This PhD project seeks to explore the cultural processes behind protest participation. In the quest to advance the ongoing debate on the relevance of collective identity and leaders in the context of contemporary issue-based movements I am going to examine the processes pertaining to identity and leadership. The main points of focus at the micro-level are the protesters’ motives for participation, their (self-)identification as well as perceptions of identity content and of prototypical group members and personal role models. At the meso-level, they will be connecting to the movement-wide identity processes, the emergence of celebrities as movement leaders and the resonance of their political communication frames.
Russia’s current anti-war movement is the perfect case study as it is an issue-based protest movement, heterogenous, with no clearly defined leaders and accompanied by celebrity endorsements. For the empirical part of my research I am going to conduct qualitative interviews with at least 30 protest participants, preceded by netnography (including Telegram) and followed by a framing analysis of the political communication of movement leaders. My approach will be partially deductive, based on a blend of frameworks on identity, leadership, celebrity, framing and political communication, and partially inductive, following the grounded theory logic.
