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.

Keywords

• cancelation
• free speech
• public opinion
• social media
• spiral of silence