Online Deliberation Lived Experiences of Kānaka Maoli Women
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ONLINE DELIBERATION LIVED EXPERIENCES OF KĀNAKA MAOLI WOMEN A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION SCIENCES AUGUST 2018 By Caterina Desiato Dissertation Committee: Daniel D. Suthers, Chairperson Malia Akutagawa Scott Robertson Jenifer Sunrise Winter Meda Chesney-Lind, University Representative Keywords: Online deliberation, social media, Hawai‘i, women, sovereignty Acknowledgments I would like to thank the co-chairs of what I call my "support committee": Oren Tsutsumi and Keila Santaella. Mahalo ʻohana because I literally could not have made it through without your encouragement and help with chilcare, food delivery, moving and cleaning at abosultely crucial times! Oren, thank you so much also for your important suggestions, introducing me to inspiring wāhine koa, and for helping me to press "send" before it was too late! Mahalo to all my friends, with a special mention to Jessica Merth for your sisterhood in motherhood and invaluable support, Michael Pellagatti for your precious suggestions, Kerrie Littlejohn for your heartwarming student-parent solidarity, and Jun Park for your editing advice. Thank you to the scientific committee of this research for bearing with me and my intellectual wandering through years of juggling work, motherhood, and research; Dan Suthers in particular, thank you for believing in me and supporting me through successes and crises, for daring to question not just my assumptions but also your own, for years of lively intellectual conversations. Thank you to my whole family and in particular: mother, Francesca Andrei, I owe you at least one visit without carring my work with me; brother, Tommaso Desiato, we don’t talk often enough but with simple words you reconnected me with sources of persistence at times I had reached the bottom of my strength; father, Salvatore Desiato, the unsaid with you is now forgotten and maybe better known in your still brilliant mind; daughter’s paternal grandma, Melinda Timmons, thank you for your unwilting encouragment and support; and a particular acknowledgment to you, daughter, Keea Desiato Satsuma, so little and so great, your love, laughter, and cries keep guiding me back to the way to be a caring person, and a well-rounded mother. A special acknowledgment for sharing your manaʻo on crucial aspects of this research to: Laulani Teale, endless source of inspiration, in action and word; Lynette Cruz, your work lit one of the first sparks in me that brought me to this project years later; Malia Akutagawa, I thank you immensily for your support for this research under many guises; Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, for your deep, vibrant insight and for referring me to Malia Akutagawa; Noelani Wahilani for your warm responsiveness and vision; and Piʻikea Keawekane-Stafford for your vital help connecting, coordinating, and finding a beautiful meeting place for the Moku o Keawe focus group. Me ke aloha, Caterina (Cat / Catì) Desiato 2 Abstract Online deliberation has increasingly attracted scholarly attention and stirred the hope for more diverse and actively inclusive public conversations to inform different polities. However, little research has been conducted to understand the realities, opportunities, and risks of people who are voicing their political views online while holding challenging positions in the matrix of power. This study begins to address this gap focusing on the experiences of Kānaka Maoli women who voice their cultural and political sovereignty positions online. The project aims to contribute to the understanding of how common online deliberation platforms (social media, particularly Facebook) support or hinder the expression and the maintenance of diverse perspectives online using a triangulation of interviews, focus group, and discourse analysis. Main findings include socio-technical affordances that disrupt participants' lifeworlds (such as self-branding, reactivity-visibility loop, cultural appropriation, infiltration, surveillance, and online harassment), others that support them (such as remediation, phatic communication, summoning, and steps towards epistemological and spatial redistribution), and most interestingly, complex affordances that require extra agency on the part of participants to appropriate the media for their purposes (such as responsible self-modeling, reframing mainstream discourses, and connected presence of body, mind, and spirit). Such complex affordances present a shared, creative effort that, with the support of both participants’ and scholarly communities, can foster a Hawaiʻi-based, safe and empowering use of communication media. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgments......................................................................................................... 2 Abstract ......................................................................................................................... 3 Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 5 Research Background ................................................................................................... 8 Deliberation, consensus, and affordances ................................................................. 8 Online Deliberation Disconnects ............................................................................ 30 Feminist Disconnects and Reconnecting ................................................................ 35 Intersectional contexts, identities, and scales ......................................................... 40 Relocating to my body and place ............................................................................ 43 Research Questions ..................................................................................................... 49 Methods....................................................................................................................... 49 Results ......................................................................................................................... 56 Intimate Scale.......................................................................................................... 58 Discursive Scale: Ranges of Vision, Orders of Discourse ...................................... 65 Discursive Scale: Sociotechnical Protocol, and Lack Thereof ............................... 87 Macro Mechanisms of Occupation and De-Occupation Scale ............................. 104 Discussion ................................................................................................................. 110 Deliberation and Participation in Power ............................................................... 110 Whose Space? Fluid public clusters ..................................................................... 113 Underlying Philosophy of Information Technology ............................................. 115 Conclusions ............................................................................................................... 119 References ................................................................................................................. 121 Appendix 1 – Interview Guide .................................................................................. 137 Appendix 2 – Critical discourse analysis chart ......................................................... 140 Appendix 3 – Summary Report to Participants (Focus Group Example) ................. 142 4 Introduction Online deliberation has increasingly attracted scholarly attention and stirred the hope for more diverse and inclusive public conversations to inform different forms of polities. However, little research has been conducted to understand the realities, opportunities and risks of people who are voicing their political views online while holding particularly challenging positions within the networks of power (Fuchs, 2014). I mean challenging in both senses of being challenged by and actively challenging current differential flows of power. This research focuses on the experiences of Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) women with online deliberation and the use of social media for the expression of cultural and political sovereignty. As discussed further in the background section, I believe they stand in a very challenging social and political position in both senses just mentioned. Therefore, I draw upon the fields of deliberative democracy and online deliberation and hope to contribute to their ongoing critical shifts by learning about, from, and with this inspiring group of people. Indeed, the field of online deliberation does not offer many critical tools to understand the experiences of engaging in online political conversations from native histories of sovereignty and occupation, their intersections with gender and race, and their purposes inextricable from spiritual ones. The polities commonly talked about in online deliberation, or assumed to be the purpose of participation, are usually some variants of “Western” democracies. However, the broader online deliberative system is shaped by and shapes also other forms of participation. There is a lot to learn about possible challenges, differential impacts, fruitful engagements, or other possible experiences with online deliberation