Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowships Cohort Archive

Publicity, Locality, and Democratic Practices

This dissertation, “Publicity, Locality, and Democratic Practices,” explores the relationships among digital rhetorics of activism and embodied protest in the era of netroots movements and digital democracy. This project analyzes a series of case studies concerning post-earthquake protests in L’Aquila (Italy) through a rhetorical theoretical framework, and it identifies the conditions that might favor public-embodied protests being productive. This project intervenes in conversations about digital activism and material rhetoric, and it contributes to deepening the understanding of contemporary social movements and of the ways locality and material conditions shape public strategies of protest. Lastly, the study aims to encourage dialogue among scholars, publics, and activists in order to implement strategies for engaging in productive democratic actions in their geographic locales.