Communicative Resilience: Civil Society's Response to Information Disorders

Edited by Dafne Calvo (University of Valencia) and Maria Iranzo-Cabrera (University of Valencia)

This special issue focuses on the communicative resilience of social movements, movement organizations, and activists. We understand communicative resilience as the cultural practices performed in response to information disorders and the crisis of the mediatized public sphere. A crisis often brings new opportunities. Resilience entails the capacity to withstand crises and endure uncertain conditions and disruptive events (Olsson et al., 2015; Beck, 2016; Walsh, 2016). This constitutive process lets people “reintegrate and actively construct their new normal through language, interaction, networks, and attention to their identities and identifications” (Buzzanell, 2019, p. 68).

It therefore occurs both at the individual level and within the wider social environment (Van Breda, 2018). We contend that the current state of affairs is characterized by information disorders that present a crisis of civic coexistence on multiple levels: they erode trust in institutions, polarize social debates, and incite violence. Within the communication realm, resilience necessitates adapting digital technologies and practices to the prevailing circumstances in which people operate. This adjustment encompasses various facets, including modes of news consumption, communication networks, alternative logics and narratives, social mobilization, and even protest amplification.

We argue that social movements are currently experiencing invisibility concerning their role in contrasting information disorders, overshadowed by the investigation of insular and partisan communities that dominate public discourse (Freelon et al., 2020). However, we believe that a systematic study of social movement practices is essential to understand how civil society establishes strategies, shares cultural codes and identities, and reinforces social networks (Tarrow, 2011) to tackle information disorders.

In an informatively disordered scenario, this special issue addresses the multifaceted relationship between activism, citizenship and media to study communication resilience practices and purposes. Contributions are encouraged to explore the role of the citizen in the context of a hybrid media ecosystem and the loss of citizens’ trust in institutions.

In this special issue, we call for papers broad multidisciplinary empirical and theoretical contributions on communication resilience in the framework of social movements addressing issues such as gender-based violence, migration, climate change, wars, and conflicts. and focusing on investigating diverse media practices that respond to information disorders.

We seek papers that investigate communication resilience considering different types of media practices that social movements and movement organization use to respond to information disorders in different countries across the globe and using quantitative, qualitative, computational or mixed-methods research design. Some of the topics that might be addressed by the papers are the following:

1. Citizens' Communicative Practices: Moments of significant social turmoil (e.g., such as political upheavals, terrorist attacks, health crises, and natural disasters) have been subject to various forms of information manipulation and polarization. This call for papers seeks to explore approaches to these events through alternative communication channels, such as conflict coverage by citizens or alternative media.
2. New Opinion Leaders: The crisis in media intermediation has led to the decentralization of traditional media as the primary mediators of public discourse. This call focuses on the evolving relationship between citizens and the media, as well as the organizational forms and strategies employed by civil society to achieve public impact independently of mainstream media in a fragmented public sphere. We are also interested in the interaction of social movements with pseudo-media and opinion leaders opposed to their interests.
3. Counter-Narratives and Counter-Speech: Disinformation has been weaponized to promote views hostile to communities traditionally marginalized from centers of power. This special issue aims to investigate the responses of minority groups to narratives that foster discrimination and marginalization.
4. Media Practices: The crisis of information disorder has frequently been analyzed in relation to various technological objects, such as the presence of algorithms and the automation of information dissemination. This call for papers seeks to examine technological designs and uses that foster more horizontal and collective forms of organization. It also aims to study the interaction between citizens and those who use such tools for uncivic purposes.
5. Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Communication: The phenomenon of information disorders necessitates a holistic study of communicative systems, drawing on various academic disciplines, from network analysis to political sciences. We invite reflections on the importance of studying social movements from a communicative standpoint, particularly in an era when journalism is a central theme in debates on today's democracy.

Submission procedure and deadlines

Articles, written in English, should be submitted to the editors according to the following schedule:

Submission of long abstracts (800 - 1,000 words): 15 December 2024

Acceptance and notification: 20 January 2025

Submission of articles: 02 May 2025

Provision of peer review feedback: 30 September 2025

Submission of revised drafts: 30 November 2025

Long abstracts should include the following information:

(1) A description of the topic,

(2) How the paper addresses one or more of the nodal points of the SI,

(3) Empirical data and methodology,

(4) Findings

To send your paper proposal, please submit a long paper abstract (700-1,000 words) to [email protected] and [email protected] by 15 December 2024.

Selected contributors will be asked to submit their full paper (8,000-10,000 words) by 15 January 2025. Note that the word total includes references, notes, tables, figures and diagrams. All papers will be sent to two external referees for final assessment.