The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my fabulous QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko, whose focus is on online support for Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Such supporters may be based all around the world; one of Kateryna’s informants is a woman in her fifties from Japan who is involved in the NAFO initiative, for instance, through activism on Xitter. And while this platform is becoming much less hospitable to pro-Ukraine activists, she and others persist in their work nevertheless.
Such online political activism is much more than mere slacktivism, then; while online activism has been described as low impact or low risk, or as inconsequential, it demonstrates a considerable practice of cosmopolitan support for distant others. Such cosmopolitan practices involve collectivity, a shared language, knowledge, materiality, and normativity, connected by action.
Kateryna examined such cosmopolitan practices for a number of case studies, engaging in scrollback interviews and practice mapping network analyses of their activities. This focussed on the North Atlantic Fella Organisation (NAFO), the 2022/23 Eurovision Song Contest, and Japanese support for Ukrainian refugees.
People who persisted in such cosmopolitan practices over time sometimes had direct connections to Ukraine, or broader interests in world affairs; they sought to do something about the conflict by speaking out and engaging others in this too. Doing something here might mean amplifying important messages, fundraising, or engaging in other ways in favour of Ukraine; in the case of Eurovision, they injected political messages into general Eurovision fandom, for instance. In the case of NAFO, this also involves mutual support between members of the activist group. Not all such practices persist over time, however; some also attract spamming and trolling and result in activists being discouraged from further participation.
Key factors allowing cosmopolitan practices to persist include news coverage, dissatisfaction with the status quo, staunch support for Ukraine, and belonging to a cosmopolitan community of practice.
Overall, then, some users practice this by repurposing existing ways of being online or developing new practices; certain external factors encourage or discourage their persistence in such activities; and the synchronicity, performance, and visibility affordances of platforms also materially affect the possibilities for continued cosmopolitan support.
