This workshop will lead participants through the current literature and diagrams on how transnational advocacy networks operate, and we will reimagine these through three participatory activities. Human rights issues or a regionally specific conflict will often develop a network of transnational advocates, through which attempts to influence the target state will be conducted. This workshop attempts to highlight the ways we conceptualize these networks and share other possible conceptualisation techniques. Participants will be asked to bring a laptop for accessing Miro, an online collaborative visualizing platform. Physical stationery will be provided by the workshop lead should participants struggle with this platform.

The inherited theory behind structures of power dictate how we 'see' these advocacy communities, and how the communities see themselves. When Laura Nader's powerful rallying cry to 'study up' encouraged anthropologists to study the powerful, she implicitly reinforced the concept of vertical lines of power for decades to come (Nader 1972; Stryker and Gonzalez 2014). Kate Nash points out that reaffirming 'the global' nature of human rights organizations can obfuscate their literal situatedness. A global movement is simply a local cause that moves: from a community to a parliament, from grassroots to organized, between languages and cultures, disciplines and sectors (Nash 2015).

International structures of change have been imagined in a variety of ways: as Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome (1980); as Weber's bureaucratic machine (1921); or simply as lines of connections around the globe. These are bounded movements in many cases, visually and spatially imagined. Through using different metaphors and shapes, this session hopes to reveal new facets of participants' advocacy networks.

ACTIVITY ONE: Adapting critical models of influence
The literature on influencing human rights contains several diagrams which have informed the metaphorical language around advocacy: namely, the spiral model (Risse, Ropp and Sikkink 1999), and the boomerang model (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Participants may point to discrepancies in their experiences which may help to create new ways of drawing these links.

ACTIVITY TWO: Routes of Change
Using as many virtual sticky notes as possible, participants will be invited to create flow diagrams of how their advocates intend to create change. This will naturally include gaps, which are often as inductive as the detailed connections. We may also expect to see previous suspect examples of change brought about by advocacy movements (as detailed through process tracing) as either the dominant model of understanding change, or as obscuring new avenues of change.

ACTIVITY THREE: Network Analysis
Following the developments in Social Network Analysis (SNA) from historical social sciences (Grandjean 2021) this research will share examples of complex Xinjiang advocacy networks in the software, Gephi. These are produced by making links between organizations and individuals, and can reveal significant actors in the network by degrees of centralities. For this exercise, however, we will produce metaphorical rather than extracted networks, to observe the preliminary connections observable within an advocacy network.

Places are limited to 30 participants and pre-booking is required. 

Book your place by selecting a (free) ticket for the workshop on our registration page: https://msa2023newcastle.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets