**Summary:** Social media excite the public imagination with their potential for democratization, newer forms of news storytelling and social change. Digitally aided waves of civil unrest invite speculation on whether social media make or break the pace of revolutionary movements. Drawing from analyses of the unfinished revolutions and interrupted movements of the past few years, this talk begins by examining the role of social media in introducing a new political. Data from recent studies undertaken at the University of Illinois at Chicago are presented in explicating the relevance of the platform for contemporary news storytelling, framing, and gatekeeping. The talk concludes with an emphasis on the concept of affective publics, and how these public formations sustain all forms of mobilization, including recent waves of populism.
Thursday, 10/18/2018
11:00am-12:20pm
Kent 120
A light lunch will be provided by Pizza Capri.
**Zizi Papacharissi** is Professor and Head of the Communication Department, Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and University Scholar at the University of Illinois System. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. She has published nine books, over 70 journal articles and book chapters, and serves on the editorial board of fifteen journals. Zizi is the founding and current Editor of the open access journal Social Media & Society. She has collaborated with Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oculus and has participated in closed consultations with the Obama 2012 election campaign. She sits on the Committee on the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults, funded by the National Academies of Science, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine in the US, and has been invited to lecture about her work on social media in several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Her work has been translated in Greek, German, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish, and Persian. She is presently working on her 10th book, titled After Democracy, with Yale University Press.
The 2018-2019 Computational Social Science Workshop meets Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. in Kent 120. All interested faculty and graduate students are welcome.
Students in the Masters of Computational Social Science program are expected to attend and join the discussion by posting a comment on the issues page of the workshop's public repository on GitHub. Further instructions are documented in the Computational Social Science Workshop's README on Github.