Urban Media and Participatory Spaces Research Group

Call for Papers: The aesthetics of digital vigilantism: cues, cases, and inequalities 

Special Issue and Symposium

Editors/organisers:

Helton Levy – London Metropolitan University | Eleonora Diamanti – John Cabot University

Symposium: Spring 2026 – Place TBD

Submit your 250-word abstract to dvigilantism@gmail.com by 15 November 2025 (Extended deadline)

The urban experience shared on digital platforms suggest a situation of constant surveillance (Lyon, 2018), where alternative democratic participation occurs through vigilantism and monitory forms (Bateson, 2021; Keane, 2009). The advent of digital vigilantism in contemporary cities has been a well-documented and theorised phenomenon (Trottier, 2017; Galleguillos, 2022). In many parts of the world, online videos have documented the persecution of individuals or the denounced deviance issues, from littering on the streets (Vicenová, 2020) to graffiti on walls (Levy, 2024) and far-right surveillance (Tanner & Campana, 2020). The advent of digital vigilantism has added new – and some alarming – possibilities to the documenting of deviance in city environments, leading to scholarly debate about whether some digital media users are moving towards an established form of “digilantism” (Reichl, 2019), a growing everyday practice of creating and sharing perceived deviant behaviour on multiple platforms. From “scambaiting” on social media (Sorell, 2019), holocaust heritage patrols (Wigh & Stanley, 2024), and humour exposing (Schwarz & Richley, 2019). In another way, digilantism has also been used to combat online misogyny (Jane, 2016). More informally, though, there is an extensive list of videos, photos, and artistic representations of shoplifters, flytippers, or minor misdemeanors caught on camera daily. In another way, feminist reappropriation of digilantism has been used to combat patriarchal and gender-based power dynamics such as online misogyny and sexual harassment (Jane, 2016; Vitis and Segrave, 2017).

This call addresses the scenario of normalisation of digital vigilantism as connected to neoliberal technologies which encourage forms of monitory citizenship, focusing on the aesthetics behind its success as a converging online media and offline development. Whether on video, photography, art, or, more recently, artificial intelligence and live streaming, there are under-explored ramifications of visual and sensorial aspects of digilantism that target and affect specific users or publics. For example, the availability of personal images on social media could ease the advent of public shaming (Kasra, 2017) or the so-called “pedofilia hunters” who assemble unrelated images and draw associations from them (Campbell, 2016). The aim is to prompt a better understanding of the formation of an aesthetics surrounding digital vigilantism, not only through the appropriation of images, but also through the use of colours, sources, senses, and the purposeful rendering of user-generated content (UGC) into visual and audio vocabularies.

This call poses the following questions: to what extent do the aesthetic, broadly conceived, matter for assembling and empowering content associated with digital vigilantism? What are the sensory cues that digital creators, either acting as watchdogs or not, follow to produce vigilant or public shaming content? What divides are reinforced or challenged once specific aesthetics are appropriated or made in the context of vigilante action? What sort of aesthetics can lead to vigilante virality and somehow be an accepted form of exposing others? Based on case studies, what implications exist for social media consumers in engaging with vigilante content that seems alluring and convincing? How could social media providers, moderators or regulators participate in a particular aesthetics that becomes conducive to or challenging injustice and inequality? What results from the aesthetisation of the relationship between the persecutor and the persecuted? 

We are interested in papers that help address these and other relevant questions on pointing to known and unknown aesthetics, broadly conceived, of digital vigilantism. We welcome contributions from all areas and disciplines and warmly encourage studies situated in the Global South, de-centring the Global North or challenging dominant narratives. Some intersection areas include:

• AI representations of deviance
• Criminology studies
• Meme vigilantism
• Social media surveillance
• Artistic renderings of vigilante action
• Partisan use of personal images
• Use and re-use of sounds on social media
• Celebrity vigilantes
• Activism as digilantism
• Artivism as digilantism 
• Digilantism as pop culture
• CCTV and surveillance footage appropriations
• Live streaming of marginalized communities
• Use of partisan colours to point to enemies
• Scambaiting
• Pickpocket surveillance
• Archival images and historical culpabilisation
• Mob lynching images
• Performative persecutions
• City hounding streaming

References

Bateson R (2021) The politics of vigilantism. Comparative Political Studies 54(6): 923–955.

Campbell, E. (2016). Policing paedophilia: Assembling bodies, spaces and things. Crime, media, culture, 12(3), 345-365.

Galleguillos, S. (2022). Digilantism, discrimination, and punitive attitudes: A digital vigilantism model. Crime, Media, Culture, 18(3), 353-374. 

Jane, E. A. (2016). Online misogyny and feminist digilantism. Continuum, 30(3), 284-297

Kasra, M. (2017). Vigilantism, public shaming, and social media hegemony: The role of digital-networked images in humiliation and sociopolitical control. The Communication Review, 20(3), 172-188.

Keane, J., (2009). Monitory Democracy and Media-saturated Societies. Griffith Review 24. 

Levy, H. (2024). ‘Welcome to favelas, but in Italy’: Urban precariousness, right-wing ideology and phatic nihilism on social media. Discourse & Society.

Lyon, D. (2018). The culture of surveillance: Watching as a way of life. John Wiley & Sons.

Reichl, F. (2019). From vigilantism to digilantism?. In Social Media Strategy in Policing: From Cultural Intelligence to Community Policing (pp. 117-138). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Schwarz, K. C., & Richey, L. A. (2019). Humanitarian humor, digilantism, and the dilemmas of representing volunteer tourism on social media. New Media & Society, 21(9), 1928-1946.

Sorell, T. (2019). Scambaiting on the spectrum of digilantism. Criminal Justice Ethics, 38(3), 153-175.

Tanner, S., & Campana, A. (2020). “Watchful citizens” and digital vigilantism: a case study of the far right in Quebec. Global Crime, 21(3-4), 262-282

Trottier, D. (2017). Digital vigilantism as weaponisation of visibility. Philosophy & technology, 30(1), 55-72.

Vicenová, R. (2020). The role of digital media in the strategies of far-right vigilante groups in Slovakia. Global Crime, 21(3-4), 242-261.Wight, C., & Stanley, P. (2024). Holocaust heritage digilantism on Instagram. Tourism Recreation Research, 49(6), 1316-1330.

Vitis, L., & Segrave, M. (2017). Gender, Technology and Violence. Routledge studies in crime and society.