PhD candidate Andrew Zalot successfully defended his dissertation, "'Tweet of the Town:' Synthesizing Local and Social Media Discourse on Book Bans," on July 3.
His committee included Assistant Professor Rachel M. Magee (chair); Professor Emily Knox; Associate Professor Kate McDowell; and Marianne Martens, professor in the School of Information at Kent State University.
Abstract: This dissertation examines the intersection of local and social media discourse during a book ban to understand how communities respond when a book ban takes place. This study explores the role social media discourse can play in community responses to book bans and the long-term effects of book bans. In 2022, the community of McMinn County, Tennessee, experienced a book ban when their district’s school board voted 10-0 to ban Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir, Maus, from the district’s eighth-grade curriculum. Through tweets collected on Twitter (X) about the ban and semi-structured interviews with residents of McMinn County, this study provides insights into how local and social media discourse can become entangled during a book ban. This dissertation provides a framework for understanding how social media discourse can intersect with local discourse through the concept of Localized Social Media Intervention, which builds upon Danielle Allen’s discourse flow model. LSMI suggests that outsiders, through social media, have the ability to influence local discourse and affect change in ways beyond the digital world.