Funktionsaktivsm : Onlineaktivism och samhällsengagemang på Twitter

Sammanfattning: Activism and Civic engagement on social media have been taking place since they became a part of communication takes place in people’s everyday lives (Mihailidis 2015). This thesis aims to study the new opportunities for civic engagement and activism that have arisen through the growth of digital media. This work aims to study this by specifically studying how activism surrounding disability and disabled people (disability activism) takes place on the social media platform Twitter. Since the needs of disabled people are often not a priority in the development of technology (World Health Organization 2011, s.184). In this study a mediated community of disability activists and their activity on Twitter are studied using nethnography. The observations of which are analyzed through theoretical foundations in infrastructuring (Mosconi et al. 2017), design in relation to civic engagement (Korn & Voida 2015), and the role of mediated communities in activism (Fromm 2015). The primary result of the nethnography is the observation of how the disability activists appropriated Twitter as an infrastructure for their activism, as well as three analytical categories of the activity that was observed during the field work. Based on this categorization and analysis of the activists’ user behavior the main contribution of this thesis is formulated: A description of how disability activists engage in infrastructuring of Twitter to create a platform where their mediated community can engage in online activism and civic engagement.