The Concentric Firestorm: A Qualitative Study of Black Lives Matter Activism and the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT The combination of a global pandemic and an ignited social justice movement created a digital environment in which people turned to social media to navigate a concentric firestorm fueled by both the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic. Through interviews with 25 supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, we used the circuit of culture to build theory about the production and consumption of messages. Specifically, we examined the ways in which meaning was produced, interpreted, and contested in the context of a social movement occurring inside of a global pandemic. We engaged in theoretical bricolage by demonstrating how perspective by incongruity, appropriation, and the referent criterion can shape meaning within the context of the circuit of culture. This study concludes with a foundational conceptualization of concentric firestorms, and we relate this conceptualization to two concepts we propose based on our data: virtual density and virtual saturation.