(research summary by Katherine Furl)
What do researchers lose by failing to consider power when studying digital networks and right-wing publics? In “Recentering power: conceptualizing counterpublics and defensive publics,” Sarah J. Jackson and Daniel Kreiss argue that without considering the ways many right-wing publics defend longstanding systems of inequality, we fail to understand the impact these right-wing publics have on democracy at large—and we minimize the vital work of counterpublics that truly challenge unequal systems.
Jackson and Kreiss trace how communications scholars use the concept of “counterpublics” to see how its meaning has become muddled over time. In contrast to an imagined singular public sphere with shared ideals, counterpublics emerge to address social, economic, and political inequalities and hold values shaped by these unequal systems of power. Counterpublics vary widely, but whether they tackle systemic racism, sexism, heteronormativity, colonialism and imperialism, or other inequalities, they all serve to challenge dominant values aligned with and upheld by groups in power.
But as studies of digital networks focus on larger datasets and ever-more sophisticated computational methods, Jackson and Kreiss find that many new studies apply the term to any publics seen as “alternative” and deviating from the mainstream, even when they promote values aligned with prevailing systems of power (as is the case for right-wing groups advocating white supremacy through overt racism, for example.) As they put it: “what some scholars take to be right-wing ‘counterpublics’ are often instead a backlash in the defense of established social, racial, and political orders.”
Failing to recognize important differences between counterpublics that challenge systems of power and right-wing publics that defend those systems because both use “alternative” means runs run the risk of “legitimizing anti-democratic movements at best, or furthering them at worst.”
In response, they recommend three practices that apply to many studies of social movements:
- In studying publics, counterpublics, and defensive publics, remember their historical, national, and international contexts; we can’t understand relationships between these groups without also understanding how they emerged.
- Consider differences within and between groups and be mindful of who is left out of which conversations and how different groups must strategize to have their voices heard.
- Be mindful of how institutions, resources, and unequal access amplify or silence counterpublics challenging dominant systems and the inequalities they uphold.
These analyses keeping power at the center of research and ensures that we better understand the important distinction between counterpublics challenging the status quo, defensive publics upholding longstanding systems of inequality, and the impact of both on democracy as a whole.
Inequality is a bigger threat to democracy than polarization.
In fact, polarization is often a sign of a healthy democracy beginning to confront systemic inequalities. And yet scholarship about technology and political communication often frames polarization as the biggest ongoing threat to democracy in the United States. This seeming contradiction, CITAP’s Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor argue, is about race.
In “A review and provocation: On polarization and plaftorms,” Kreiss and McGregor point out that the content of the poles in polarization is both important—and often ignored. Polarization does not account for the crucial differences between, for example, white supremacists and racial justice activists. Black Lives Matter and Stop the Steal are not equally good movements for democracy: as BLM activists explicitly calls for greater equality in a democratic society, Stop the Steal activists seek to overturn elections.
As Kreiss and McGregor put it, “polarization is… the necessary byproduct of the struggle to realize democracy in unequal societies.”
If political communication and media and technology scholars want to understand polarization, they cannot continue to do so from a power-disinterested lens. Polarization and systemic inequality are co-produced. And yet frequently the problems caused by polarization are blamed on those simply calling for justice. Ultimately, scholars frame struggles for justice as “polarizing” because:
our field’s conceptualizations of democracy are so thin, solidarity is so treasured, racial analytics are so rare, and historical memory is so short. It is not polarization, but racial repression that has been far more challenging and destabilizing to democracy over the past 300 years if looked at from a non-White perspective.
“[O]ur field does not consider race to be an especially relevant factor in the study of political communication, and racism even less so.”
So conclude Deen Freelon, Meredith Pruden, and Daniel Malmer in their new piece “#politicalcommunicationsowhite: Race and Politics in Nine Communication Journals, 1991-2021,” released today in Political Communication.
Race is a potent political force in U.S. (and global) politics and political communication. To study polarization, mis and disinformation, and negative campaigning without accounting for race, the authors argue, leaves vital questions unanswered. Instead, much of our understanding of the role of race in political communication comes from outside the field, with important contributions from legal scholarship and political science.
In the face of rising anti-Black police violence and increasingly tolerance for outright racism since Trump's election (Jardina, 2019), political communication remains silent. As Freelon, Pruden, and Malmer argue, "we must confront the possibility that [racism] is simply being ignored, and that we therefore have little idea of how race affects the production, content, distribution, reception, and effects of political communication."
The authors call for political communication scholars to take up race in their work, echoing an earlier call from Daniel Kreiss that “that if we want to understand communication, we must account for social and cultural difference, and especially race and ethnicity.”