Navigating compassion development in digital activism through moral affiliation enactivism

This talk initially introduces the concept ‘compassion’ and its multifaceted nature, encompassing ethics, performance, and assessment criteria, using corpus analysis. The focus then shifts towards modelling compassion development in digital activism as moral affiliation enactivism. What is at stake here is understanding how digital texts enact affiliation (i.e. unite communities), share and urge alternative positionings, and reveal activism motivations, ethics, and “allegiance to the goals and guiding values of a particular movement” (Markham, 2016, p. 951). The moral affiliation model of analysis illustrates compassion evolution through: aligning identities; positioning the audience within shared moral fields in which actors take positions of rights and duties and engage with each other (Van Langenhove, 2017); and exhorting people towards purposeful social actions. The analysis examines texts from activist movements, such as BDS movement, shedding light on how compassion evolves as a coordinated response to wrongdoing (Sznaider, 2015) and how non-violent resistance projects’ design facilitates social change (Hughes, 2018) and counters two challenges faced by compassion discourses, ignorance of people’s suffering and compassion fatigue (Höijer, 2004). Compassion is taken as the desire/moral motivation and effort to alleviate suffering, affirming master sociocultural frames (e.g. freedom) and human rights (Sznaider, 2015; Bandura, 2016). Given that digital texts are pregnant with evaluations, a functional approach to evaluative language is crucial in discerning acts of compassion driven by moral beliefs and evaluations, which can account for motivations (cf. Kádár et al., 2019). Key (un)shared bonds, ‘communing affiliation’ tactics (Etaywe & Zappavigna, 2023), and patterns of ‘tendering’ proposals (Doran et al., forthcoming) will be unpacked as used in the ongoing process of ‘authentication’ (Bucholtz, 2003) of individual compassionate identity.