Solidarities in Dispute: Anti-Caste Digital Mobilisation at the Crossroads of Universalism and Caste-Ethnic Identities
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | Caste-based discrimination and violent atrocities against Dalit communities have led to the emergence of organised anti-caste resistance across India. However, contemporary anti-caste movements face a major challenge today: the fragmentation of their networks and mobilisation initiatives. With the development of the Internet and advanced technologies in the 21st century, these new opportunities have raised the expectations of many anti-caste activists from marginalised backgrounds about the role of the digital environment in unifying their efforts. In their online discursive strategies calling for a change in society, they draw on local cultural resources (caste-ethnic identities, religious traditions, and histories of anti-caste struggle) and universal human rights values to evoke solidarity and mobilise for collective action. In this paper, I explore these online digital strategies by presenting computational text analysis of a large corpus of online anti-caste blog articles (2962 documents published 2010–2022), with a particular focus on the mobilising potential of major anti-caste collective action frames and the cultural production embedded in them. Through a novel mixed-methods approach combining fieldwork, natural language processing methods, and content-based frame analysis, the research examines 1) how local cultural resources and universal human rights values are used in anti-caste online discourse to promote solidarity with marginalised communities, 2) how they are utilised in anti-caste collective action frames, and 3) how to estimate their mobilising potential through frames’ mutual co-occurrence. The findings point to broader issues faced by anti-caste movements in India in appealing to solidarity through universalist human rights values without invoking caste-ethic collective identities. |
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