Performing as the expert: urban activists’ roles and identities online and offline

ongoing

The meaning of (urban) space is undergoing constant renegotiation, it is reproduced in everyday actions and in political discourse. Urban activists advocate for a more just distribution of physical urban space away from motorised traffic towards sustainable, human-scale cities. Most activists act on their own behalf, as concerned or affected residents; others choose to perform specific roles, for instance, as topic experts. In this research, I investigate which roles urban activists perform, how they choose a role, and which motives influence the choice. I ask whether activists’ performativity can shift the political landscape in their favour, and how performed roles are perceived by politicians, lobby groups, and the public. I am interested in the influence of situational, cultural, and political settings; specifically, whether urban activists perform different roles online and offline, in societies trusting in experts and in more populist societies, and in the Global North and in the majority world. I employ a mixed-method approach that combines innovative quantitative methods from computational linguistics and social network analysis, and state-of-the-art qualitative methods from visual anthropology, digital ethnography, and digital anthropology. Beyond academic output, this research project will engage the public, among other channels, using videos posted to social media, and provide a ‘handbook’ to urban activists to support their work transforming our cities into more just and sustainable places. In this MSCA, I will receive the necessary training to establish myself as a multidisciplinary scholar who is firm in qualitative and quantitative methods, and is confident with theories from different fields. As such, this action has the potential of setting my career path towards becoming a leading researcher investigating timely issues of societal relevance from a multi-paradigmatic and holistic perspective.