Addressing corruption through visual tools in India: the case of three civil society initiatives and their Facebook pages

Abstract

In the past decades, several grassroots movement organisations across the world have tackled the issue of corruption with the aim of mobilising knowledge on this widespread problem. In our paper, we look at three bottom-up civil society organisations and collective actors fighting for greater transparency and curbing of corruption in Indian society, highlighting how they employ visuals to debate on these issues and to communicate their mission to their audiences. The focus is on how the initiatives employed visuals to discuss a particular anti-corruption policy of the central government. In particular, our paper sheds light on the dynamics between the three initiatives and the government especially at a time when democratic credentials of the country are in decline. Inspired by Rodriguez and Dimitrova’s four levels of visual framing, we propose a revised schema for visual framing analysis, taking into account contextual dimensions, in our study of visuals as tools enhancing public debates on corruption and anti-corruption practices.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We firstly would like to thank all our respondents connected to the case studies who helped us gain a comprehensive understanding of their activities. Secondly, we thank the editors of the journal and this special issue as well as the anonymous reviewers who gave us valuable inputs that shaped the paper in its current version. The two authors confirm that all necessary ethical approvals were obtained from the European Research Council Ethics Panel (1649987-13/03/2019) and the Ethics Committee of the University of Bologna (109872-4/6/2020) prior to the start of the empirical research on which this article is based.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The two authors acknowledge that this publication has been made possible by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant agreement No. 802362 BIT-ACT.

Notes on contributors

Anwesha Chakraborty

Anwesha Chakraborty is a Research Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, where she is part of the ERC-funded project BIT–ACT. At present, she is working on digital media and collective action against corruption. She is interested in studying various aspects of digital transformations in society, including technology policies, digital divides, e-governance, and ICTs for development. Her work has appeared in journals such as Asian Studies Review, First Monday, Journal of Science Communication, Sociologia del Lavoro, Sociologica and Telecommunications Policy.

Alice Mattoni

Alice Mattoni is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna (Italy). Her research focuses on the dynamic interplay between media — digital and otherwise — and social movements, civil society organisations and movement organisations. She currently serves as Principal Investigator of the ERC funded project BIT-ACT (2019–2024), which explores how civil society organizations and activists utilize digital media, digital data, and AI applications to combat corruption worldwide.