The Ethics and Politics of Representation in Researching with Social Movement Activists in the Social Media Age

Sociological research on social movements has increasingly been conducted online, not only because online activism has become prevalent in recent years across multiple geographies, but also because researchers have innovated their fieldwork methodologies with the pioneering arrival of new methods such as netnography (Kozinets, 2019). While there has been a corresponding research ethics literature in recent years on grappling with issues that arise from social media research (e.g. Hunter et al, 2018), as well as on the ethics in researching under repressive conditions (Glasius et al, 2018; Cox et al, 2024), relatively little attention has been paid to the ethics and politics of conducting social movements research in the social media age. In particular, we would like to focus on the issue of representation, both in terms of our research participants who are social movement activists, as well as ourselves in our positionality as researcher-activists. In this paper, we will draw upon the fieldwork experiences of both authors who conduct online research with anti-racist activists in Finland and pro-democracy activists from Hong Kong, and highlight some of the ethical challenges we have faced and how we are dealing with them. The issues we will discuss include: how researchers’ online and offline identities may impact on fieldwork encounters -- how social movement members may make certain assumptions about, and interact differently with, researchers who emphasize their researcher versus activist positionalities; how relational distance, rather than rapport, may be more helpful in eliciting engagement from our social movement participants; and finally, on the ethics of disclosure where we tease out the difficulties and risks of identification for both researcher-activists as well as the social movement activists, and where we advocate allowing both the researchers and the researched to be empowered in deciding how their identities are to be represented in sociological research.