Social media offers an attractive site for Big Data research. Access to big social media data, however, is controlled by companies that privilege corporate, governmental, and private research firms. Additionally, Institutional Review Boards’ regulative practices and slow adaptation to emerging ethical dilemmas in online contexts creates challenges for Big Data researchers. We examine these challenges in the context of a feminist qualitative Big Data analysis of the hashtag event #WhyIStayed. We argue power, context, and subjugated knowledges must each be central considerations in conducting Big Data social media research. In doing so, this paper offers a feminist practice of holistic reflexivity in order to help social media researchers navigate and negotiate this terrain.

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Scholars have argued that digital spaces are key sites for feminist activism, which can be seen in the emergence of “hashtag feminism,” or the use of social media hashtags to address feminist-identified issues through sharing personal experiences of inequality, constructing counter-discourses, and critiquing cultural figures and institutions. However, more empirical research is needed that examines both the possibilities and constraints of hashtag feminism. Through a qualitative analysis of 51,577 archived tweets and semi-structured interviews, we trace the ways #WhyIStayed creates a space for feminist activism in response to victim-blaming related to domestic violence through voice, multivocality, and visibility. More specifically, we critically analyze postfeminist discourses within #WhyIStayed in order to examine contradictions within the hashtag event as well as how these postfeminist contradictions shape possibilities for feminist activism online.

Reflexivity is considered a hallmark of qualitative research. With the continued growth in team-based research, more attention is needed to what it means to practice reflexivity within the context of these research collaborations. In this article, we draw upon scholarship on reflexivity and our own experiences to develop what we term ‘collaborative feminist reflexivity’ (CFR). CFR represents a form of reflexivity that is distinctly collaborative in how it is enacted, grounded in feminist epistemological and ethical commitments, holistically engaged throughout the research process, and multifaceted, involving multiple formal and informal practices. In critically analyzing our own reflexive practices in the context of an interdisciplinary, multi-method study on hashtag activism related to domestic violence, we seek to identify specific practices for research teams as well as interrogate the potentials and limitations of these practices for enacting feminist reflexivity.

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