{"id":67301,"date":"2020-07-06T15:11:28","date_gmt":"2020-07-06T19:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=67301"},"modified":"2025-10-15T09:58:45","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T13:58:45","slug":"carleton-research-chair-explores-intersection-of-digital-and-offline-activism","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/carleton-research-chair-explores-intersection-of-digital-and-offline-activism\/","title":{"rendered":"Carleton Research Chair Explores Intersection of Digital and Offline Activism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Carleton Research Chair Explores Intersection of Digital and Offline Activism\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

Modern political activism is far too complex to be explained in black and white, but it happens all the time. Democratic or dictatorial, rational or racist, armchair activism or real-world demonstration \u2014 which is it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reality is far more nuanced, which is something that Carleton University Communications Prof. Merlyna Lim<\/a>, Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Global Network Society, has always understood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lim\u2019s study of both online and offline activism (as well as the combination of the two) requires many different approaches to describe their complexity. She conducts online and real-world observations, in-depth interviews, data research and literature reviews to understand how movements mobilize, where people gather and how messages spread in the cyber and civic realms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An
Prof. Merlyna Lim<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With the renewal of her Canada Research Chair in 2019, Lim has expanded the scope of her research. She will study the social and political rhythms of various countries where social media narratives have spread quickly. Algorithms play a big part in spreading certain ideologies online, but this has to be weighed with cultural context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople bring their own bias to everything,\u201d says Lim. \u201cWhat we are experiencing is not just because of social media \u2014 it\u2019s amplified by it and still shaped and reshaped by users.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lim has conducted research on social movements in many places, including Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. More recently, she studied misinformation in Canada during the 2019 federal election and the movements in Malaysia surrounding electoral reform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the onset of COVID-19, her field work \u2014 talking to people about their lives, social circles and customs \u2014 will continue remotely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ll continue working on doing the online part of my research and interviewing from afar,\u201d says Lim. \u201cOf course, with the pandemic, there are many emerging social movements and collective actions that traverse both online and offline realms.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lim still plans to travel to Southeast Asia, Singapore and urban areas such as Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Jakarta in 2021. Her recent research<\/a> on hate speech and social media is not the first time she has studied mass communication and social change in her home country of Indonesia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\nLessons from the Streets
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As an architectural engineering student, Lim witnessed the student movement to remove the authoritarian former president Suharto. What culminated in nation-wide protests in May 1998 \u2014 and the president\u2019s resignation \u2014 began in Jakarta, Bandung and other cities where student activists organized online and in physical spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was not the most active, I was mostly observing,\u201d says Lim. \u201cBut I was on the street with thousands of other students.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lim focused her PhD thesis<\/a> on these and other movements in Indonesia. She explored the complexity of the situation, dismissing the simple description of \u201cInternet revolution,\u201d and outlined how taxis, mosques and food stalls played important roles in the movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDigital activism doesn\u2019t bloom from a vacuum,\u201d she says. \u201cIt springs from the context of technology and socio-political problems.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lim will also continue to research and work with her ALiGN (Alternative Global Network) media lab<\/a>, which does public outreach to help progressive groups communicate complex issues. The lab offers thought-provoking podcasts, videos and comics, as well as workshops to support communities that wish to better mobilize their causes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In March, ALiGN hosted a media training and writing workshop for refugees in Kenya\u2019s Kakuma Camp and published a story by Zamzam Abdikader, one of the workshop\u2019s attendees, who wrote about life in the camp<\/a> during the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy research is very objective, but morally I\u2019m not neutral,\u201d says Lim, \u201cI’m for marginalized communities. I seek to empower the voices of refugees and activists for democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alongside Prof. James Milner<\/a> in the Department of Political Science, Lim will also help international refugees communicate their needs and issues by telling their own stories. They wish to share their knowledge with small groups \u2014 especially progressive youth movements \u2014 that are fighting for equality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI want them to see that there is hope,\u201d says Lim. \u201cWe can do better. How do we build a movement if authoritarians keep winning? There are more of us \u2014 we just have to be connected.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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\nMore Stories<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Modern political activism is far too complex to be explained in black and white, but it happens all the time. Democratic or dictatorial, rational or racist, armchair activism or real-world demonstration \u2014 which is it? Reality is far more nuanced, which is something that Carleton University Communications Prof. Merlyna Lim, Canada Research Chair in Digital […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":67645,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_story_type":[13,1931,19],"cu_story_tag":[1921],"class_list":["post-67301","cu_story","type-cu_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","cu_story_type-research-discovery","cu_story_type-social-innovation","cu_story_type-technology-innovation","cu_story_tag-faculty-of-public-and-global-affairs"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":"blueprint"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/67301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/67301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98055,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/67301\/revisions\/98055"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_story_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_type?post=67301"},{"taxonomy":"cu_story_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_tag?post=67301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}