Morality, aggression, and social activism in a transmedia sports controversy

Abstract

This article examines how the interconnections between morality, aggression, and social activism are discursively articulated in two data sets: a face-to-face sport controversy and a corpus of evaluative online comments in response to reports of said controversy. The study adopted a combined transmedia, critical, and intersectional perspective that revealed the divergent interpretations of the controversy as an aggression that threatened the moral or a case of activism in defense of the moral. Thus, competing moral and social frameworks were found to lie behind social division and suggested the need for intersectional awareness and critical views on the complex and unstable distinctions between causing and taking offence and between the roles of transgressor/offender and victim/offended.