Week 3 blog post

Ruth Osorio's article "I Am #ActuallyAutistic, Hear Me Tweet: The Autist-Topoi of Autistic Activists on Twitter" gave me a deeper understanding of the concept of topoi, as well as the way they are used by activists and what this activist work can look like on social media. I don’t think I’d heard of the concept of topoi before, but this article made it easy to understand, and now I can very clearly see topoi at work in both dominant narratives and counternarratives put forth by activists. “Topos” actually is a useful term for me, because in argumentation I’ve often tried to express “common ideas” or “things people think” without really knowing what to call them, and that confusion and informality definitely didn’t make my arguments seem very credible.

I think topoi are very pertinent to the movement I am studying, the animal rights movement. A lot of animal advocacy work centers around trying to dispel misconceptions about animals – as I discussed in my Wednesday post, for example, the topos that animals are unfeeling and thus it’s okay to kill them. I do still have some issues with trying to use a hashtag as a “space,” just because they are unregulated and constantly changing and can be very inconsistent. But I can still see how hashtags are important and how they are used in the animal rights movement.