among the participant entities in the People’s Assembly.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	©Sage Publications, 2017 Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications
Publisher Keywords:	social movement, social learning, social media, austerity, protest, People’s Assembly
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform H Social Sciences > HX Socialism. Communism. Anarchism
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs > Sociology & Criminology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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