From Eccentricity to Extremism: Understanding the Anti-Covid-19 Movement as Countercultural Hybrid Media Activism

From Eccentricity to Extremism: Understanding the Anti-Covid-19 Movement as Countercultural Hybrid Media Activism
Anti-Covid-19 activism presents a complex and underestimated extremist threat, not yet critically analysed via subcultural theory in a constructive way, nor within a Welsh/UK context. By examining this movement, how it constructs and appropriates online narratives, and how this translates into behavioural organisation offline, this proposal seeks to use these insights to generate theoretical frameworks towards understanding anti-covid culture in new ways.
It would build on forthcoming research (Anthony 2022) describing a novel aspect of online anti-covid activism. Post social media, online antivaccine ideology is aligning itself with other social movements by building independent websites that hijack concomitant narratives, resulting in greater online reach. The forthcoming work faces time and resource constraints that preclude valuable offline sociological and ethnographic study.