Energy to Contest? Emotional and Multimodal Contestation of Institutional Infrastructure

Transforming an institution is a complex, multilevel undertaking, usually accomplished by linguistically highlighting the contradictions and hypocrisies within institutional logics, infusing economic activity with moral values, motivating contestation and collective action, and creating institutional change. Organizational research has focused on the cognitive persuasiveness of actors’ words, the emotions these words invoke, and increasingly on the emotions of accompanying images. Yet, little research examines the relative persuasiveness of words and images together in emotional and factual appeals during institutional contestation. Thus, we ask: How can multimodal messages – that combine words, images, URL links, and other elements – more effectively capture attention, invoke logical arguments and emotional appeals, and catalyze multilevel conversations. To answer this question, we gathered all the tweets, retweets, and comments associated with the Energy East Pipeline, a highly contested energy project in Canada, from the pipeline's announcement in 2013 to its protest-motivated cancelation in 2017 and beyond. We examined how actors combined images, words, hashtags, URLs, and other multimodal elements; the values and emotions evoked by these combinations; and users’ responses to these tweets. We show how taken-for-granted institutional infrastructure can become challenged through images and texts, emotional and factual claims, and other multimodal elements. We help to understand how multimodal messaging on social media shapes multilevel conversations among “relational publics” whose communications constitute and contest institutions. Last, we make a methodological contribution by analyzing multimodal texts with automated coding.