[Commlist] CFP: The aesthetics of digital vigilantism

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: April 2026 – Place TBD
Journal proposed: Convergence
Submit your 250-word abstract to (dvigilantism /at/ gmail.com) by 01 November 2025
Questions/queries to (h.levy /at/ londonmet.ac.uk) or (ediamanti /at/ johncabot.edu)
No payment of any kind will be required from authors.


The urban experience shared on digital platforms suggests 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 
misdemeanours 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 that encourage 
forms of monitory citizenship, focusing on the aesthetics behind its 
success as a convergence of 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 “paedophilia 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 aesthetic 
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 
aesthetics, broadly conceived, matter for assembling and empowering 
content associated with digital vigilantism? What are the sensory cues 
that digital creators, whether 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
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 marginalised 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.


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