Activism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Based on interviews with Syrian media practitioners, this article uses the notion of affective proximity to make sense of local media practitioners’ reporting and witnessing of suffering in their country and community. I argue that the life-risking, and sometimes deadly, media practices of local reporters and witnesses, as well as their emotional labour, often do not feature in understandings of journalism when it is conceived as a purely professional discursive pursuit. I explain affective proximity in terms of an imagined space (or the lack thereof) between a media practitioner, on the one hand, and the event they are representing and participating in, on the other. In relation to Syria, I use it to analyse the word ‘revolution’ and what it mediates, the shifting boundaries between activism and journalism, and experiences of, and in, violence. I make the case that the study of affect and emotion in global news should be contextualized within the unequal power relations that give s...

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- Psychology, Emotion, Journalism, Syria

The Book is a graphic montage piece, where comments, thoughts and short accounts from Ou Ning’s travels to Bishan are intertwined with drawings, clippings, color-coded text, handwritten notes, pictures and quotes. The forefathers of the... more

- by Ou Ning and +1
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- Utopian Studies, Anarchism, Anarchist Studies, Activism

This critical set of reflections addresses how the increasing visibility of the Palestinian struggle and the growing attention to Palestine in the (US) academy coincides with altered and depleted meanings for terms and concepts once central to a Palestinian liberation framework. The authors challenge the de-familiarization of the Palestinian political lexicon by ruminating on past, present and potential future meanings for words whose currency, they argue, has assumed a deceptively simple valuation. What are the unforeseen political consequences of visibility, of “incorporation,” and how might these be resisted within the arena of meaning and through the process of reviving language as an instrument of national liberation struggle? Revisiting old definitions of terms and contributing thoughts to the value of words such as Zionism, peace process and negotiations, statehood and violence, the authors contest the boundaries of disciplinary research in service of Palestinian liberation.

- by Loubna Qutami and +1
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- Academic Freedom, Israel/Palestine, Palestine, Zionism

From sites like Hollaback! and Everyday Sexism, which document instances of street harassment and misogyny, to social media-organized movements and communities like #MeToo and #BeenRapedNeverReported, feminists are using participatory digital media as actvist tools to speak, network, and organize against sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. As the first book-length study to examine how girls, women, and some men negotiate rape culture through the use of digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps, the authors explore four primary questions: What experiences of harassment, misogyny, and rape culture are being responded to? How are participants using digital media technologies to document experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and sexism? Why are girls, women and some men choosing to mobilize digital media technologies in this way? And finally, what are the various experiences of using digital technologies to engage in activism? In order to capture these diverse experiences of doing digital feminist activism, the authors augment their analysis of this media (blog posts, tweets, and selfies) with in-depth interviews and close- observations of several online communities that operate globally.

- by Jessica Ringrose
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- Women's Studies, Digital Media, Social Activism, Social Media
- by Gulzar R. Charania
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- Critical Race Theory, Humanitarian Intervention, Activism, Global education
- by thea buckle
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- Discourse Analysis, Semiotics, Cultural Studies, Social Change
- by Anastasia Veneti and +1
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- Social Movements, Health Communication, Politics, Social Media

El imperialismo afecta tanto el ‘aqui’ como el ‘ahi’. Mujeres de clase media y blancas han historicamente salido de su hogar y ganado mas de ‘de si mismas’ siendo buenas ayudantes, tipicamente como maestras y misionarias. En este papel han consolidado el poder del imperio, a veces sin intencion. Hoy en dia el papel de buen ayudante es usado mas ampliamente, no solamente por mujeres blancas, para trabajar en contra del imperio. Pero estas herramientas del amo son toxicas. Puede parecer que estamos trabajando en contra de el, pero en realidad refuerzan los sistemas de dominacion que produce el imperio. Aquellos de nosotros que combatimos el imperio debemos tambien luchar contra el imperialismo dentro de nosotros mismos. Este analisis de las formas en las que descolonizar el trabajo solidario tiene raices en el movimiento para cerrar la Escuela de las Americas (un campo de entrenamiento de los EE UU) y en un proceso de teorizacion en colaboracion con prisioneras de consciencia de clase...

Convocarte — Revista de Ciências da Arte n.º 5 Revista Internacional Digital com Comissão Científica Editorial e Revisão de Pares Tema do Dossier Temático ARTE E ACTIVISMO POLÍTICO: PERSPETIVAS DA HISTÓRIA DA ARTE E ESTUDOS DE CASO Ideia... more

Convocarte — Revista de Ciências da Arte n.º 5
Revista Internacional Digital com Comissão Científica Editorial e Revisão de Pares
Tema do Dossier Temático ARTE E ACTIVISMO POLÍTICO: PERSPETIVAS DA HISTÓRIA DA ARTE E ESTUDOS DE CASO
Ideia e Coordenação Geral Fernando Rosa Dias
Coordenação Científica do Dossier Temático Cristina Pratas Cruzeiro

- by Cristina Pratas Cruzeiro
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- Art History, Art Theory, Activism, Art and Activism

Our scholarship on aids must be located at the crossroads of art and politics, life and art, and life and death.-Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, "Response to the Repre sen ta tion of aids" Activism is an engagement with the hauntings of history, a dialogue between the memories of the past and the imaginings of the future manifested through the acts of our own pre sent yearnings. aids has surrounded us with the living memory of familiar ghosts, faces that haunt our intimate realities of being infected/not yet infected, sick/not yet sick, alive but not yet dead. As we wait for passage to the other side, we plan our revenge and chart strategies of re sis tance to head off the silence. Identity politics, as an organ izing tool and po liti cal ideology, has historically had specific investments for marginal-ized groups in this country. Po liti cal groupings based on identity categories, however, have become highly contested sites, splintering ever further into more specialized and discrete social and po liti cal units, based on more precise yet still problematic categories of identification and concomitant modes of definition. As a lived practice, strategic essentialism (and the policing of identity) that often defines it has become a messy and contentious organizing strategy that ultimately reveals the limits and problematic assumptions of identity politics. Identity politics formed in re sis tance to state power thus remains implicated in the perpetuation of the narratives upon which it is founded, specifically the conflation of identity, ideology, and po liti cal practices and the lived ramifications of the constructed and problematic duality of insider/outsider. Yet for many, it becomes impossible to conceive of po-liti cal organ izing without explicative narratives or definitive social positions.

- by Juana María Rodríguez
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- Latina/o Studies, Queer Theory, HIV/AIDS, LGBT Issues

Political geography traditionally focused on state, but there has been a broadening of what counts as ‘doing politics’ that includes the work of social movements. Much of this work though uses analytical categories other than social movement, and these are reviewed and included here. Geographers have brought space into thinking about social movements, analyzing how various spatialities shape and are shaped by movements, the spatialities of solidarity, and the geographies of emotion used and generated by movements. Many do this work as academic-activists and collaborate with movements. Across different methods, approaches, and languages, geographers have contributed to building the power of movements to make a better world.

- by Sara Koopman
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- Sociology, Social Movements, Geography, Political Geography and Geopolitics

The past 10 years witnessed a resurgence of youth activism in East Asia. While some may consider it as simply reflecting a broader, general trend of young people reacting to the neoliberalizing world, this paper pays special attention to the changing cultural geographies of East Asia that underlie part of the picture. In 2014, the Sunflower movement in Taiwan was triggered by a group of young people who occupied the Legislative Yuan, paralyzed the establishment for 23 days, and brought about alternative politics, which soon was echoed by the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong during 26 September to 15 December the same year. This paper is interested in understanding how young people, walking away from the aforementioned urban uprising with their memories of participating in a sort of exceptional city for short time, carried on their aspiration for alternatives in their everyday lives. Finding inspiration from Victor Turner’s notion of liminoid and anti-structure, it attends to the activism embedded in everyday life. It also attends to the translocal, transnational interaction among young actors across cities in East Asia, with a focus on the act of place-fixing, which enables connection, collaboration, and circulation (of resources) through materialistic, transactive practices and can be compared to place-making.

- by Shu-mei Huang
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- Taiwan Studies, Hong Kong, Activism, Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

The NFL protests are only one of many celebrity-fueled political controversies during the Trump presidency. Why is there such a proliferation of celebrity activism? More importantly, does it amount to anything? What does our knowledge of... more

- by Mark Harvey
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- Social Psychology, Media Studies, Political Psychology, Persuasion (Psychology)

AFTER his release from prison in South Africa and he became inaugural president of the majority rule government with the abolition of apartheid, Nelson Mandela declared in a speech in 1997: "We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians. Founding Halt All Racist Tours (HART) leader John Minto invoked these words again several times in Hamilton on Sunday as veterans and supporters of the 1981 Springbok Rugby Tour anti-apartheid protests gathered to mark the 40th anniversary of the historic events. Starting at the “1981” tour retrospective exhibition at the Hamilton Museum – Te Whare Taonga o Waikato, the protesters gathered for a luncheon at Anglican Action and then staged a ceremonial march to FMG Stadium – known back then as Rugby Park – where they had famously breached the perimeter fence and invaded the pitch.

- by David Robie
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- History, Journalism, Human Rights, Israel/Palestine
- by akshay khanna
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- Sociology, Queer Studies, Law and Society, Sexuality

La documentación lingüística lleva más de un siglo de existencia y tiene una antigua tradición de series monográficas y revistas que fueron locales para la publicación de textos, diccionarios, gramáticas, vocabularios, entre otros. En la última década, sin embargo, la documentación, o ya, la lingüística de la documentación, cambió su perspectiva e incorporó como elementos centrales la diversidad, en cuanto a tipos de lenguas y a tipos de materiales que se registran, la diversidad social y de ideologías sobre la lengua y las prácticas lingüísticas. El activismo de la comunidad de habla ha tenido un profundo efecto en esta nueva perspectiva de la documentación. Este trabajo se enmarca en esta última tendencia de la lingüística de la documentación y se propone presentar experiencias nuevas de documentación y activismo en comunidades wichí del río Bermejo en la provincia de Formosa (Argentina), a fin de discutir y reflexionar sobre sus contribuciones a la práctica lingüística y a la lingüística de la documentación.

- by Verónica Nercesian
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- Documentary Linguistics, Activism, Language Use, Glotopolítica
- by Valeria Spacciante
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- Classics, Greek Literature, Latin Literature, Reception Studies

This article helps to account for the radicalization of vast sectors of the Latin American youth in the Sixties by studying the social and emotional lives of young Chilean communists. Scholars point to the increasing dominance of ideology when studying youth radicalization, ignoring the strong emotions underpinning left-wing activism. I show that ideology was embedded in a web of social and emotional relationships and argue that the appeal of the left among the youth of the era cannot be understood without recourse to feelings of friendship and love. Young people from all walks of life made friendly contacts with young activists that led them to commit further, and, once active in youth political organizations, they forged strong emotional bonds that provided them with a sense of belonging and a shared identity. Love played a crucial role in bringing new people into the ranks of the left and strengthening their political commitment. Young activists felt an intense need to date and marry those who shared their ideas in order to have a fulfilling life.

- by Alfonso Salgado Muñoz
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- Latin American Studies, History Of Emotions, Communism, History of Chile

Going online can significantly assist a community group or organisation in seeking to meet its aims. Many open source technologies embody are designed to embody a decentralised and collaborative authorship, facilitating the ability for an organisation to share their message with a much broader audience—and on its terms. By reflecting on the techniques adopted by the Sandon Point Community Picket in going online, and how the approach mirrored their grassroots campaign, we can explore the how alongside the why of working for social change. Challenges faced, there implications, and what we can learn from them can also be considered.

- by Colin Salter
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- Social Change, Social Media, Activism

The ability of social media users to express themselves online should be influential for opinion formation, including potential polarization. Still, little is known about how expression interacts with users’ psychological predispositions, especially for controversial topics. The potential for expression to relate to support for social media-based racial justice movements, which could also be affected by underlying feelings of racial resentment, is particularly interesting. We apply the Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model (DSMM) to the study of the relationship between social media expression and issue polarization regarding Black Lives Matter. In a survey of social media users conducted during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we find that racial resentment moderates the relationship between social media expression and support for racial justice movements. Among low-resentment social media users, more frequent expression was associated with less support for Black Lives Matter. Additionally, low- versus high-resentment users who expressed themselves on social media more frequently were more polarized in their support for All Lives Matter but less polarized in their support for Black Lives Matter. In line with the DSMM, our findings highlight that users’ psychological predispositions must be taken into account when determining how social media expression relates to issue polarization.

- by Stewart Coles
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- Social Movements, Race and Racism, Social Activism, Social Media

Performance and digitality constitute an onto-historical apparatus or dispositif reshaping cultures globally, yet our engagement with these performative circuits remains out-of-sync and ineffective, especially at the levels of knowledge and power, thought and action. Within higher education, modern disciplinary methods, arborescent institutional structures, and logocentric literacies inhibit the critico-creative syntheses needed to engage and resist neoliberal modes of performativity. In contemporary societies of control, universities around the world face daunting economic and political pressures to transform and innovate, while tradi- tional forms of academic research and education struggle to contend with young people’s attachments to mobile technologies, social media, and consumer-driven design practices. StudioLab is a critical design pedagogy that seeks to democratize emerging forms and processes of digitality by supplementing seminar-based critical thinking with studio-based design thinking and lab-based tactical media-making. In StudioLab, students roleplay as critical design teams to research and create conceptually-rich projects that address contemporary social challenges through a variety of media forms and events. Critical design teams combine cultural, organizational, and technological performances and learn ways to introduce values of cultural efficacy into structures dominated by organizational efficiency and technological effectiveness, thereby generating creative and potentially transformative micro-transvaluations in themselves and others. This performative matrix of valorizations helps to situate StudioLab’s practices of democratizing digitality and suggests new figurations of thought and action, new experiential architectures.

- by Jon McKenzie
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- Critical Theory, Philosophy, Communication, Education

This dissertation is the first major academic analysis of the Danish refugee solidarity movement that mobilized more than 100,000 citizens in the fall 2015 when the European refugee crisis reached Denmark. The dissertation makes four main contribution to the two questions of differential recruitment—what accounts for activists’ involvement in different activities—and the question of social movement outcome in the form of changes to the activists’ political perceptions. First, it argues that in solidarity activism an ethical demand to care for the unfortunate is a central driver that may lead to involvement in high-risk activism. This ethical demand is mediated by values of altruism. Second, such basic human values are argued to be important for how we react emotionally to major events which, together with effects of network and socialization, influence our propensity to engage in activism of varying risk. Third, values are also expressed in variation between the style group interaction. No matter prior experience with activism, activists in groups with a style that focuses on the immediate compassion and care for the refugees engage to a lesser degree in political protest, than do activists in a group culture that focuses on the political and contentious dimension of the matter. Fourth and finally, for activists engaged in the legal cases of refugees, experiencing an immigration-bureaucracy with little or no care for the human beings behind the dossiers combined with an experience of systematic bias against the refugee, results in a loss of institutional trust. Given the fact that the activists also prior to their involvement in the movement had a high level of participation in democratic civil society, the operation of the institutions causing loss of trust, may pose a unintended threat to Danish democracy by alienating key actors in civil society from the institutionalized political process.

- by Jonas Toubøl
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- Social Movements, Machine Learning, Social Media, Survey Research
- by Charlie Krautwald
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- Political Science, Fascism, Activism, Nazism

This is an outline of a new project that I am working on referred to as "social movement literacy." The basic question is: How do we educate the general public on how to properly read and understand the nature and function of social... more

- by Jason Del Gandio
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- Social Movements, Critical Pedagogy, Social Justice, Social Justice Education

In 20th century, amaranth has been rediscovered as crop that could defend vulnerable areas of the world from hunger due to its tolerance for drought and poor soil. It still constitutes a minor cereal crop in the global scale, but as a labor intensive and resilient plant that does not benefit much from pesticides or genetic modification but supplies high quality nutrition, it models an alternative to neoliberal pesticide-driven monocrop agriculture and factory farming. This paper rewrites the history of human relations with amaranth in one of its centers of origin, Tehuacán Valley (Puebla, Mexico) since the times of Aztecs, through its colonial demise, till its rebirth in Proyecto Alternativas, aimed at remediation of poverty due to drought. While doing this I transform Toledo and Barrera-Bassols’ (2009) concept of biocultural memory to consider this memory as a hybrid phenomenon formed through interactions between humans and plants and viewing plants’ adaptation strategies as “living thoughts” (Kohn, 2013).

- by Katarzyna Beilin
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- Indigenous Studies, Water, Mexican Studies, Poverty
- by Gilda L. Ochoa and +1
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- Chicano Studies, Education, Learning and Teaching, Immigration

This paper begins with a brief historical overview of the Australian movement against uranium mining, before focussing on two major campaigns: Roxby and Jabiluka. It describes the reasons the activists gave at the time for their blockades of the Roxby Downs uranium mine in South Australia in 1983 and 1984. These reasons – such as perceptions that the industry is unsafe - have changed little over time, and were the basis for the campaign against the proposed Jabiluka mine in the Northern Territory in 1998. They continue to be cited by environmental groups and Aboriginal Traditional Owners to this day as new situations arise, such as the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. The paper then describes how the movement evolved between the Roxby and Jabiluka blockades, with changes to the movement’s philosophy, strategy, tactics and internal dynamics. This analysis includes a comparison between two anti-nuclear bike rides, one a year after the 1984 Roxby blockade and involving some of ...

- by Marty Branagan
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- Nonviolence, Environmental Sustainability, Activism

This article presents a quantitative study of differential participation in low- and high-risk activism in the Danish refugee solidarity movement. Distinguishing between low- and high-risk activism, it shows the fruitfulness of combining what are often considered competing theoretical explanations related to (1) values, (2) microstructures, and (3) emotions. We analyze data from a unique survey of 1,856 respondents recruited via Facebook. The results show that low- and high-risk participation strongly correlate but are influenced by different factors. For low-risk activities, the most important factors are emotional reactions, structural availability, and predispositions in the form of basic human values. For high-risk activity, the important factors are prior history of activism and emotional reaction. Values, microstructures, and emotions interact in relation to participation in both kinds of activism, which points to promising avenues for integrating and developing the theoretical framework of differential participation and recruitment.

- by Jonas Toubøl
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- Sociology, Political Sociology, Values, Immigration
- by Verity Trott
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- Digital Media, Feminism, Political Communication (Communication), Feminist activism
- by Antonio Alvarez-Benavides
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- Social Movements, Social Activism, Activism, Movimientos sociales

[PART]
....The concept of Cyberactivism has hit Kenya like a relentless wave as most Kenyans (especially the youths) have more times than not been able to use these social networking platforms for various purposes, such as awareness creation, gathering and organizing followers and initiating reactions and participating in national debates. The most popular of these efforts was the now infamous #OCCUPYPARLIAMENT “uprising” which spread like wildfire on social media as Kenyans united to show their dislike for the members of parliament’s hefty allowances. Their efforts on social media climaxed with a street demonstration on May 14th which saw demonstrators pour animal blood outside parliament and release pigs [and piglets] on the outside of parliament as they tried blocking the members of parliament from entering the parliament building.

- by Allan tuli
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- Constitutional Law, Politics, Social Activism, Kenya

In this essay I want to figure out in which ways the Squat Group Kinderen van Mokum fit into what we know about contemporary problems in Amsterdam, especially concerning the youth. In analysing literature and comparing that to the characteristics of the activist group, I want to know in what way the activism of Kinderen van Mokum is a response to the problems that young people face in Amsterdam.

- by Lara Verheugen
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- Gentrification, Affordable Housing, Creative City, Activism

Traditionally marginalised groups now have more access to new and unconventional means to participate in politics, transforming the media ecologies of existing political environments. Contemporary feminist scholarship has centered on how women use new media technologies to serve political agendas. However, this literature focuses predominantly on women in the West, while women in developing countries, or Asia more generally, have been largely excluded from analysis. This article aims to fill this gap by examining Thai women's online activities during the 2013/2014 Bangkok political protests.

- by Verity Trott
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- Media Ecology, Activism, Digital Activism, Politics in Thailand
- by Gilda L. Ochoa
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- Chicano Studies, Education, Teacher Education, Chicana/o History

This ethnography investigates the collective identity of the Knoxville punk community. I argue that punk rock culture in Knoxville exists as a proactive open community, and frame the discussion with the psychoanalytical work of collective identity by Jacques Lacan, notions of discourse described by James Gee, as well as definitions of community explored by Will Straw and David Hesmondhalgh. Knoxville punk musicians promote the sense of community with music through the value of cultural knowledge, providing physical areas for social space creation, and instructing young women musicians. Each factor provides a distinct element for the proactive movement in Knoxville punk. In examining the familial nature of punk musicians in Knoxville, I illustrate how punk culture transcends previous notions of subcultural studies and promotes a collective identity through the desire for community progression. Rather than focusing on the negative aspects of a youth culture in opposition to mainstream...

- by Paula Propst
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- Musicology, Ethnomusicology, Ethnography, Community
- by Mark Gring
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- Social Movements, Rhetoric, Rhetorical Analysis, Rhetorical Invention
- by Anna Stetsenko
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- Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Psychology, Developmental Psychology

In three studies we examined lay definitions of cultural appropriation in U.S. community and college student samples. In a fourth study we examined correlates of perceptions of cultural appropriation. Using community and undergraduate student samples (Studies 1-2), and popular media articles (Study 3) we examined definitions of cultural appropriation following Rogers' (2006) typology of cultural exchange, dominance, and subordination. The results across three studies revealed that cultural appropriation was defined predominantly as cultural exploitation. In Study 4 we examined political correctness (emotion and activism), social justice, empathy (perspective taking and empathic concern), and political orientation as correlates of cultural appropriation perceptions. Using canonical correlations, we found that cultural exploitation was the primary contributor to the synthetic predictor, and political orientation, emotion political correctness, activism political correctness, and social justice made significant contributions to the criterion variable, but not empathy. Implication and further research directions are discussed.

- by Stephen Reysen
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- Social Justice, Activism, Political Orientation, Political Correctness