Identity Work as Deliberation: AAPI Political Discourse in the 2016 US Presidential Election

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are perceived as the "model minority" with a monolithic identity, in contrast to other marginalized racial groups in the United States. In reality, they are composed of different ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, and political ideologies. AAPIs share their political views online, engaging in the public sphere through a collaborative process we coin, "identity work as deliberation." Using the 2016 US Presidential Election as a case study, we retrieved 4,406 Reddit comments posted between October 2016 to December 2016. We examine how users engage in an online community through a deliberation lens to understand the extent to which Reddit supports identity work as a deliberative process. Under the collective AAPI umbrella, we find that ethnic identifications complicate the types of discussion possible within r/asianamerican. We discuss how the expression of identity, and thereby solidarity, in a politicized online setting may lead to a social movement.

[1]  Jennifer Lee.  The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism , 2011 .

[2]  Richard H. Nagasawa,et al.  Asian Americans as a Model Minority: Self-Perceptions and Perceptions by other Racial Groups , 1998 .

[3]  J. Habermas.  The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere , 1962 .

[4]  Alex Leavitt,et al.  "This is a Throwaway Account": Temporary Technical Identities and Perceptions of Anonymity in a Massive Online Community , 2015, CSCW.

[5]  Manuel Castells,et al.  Communication Power and Counter-power in the Network Society , 2007 .

[6]  Lynn Dombrowski,et al.  Disclosure, Stress, and Support During Gender Transition on Facebook , 2015, CSCW.

[7]  Libby Hemphill,et al.  Asian American Chicago Network: A Case Study of Facebook Group Use By Immigrant Groups , 2016, CSCW '16 Companion.

[8]  D. Snow,et al.  Identity Work Among the Homeless: The Verbal Construction and Avowal of Personal Identities , 1987, American Journal of Sociology.

[9]  Frieda Wong,et al.  The "model minority": Bane or blessing for Asian Americans? , 2006 .

[10]  J. Okamura.  The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race , 2017 .

[11]  K. Weick,et al.  Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking , 2005 .

[12]  Andy Koronios,et al.  Study of Asian immigrants' information behaviour in South Australia: preliminary results , 2014 .

[13]  J. Butler.  PERFORMATIVE ACTS AND GENDER CONSTITUTION: AN ESSAY IN PHENOMENOLOGY AND FEMINIST THEORY , 1988 .

[14]  Daryl J. Maeda.  Rethinking the Asian American Movement , 2012 .

[15]  Munmun De Choudhury,et al.  Understanding Social Media Disclosures of Sexual Abuse Through the Lenses of Support Seeking and Anonymity , 2016, CHI.

[16]  Patrick Olivier,et al.  A pool of dreams: facebook, politics and the emergence of a social movement , 2014, CHI.

[17]  David Kreitz.  Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Science Research Centre 1956, 161 S. (dt. Wir alle spielen Theater. Die Selbstdarstellung im Alltag, München 1969) , 2016 .

[18]  J. Feagin.  Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism , 2008 .

[19]  E. Goffman.  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 1959 .

[20]  Paul R. Lichterman.  Talking identity in the public sphere: Broad visions and small spaces in sexual identity politics , 1999 .

[21]  Liza Potts,et al.  Interfaces as rhetorical constructions: reddit and 4chan during the boston marathon bombings , 2013, SIGDOC '13.

[22]  F. C. P. Motta.  The theory of communicative action , 1991 .

[23]  Brenda. Chan.  Imagining the Homeland: The Internet and Diasporic Discourse of Nationalism , 2005 .

[24]  Bryan C. Semaan,et al.  Exploring AAPI Identity Online: Political Ideology as a Factor Affecting Identity Work on Reddit , 2017, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[25]  N. Sobol,et al.  Preliminary results , 2020, Asymptotic Analysis of Random Walks: Light-Tailed Distributions.

[26]  W. Keith Edwards,et al.  Intersectional HCI: Engaging Identity through Gender, Race, and Class , 2017, CHI.

[27]  Michael Omi,et al.  Racial formation in the United States , 1986 .

[28]  N. Ellison,et al.  Identity Work on Social Media Sites: Disadvantaged Students' College Transition Processes , 2016, CSCW 2016.

[29]  Joachim Schroer.  Voluntary Engagement in an Open Web-based Encyclopedia: From Reading to Contributing , 2008 .

[30]  Tawfiq Ammari,et al.  Understanding and Supporting Fathers and Fatherhood on Social Media Sites , 2015, CHI.

[31]  D. Harrison,et al.  Asian American Attitudes toward Affirmative Action in Employment , 1997 .

[32]  K. Osajima,et al.  Racial Politics and the Invisibility of Asian Americans in Higher Education. , 1995 .

[33]  Aaron D. Shaw,et al.  Starting Online Communities: Motivations and Goals of Wiki Founders , 2017, CHI.

[34]  J. Nathan Matias,et al.  Going Dark: Social Factors in Collective Action Against Platform Operators in the Reddit Blackout , 2016, CHI.

[35]  Kelly Bergstrom,et al.  "Don't feed the troll": Shutting down debate about community expectations on Reddit.com , 2011, First Monday.

[36]  D. Snow.  Collective Identity and Expressive Forms , 2001 .

[37]  Carrie Margaret Moore,et al.  Redditors Revealed: Motivational Factors of the Reddit Community , 2017, HICSS.

[38]  Robert D. Benford,et al.  IDENTITY TALK IN THE PEACE AND JUSTICE MOVEMENT , 1994 .

[39]  V. Nee,et al.  The Road to Parity: Determinants of the Socioeconomic Achievements of Asian Americans , 1985 .

[40]  Bryan C. Semaan,et al.  Impression Management in High Context Societies: 'Saving Face' with ICT , 2017, CSCW.

[41]  Patrick Olivier,et al.  HCI, Solidarity Movements and the Solidarity Economy , 2017, CHI.

[42]  J. Lofland,et al.  Analyzing Social Settings , 1971 .

[43]  Robert B. Everhart.  Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth. , 1998 .

[44]  G. Hertel,et al.  Voluntary Engagement in an Open Web-based Encyclopedia: Wikipedians, and Why They Do It , 2007 .

[45]  S. Schulze.  Glass Ceilings And Asian Americans The New Face Of Workplace Barriers , 2016 .