Using Emotion-Symbolic Work For Social Change.

Dr Itziar Castello, Centre of Digital Economy, Surrey Business School.

Itziar’s research has recently looked at how social entrepreneurs use images to convince people to enact drastic change. Through a longitudinal study based on interviews, observational, archival and social media data, Itziar analysed how anti-plastic pollution social entrepreneurs use multimodal (visual and verbal) interactions to influence their targets and promote their cause. Her findings reveal that these social entrepreneurs used what we call emotion-symbolic work, which involved using visuals and words to elicit negative emotions through moral shock, and then transforming those emotions into emotional energy for enactment. The emotional transformation process entailed connecting target actors to a cause, a collective identity and the social entrepreneurs themselves. The exploration of emotion-symbolic work offers new ways of seeing by emphasising the use of multimodal interactions to affect emotions in efforts to influence target actors to enact a cause.

See also the video about the paper here

Itziar’s research was Feature in the top 100 articles in management for societal contribution (February 24th 2020). Listed as 47th. See here.

Selected as runners up at the 2020 ONE-SIM Award for best outreach activities based on a published paper. See here.

It has been presented as keynote or as paper presentation in conferences such as: The Academy of Management, EGOS, ICSRCOM, Organization Studies Summer Conference, etc. 

Itziar’s has been selected for the 2020 Woman’s #thinklist30

Dr Itziar Castello, Centre of Digital Economy, Surrey Business School.