Tereza Menšíková is now a PhD

Congratulations to Tereza! Below is the abstract of the thesis.

Contemporary anti-caste movements in India face a major challenge: the fragmentation of their networks and mobilization efforts. With the emergence of the Internet and the increasing accessibility of advanced technologies in the 21st century, these new opportunities have raised the expectations of many activists from marginalized backgrounds regarding the role of digital activism in bridging this divide. In my dissertation, I aim to explore this issue by analyzing a large corpus of anti-caste textual materials, with a particular focus on contemporary Ambedkarite Buddhism as a strategy proposed by B. R. Ambedkar for promoting change in Indian society. My research examines how cultural resources of Ambedkarite Buddhism are used in contemporary Ambedkarite anti-caste discourse online, focusing on the mobilizing potential of specific collective action frames and the cultural production embedded in them. Through a novel mixed-methods approach combining fieldwork, computational text analysis, and content-based frame analysis, I identify major topical categories, collective action frames, and grievances in the digital discourse and estimate their mobilizing potential through mutual co-occurrence. The findings highlight three challenges that the Ambedkarite movements face: 1) how to appeal to human rights issues without invoking caste-ethic identities, 2) how to bridge reformist and revolutionary approaches, and 3) how to draw on global Buddhist cultural resources while maintaining local contextual boundaries. By pointing to the broader issues of mobilizing for collective action through universalist or contextualized cultural production, the thesis contributes to an understanding of the complex relationships between cultural resources governance and their mobilizing potential that social movements must navigate to sustain their future.