Russia’s regions are the scene of recurring protests that rally people around different causes. In her project, sociologist Tatiana Golova focuses on protest campaigns where a regional or local identity plays a central role in combination with other (ecological, electoral, etc.) issues. These mobilising (or demobilising) interpretations of events and actors arise in a hybrid online-offline space, with social media being hugely important given the closure of other public platforms and despite digital repression. This project investigates discursive mobilisation on social media in the context of concrete protests and looks at the frames (shared interpretations) users construct and how contentious issues are ‘regionalised’. The first case study to be examined are the protests in the Khabarovsk Krai triggered by the arrest in July 2020 of the Governor Sergey Furgal – the surprise victor of the 2018 gubernatorial election – which lasted several months.

• Combination of quantitative and qualitative methods
• Analysis of large corpora of social media contributions on concrete protests using natural language processing methods to reconstruct the long-term dynamics of positive and negative contributions and identify clusters (groups of similar texts)
• Qualitative analysis of selected texts that are representative of specific clusters
• Reconstruction of shared interpretative frames

• How are social media used in concrete protest campaigns in Russia’s regions?
• What long-term dynamics of social media contributions can be identified and what is their relationship to specific protest events?
• What main lines of interpretation are constructed on social media and harnessed for mobilisation?
• To what extent do local and nationwide discourses on the same regional protest campaigns diverge?