interviewed for Salt Lake Tribune article on far-right influences in Mormon Twitter

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to be interviewed by Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Tamarra Kemsley about work that Amy Chapman and I have been doing on the reactionary DezNat movement within Mormon Twitter. Our conversation largely focused on the article that Amy and I published last year on far-right and anti-feminist influences within DezNat, but I got to pull in some observations from an article on DezNat perceptions of religious authority that is currently under review and some work on broad patterns in DezNat activity between early 2019 and late 2022 that we’ll be presenting at October’s meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (more specifically, within a session organized by the Mormon Social Science Association).

Kemsley’s article can be found here—it’s behind a paywall, which is annoying, but as someone who finds the Tribune’s religion coverage valuable enough to pay for, I get it. As a preview, here’s one excerpt from the (edited) interview:

DezNat raises questions about what appropriate boundaries within Mormonism are.

Anti-feminist discourses that are present in DezNat have some overlap with church teachings. Where is the line between what is preached at General Conference and aggressive behavior towards women online? Can you form a boundary between those? Can you form a boundary between sustaining Ezra Taft Benson as a former president of the church and accepting that earlier in his life he wanted him to run for president with famous segregationist George Wallace?

I don’t know where those lines are. That’s largely an exercise for Latter-day Saint leadership and membership. But it does blur some of those boundaries in ways that I think are challenging and maybe even disturbing.

While I will always wonder if I could have worded things better, this comment foregrounds the questions about boundaries and boundary maintenance that DezNat research keeps bringing to mind. I’ve long been using James Paul Gee’s affinity space framework to understand online communities, because it accounts for (and draws attention to) fuzzy boundaries, ill-defined spaces, and that sort of thing. My embrace of this particular framework began for pragmatic purposes—I didn’t have to demonstrate that a community of practice was present before I could justify studying activity within a Twitter hashtag. With my turn to DezNat research, though, the fuzzy boundaries are the point, and draw attention to important questions related to contemporary Mormonism.

• macro
• Work
• Salt Lake Tribune
• media appearances
• Tamarra Kemsley
• DezNat
• online Mormonism
• Mormon Twitter
• Amy Chapman
• boundary maintenance
• religious authority
• SSSR
• MSSA
• SSSR 2024
• Ezra Taft Benson
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• Mormonism
• affinity space
• James Paul Gee