Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Tam Phan

Access: Open access

“Twitter Revolutions” in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and Moldova illustrate social media’s capacity to mobilize citizens in uprooting systems of injustice. As non-democratic regimes, these “Twitter Revolutions” offer insight into how Twitter’s microblogging, hashtags, and global user connections help broker relations between activists hoping to challenge the government. However, this thesis focuses on the democratic regime of the US and how Twitter plays a role in aiding the prison abolition movement in their effort to dismantle carceral networks that inflict racial and political violence on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and People of Color. The thesis outlines how, under the US’ classification as a democracy, the US utilizes infrastructural power to coerce American citizens into accepting carceral networks of violence as essential institutions to maintain civil society. The following sections explain the abolitionist movement’s history of attempting to dismantle the discrete formal and informal institutions of political violence, and includes the complicating development of liberal-progressive reformism that attempts to co-opt the goals of the abolition movement. The thesis focuses on the Twitter hashtag #PrisonAbolition in 2020 to explore how American Twitter users perceive the US carceral state and the prison abolition movement. The research concludes that #PrisonAbolition does not currently possess the capacity to evolve into the social mobilization seen in the “Twitter Revolutions” of non-democratic regimes because the US’ infrastructural power effectively engrained into the minds of Americans that prisons protect civil society. However, the tweets still show a promising development as American Twitter users become more engaged in abolitionist conversations.

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Ryan S. Kovarovics

Access: Open access

The concept of freedom has always been central to the American identity, but its meaning has never been agreed on by all and has long been the subject of debate. An abridged explanation of the evolution of liberty’s meaning in political thought and American history is presented in the first chapter of this project. It demonstrates the long-standing importance of individual freedom in America and highlights some historical moments when liberty has come into conflict with other societal values. When used in American political rhetoric today, “freedom” and “liberty” typically take on a “negative” meaning that is focused mostly on individual freedom from government intervention. This is especially clear with regard to issues each party claims to “own” in the context of freedom, including abortion for the Democrats and the covid-19 pandemic response for the Republicans. To verify this partisan ownership of freedom and compare how each party uses freedom in political rhetoric, an empirical analysis was conducted of the uses of “freedom” and “liberty” in candidate tweets and campaign ads from the 2022 midterm elections. The analysis found some support for partisan ownership of freedom rhetoric surrounding these and other issues, but the most interesting finding was that Democrats and Republicans invoked “freedom” and “liberty” in their rhetoric at virtually identical rates. This shows that neither party can lay an exclusive claim to be the “party of freedom.”