Podcasts as a Medium for Participation in Collective Action: A Case Study of Black Lives Matter
This research addresses the gap in understanding activism in spoken digital discourse for social scientists and media researchers, though it is incremental by applying existing frameworks to a new medium.
The study analyzed podcast transcripts to examine how participation in collective action is expressed in audio formats, using the Black Lives Matter movement as a case, and found that emotional profiles vary by activism stage with positive emotions linked to calls-to-action and negative emotions showing unexpected associations.
We study how participation in collective action is articulated in podcast discussions, using the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as a case study. While research on collective action discourse has primarily focused on text-based content, this study takes a first step toward analyzing audio formats by using podcast transcripts. Using the Structured Podcast Research Corpus (SPoRC), we investigated spoken language expressions of participation in collective action, categorized as problem-solution, call-to-action, intention, and execution. We identified podcast episodes discussing racial justice after important BLM-related events in May and June of 2020, and extracted participatory statements using a layered framework adapted from prior work on social media. We examined the emotional dimensions of these statements, detecting eight key emotions and their association with varying stages of activism. We found that emotional profiles vary by stage, with different positive emotions standing out during calls-to-action, intention, and execution. We detected negative associations between collective action and negative emotions, contrary to theoretical expectations. Our work contributes to a better understanding of how activism is expressed in spoken digital discourse and how emotional framing may depend on the format of the discussion.