Papers by Chrissy Thompson
The Emerald Handbook of Technology-Facilitated Violence and Abuse, 2020
This chapter examines the structure and sentiment of the Twitter response to Nathan Broad’s namin... more This chapter examines the structure and sentiment of the Twitter response to Nathan Broad’s naming as the originator of an image-based sexual abuse incident following the 2017 AFL Grand Final. Employing Social Network Analysis to visualise the hierarchy of Twitter users responding to the incident and Applied Thematic Analysis to trace the diffusion of differing streams of sentiment within this hierarchy, we produced a representation of participatory social media engagement in the context of image-based sexual abuse. Following two streams of findings, a model of social media user engagement was established which hierarchised the interplay between institutional and personal Twitter users. In this model, it was observed that the Broad incident generated sympathetic and compassionate discourses amongst an articulated network of social media users. This sentiment gradually diffused to institutional twitter users – or Reference accounts - through the process of intermedia agenda-setting, whereby the narrative of terrestrial media accounts was altered by personal Twitter users over time.
Violence Against Women, 2019
Discourses on men’s violence against women have long been associated with linguistic avoidance an... more Discourses on men’s violence against women have long been associated with linguistic avoidance and communicative strategies that obscure the responsibility of male perpetrators. Linguistic avoidance does not only obfuscate the responsibility of male perpetrators; such strategies also hide the norms and attitudes that underpin much of men’s violence against women. Such techniques represent a form of misdirection: communicative strategies that draw attention away from the true causes or nature of an issue. To demonstrate misdirection in action, I conduct a feminist critical discourse analysis of Australian parliamentarians’ speech acts during the criminalisation of upskirting in Victoria in 2007.
PacifiCrim: The Newsletter of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology, 2018
I was invited to write this short piece after my difficulties in accessing the British Society of... more I was invited to write this short piece after my difficulties in accessing the British Society of Criminology conference in the UK were aired on Twitter in June of this year. With the power of social media, my frustration with the exclusionary practices and inaccessibility of academic conferences had finally garnered the attention of those beyond my immediate social network. I'd like to share my own observations, not only about where things have gone wrong, but how criminology as a discipline can move forward to be a more inclusive and accessible community for all researchers.
Feminist Media Studies
A technologically armed peeping Tom, the creeper is the most recent incarnation of the video voye... more A technologically armed peeping Tom, the creeper is the most recent incarnation of the video voyeur of the late 1990's, disseminating and sharing non-consensual sexual photographs via the Internet. Alongside revenge pornography and upskirting, creepshots are a recent and harmful iteration of sexual images that are captured and distributed without consent online. In order to understand the evolution of the creepshot and its current status as a major form of online misogyny, we have to excavate the past, and analyse the technological developments that have enabled this behavior to proliferate today. Whilst we are concerned with the present state of creepshots and online misogyny, we situate these forms of technologically facilitated violence against women against a backdrop of developments in audiovisual media that have altered the gendered regimes of visibility women are entangled in. We therefore conduct a media archeology that examines the technological preconditions for both producing and disseminating creepshots online.
Surveillance & Society
Speed camera 'traps', random breath testing (RBT) stations, and other forms of mobile traffic sur... more Speed camera 'traps', random breath testing (RBT) stations, and other forms of mobile traffic surveillance have long been circumvented by motorists. However, as technologies for traffic surveillance have developed, so too have technologies enabling individuals to monitor and countersurveil these measures. One of the most recent forms of these countersurveillance platforms can be found on Facebook, where dedicated regional and national RBT and 'police presence' pages publicly post the locations of various forms of police surveillance in real-time. In this article, we argue that Facebook RBT pages exemplify a new form of social media facilitated countersurveillance we term crowdsourced countersurveillance the use of knowledge-discovery and management crowdsourcing to facilitate surveillance discovery, avoidance and countersurveillance. Crowdsourced countersurveillance, we argue, represents a form of countersurveillant assemblage: an ensemble of individuals, technologies, and data flows that, more than the sum of their parts, function together to neutralize surveillance measures. Facilitated by affordances for crowdsourcing, aggregating, and crowdmapping geographical data information on surveillance actors, crowdsourced countersurveillance provides a means of generating 'hybrid heterotopias': mediated counter-sites that enable individuals to contest and circumvent surveilled spatial arrangements.
Wood, M.A., Rose, E., Thompson, C., (2017), ‘Viral justice? Online justice-seeking, intimate partner violence, and affective contagion,’ Theoretical Criminology, DOI: 10.1177/1362480617750507, 2017
What has been termed the survivor selfie is a recent and growing phenomenon whereby survivors of ... more What has been termed the survivor selfie is a recent and growing phenomenon whereby survivors of intimate partner violence or their close supporters upload graphic photos and accounts of their injuries and suffering to social media. In this article, we examine how the like economy of Facebook can lead to the rapid circulation of survivor selfies to large audiences, and in doing so, generate what we term viral justice: the outcome of a victim's online justice-seeking post 'going viral' and quickly being viewed and shared-on by thousands of social media users. Through examining the trajectory and impact of one particular case – Ashlee Savins's viral survivor selfie – we identify the technological preconditions of viral justice and three of its key dimensions: affective contagion, swarm sociality, and movement power. Through discussing the speed, sociality, and contagion of viral justice, we critically consider some of its implications for online justice-seeking, and responding to intimate partner violence.
Conference Presentations by Chrissy Thompson
Paper presented at ANZSOC Conference 2017
A technologically armed peeping Tom, the creeper is the most recent incarnation of the video voye... more A technologically armed peeping Tom, the creeper is the most recent incarnation of the video voyeur of the late 1990’s, disseminating and sharing non-consensual sexual photographs via the Internet. Alongside upskirting, creepshots are a recent and harmful iteration of sexual images that are captured and distributed without consent online. In this paper, we examine how the 21st century discourse network of computational and mobile media has transformed the storage, classification, retrieval and consumption of non-consensual sexual photographs of women. Through incorporating collective social tagging systems, we argue that creepshot websites have generated folksonomies of misogyny: multi-user-tagging practices that function to tag content in a way that fosters harmful sexist attitudes. Such folksonomies of misogyny, we argue, not only offer a barometer of the vocabulary used to objectify women, but also represent an entirely new gendered regime of visibility where women’s bodies are recorded, tagged, fragmented, and aggregated for consumption.
A technologically armed peeping Tom, the creeper is the most recent incarnation of the video voye... more A technologically armed peeping Tom, the creeper is the most recent incarnation of the video voyeur of the late 1990’s, disseminating and sharing non-consensual sexual photographs viathe Internet. Alongside upskirting, creepshots are a recent and harmful iteration of sexual images that are captured and distributed without consent online. In addition to examining the changing conditions for image production, research into such non-consensual sexual photographs of women must take into account the changing context of information storage, classification and retrieval. In this paper, we therefore examine how the 21st century discourse network of computational and mobile media has transformed the storage, classification, retrieval and consumption of non-consensual sexual photographs of women. Through incorporating collective social tagging systems, we argue that creepshot websites
have generated folksonomies of misogyny: multi-user tagging practices that function to tag content in a way that fosters harmful sexist attitudes. Such folksonomies of misogyny, we argue, not only offer a barometer of the vocabulary used to objectify women, but also represent an entirely new gendered regime of visibility where women’s bodies are recorded, tagged, fragmented, and aggregated for consumption.
Intimate partner violence continues to be the most pervasive harm perpetrated against women, yet ... more Intimate partner violence continues to be the most pervasive harm perpetrated against women, yet it remains significantly undocumented and unreported. Part of the problem has been attributed to the difficulties victims encounter when traversing formal criminal justice pathways and recently, a wealth of informal justice mechanisms have been documented by scholars as mechanisms victims can utilise in order to achieve justice. What we term the 'survivor selfie' is a recent and growing form of online informal justice whereby survivors of intimate partner violence or their close supporters upload to social media sites often graphic photos of injuries perpetrated by an intimate partner. Addressing the largely hidden nature of intimate partner violence has been a priority for victim-survivors and activists, and the 'survivor-selfie' offers a particularly interesting and innovative contemporary tool for achieving this aim. In this presentation, we explore both the positive and problematic implications of the survivor-selfie and offer a critical commentary on this previously undocumented phenomenon. This discussion is anchored to an emerging phenomenon we term viral justice: a specific form of online informal justice that is produced through Internet virality and the like economy of social media. Such platforms include, but are not limited to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr. Though closely associated with online shaming, as we will argue through our analysis of survivor-selfies, viral justice does not solely function to publically shame or humiliate perpetrators. It may also function as a form of evidence, an attempt to garner support from a sympathetic audience, and as a form of online activism or awareness raising. We critically explore the possibilities and problems associated with this new form of online justice, and what this might mean for victims of intimate partner violence now and in the future.
Upskirting – covertly photographing a person's genital or anal region, often to distribute the fo... more Upskirting – covertly photographing a person's genital or anal region, often to distribute the footage online – is frequently neglected as a form of serious online sexual predation against women. This behaviour has occurred for centuries, and while its form has changed with the advent of smart phones and the internet, it has remained a pervasive and insidious harm against women. Drawing on my doctoral research this paper presents findings from a discourse analysis of the Victorian parliamentary debates relating to the Summary Offences Amendment (Upskirting) Bill 2007, and a sample of Australian media reports on upskirting over a 10-year period between 2005-2015. In this paper, I analyse the discursive construction of upskirting and identify three recurring themes that a) represent this behaviour as a harmless or victimless crime; b) only portray the behaviour as an invasion of privacy, and c) normalise harmful sexist ideology relating to gendered violence. I contend that upskirting is another example of how online spaces can facilitate violence against women, and that the ways in which it has been represented has simultaneously obscured, denied and contributed to the harm this behaviour can engender. It is imperative that in addition to understanding the nature of new technologically facilitated harms such as upskirting, scholars should also examine and challenge problematic popular representations of these new harms, so that a broader audience might also 'rethink' cybercrime.
Talks by Chrissy Thompson
I presented with three other women at the IPAA 'Empowering Women Summit' in August 2019 on Inters... more I presented with three other women at the IPAA 'Empowering Women Summit' in August 2019 on Intersectionality and Diversity.
A public lecture reflecting on gender, disability and what it's like to adjust to life with a new... more A public lecture reflecting on gender, disability and what it's like to adjust to life with a new body.
Uploads
Papers by Chrissy Thompson
Conference Presentations by Chrissy Thompson
have generated folksonomies of misogyny: multi-user tagging practices that function to tag content in a way that fosters harmful sexist attitudes. Such folksonomies of misogyny, we argue, not only offer a barometer of the vocabulary used to objectify women, but also represent an entirely new gendered regime of visibility where women’s bodies are recorded, tagged, fragmented, and aggregated for consumption.
Talks by Chrissy Thompson
have generated folksonomies of misogyny: multi-user tagging practices that function to tag content in a way that fosters harmful sexist attitudes. Such folksonomies of misogyny, we argue, not only offer a barometer of the vocabulary used to objectify women, but also represent an entirely new gendered regime of visibility where women’s bodies are recorded, tagged, fragmented, and aggregated for consumption.