A Study of Intersectionality on the Black Lives Matter and Me Too Movements

Dear colleagues and students, 

As part of its graduate seminar series, the IR Department invites you to a talk by Dr. Başak Taraktaş titled “A Study of Intersectionality on the Black Lives Matter and Me Too Movements” on Thursday, March 30th, 12.30, at Scola 460.  

Abstract 

Black Lives Matter and MeToo, two social movements that went viral around the globe, have been actively supporting each other. This paper studies what kind of grievances and demands become prominent at the intersection of these movements. Building on the intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1990), we seek to uncover whether the most salient demands relate to broad themes on which more people concur or specific grievances and demands of intersectional groups (such as Black transgender women), which sound divisive to some. Building on Laclau (2007), we expect to find broader and vaguer themes to dominate the more specific themes related to intersectionality. The broader and vaguer a theme, the wider the audience with which it resonates. We test this hypothesis on a large tweet dataset from Jan. 2020 to Dec. 2021 we compiled using Twitter’s API. We applied network analysis and topic modeling to these data to identify the most salient themes and frames that activists use. Our preliminary findings support our hypothesis. The most salient themes concern racial equality, sexual abuse, and police violence.

Asst. Prof. Başak Taraktaş

Basak Taraktas is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bogazici University and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow (H2020-MSCA-IF-2020 #101028566). Her research centers on collective action and opinion dynamics in the field of social movements and regime change, and she combines computational social science techniques such as network analysis and agent-based modeling with comparative historical analysis. Currently, Basak is working on her Horizon 2020 project entitled Dia-Pol, which . This project examines a) when social media debates on Me Too and Black Lives Matter foster dialogue and trigger polarization, b) the role of intersectionality in these movements, and c) variation in framing within Black Lives Matter’s countermovements. Basak’s work has been published in Social Networks, Government and Opposition, Plos One, and Journal of Contemporary European Studies.