Cancel Culture in the Academia: The hispanic perspective

Abstract

Although many cases of the so-called Cancel Culture in the American and British colleges and are taking place nowadays, social science researchers claim for a better understanding of the phenomenon and a clarification of the concept. In this context, cultural perspectives can be an interesting tool to illuminate facts and meanings. This paper tries to contribute to this debate introducing theoretical aspects as well as case studies from the Hispanic context. To achieve this goal, first three different approaches to the Cancel Culture (critical, institutional, and moral) are explained. Then, we examine the role of social media and the new “fear of isolation”, connecting Cancel Culture with the classic theory of the spiral of silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1974). We complement the theoretical discussion with an exploratory work on cases of Cancel Culture in different Hispanic countries. Observing characteristics of those cases we can conclude that they do not follow the traces of the Anglosaxon world, but they share some aspects of the culture of fear in the new digital context. This is the first academic work in this field for the situation in Latin America and Spain.

Cancel Culture - the Speech Behavior of Modern Society

“…State broadcasters from countries including Iceland, Finland, Norway and the Netherlands had called for Russia to be banned from the contest, which takes place in Turin in May <…> The Rotterdam Philharmonic also threatened to cancel its longstanding annual Gergiev festival this year, Switzerland's Verbier festival has asked Gergiev to resign his position as music director of the Verbier Festival Orchestra, and in New York, he was replaced for performances with the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. 9 The very knowledge of the phenomenon of "cancel culture" in relation to brands (public criticism or refusal to buy for the purpose of "punishment") is growing. If in 2021 only 7% of Russians knew about it, then in 2022 this figure doubled.…”

“…Speech behavior, which in our work we define as a new discourse practice, can be of certain interest to scientists of various fields: political linguistics [1], political science [2], cultural studies [3,4], linguoculturology [5], linguoargumentology [6]. There are certain scientific works of foreign researchers studying cancel culture as a crucial problem of modern society [9][10][11][12][13].…”

Can the principle of the ‘right to be forgotten’ be applied to academic publishing? Probe from the perspective of personal rights, archival science, open science and post‐publication peer review

“…The phenomenon in the latter paragraph is also related to a form of 'cancel culture' in academia, in which an individual's opinion or position is suppressed, via retractions, sometimes in response to mass or social pressure (Garry, 2023;Sadaba & Herrero, 2022;Teixeira da Silva, 2021d). We are of the belief that it is because there exists a very fine or hazy line between the right of preservation and the right of deletion, and an intersection with an author's inherent rights of deletion that may pit authors against publishers' legal departments, inducing opacity in retraction notices Teixeira da Silva & Vuong, 2022;Xu et al, 2023).…”