Book Review: Alternative and Activist New Media

Alternative and Activist New Media. Digital Media and Society Series. By Leah A. Lievrouw. Pp. 294. USA/England, Polity Press, 2011. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4184-3 (pb)

Hecho con ganas : Latin@ alternative and activist media

textThe proliferation of independently produced Latin@ media has only intensified with the rise of new media technologies and saliency of online user-generated content in our present media culture. As online platforms become more open and new media technologies and devices make the creation and accessing of information easier, Latin@s and other minorities who have traditionally been marginalized within mainstream media culture and largely excluded from participating in media industries, are turning to the web to launch their own media projects. In more recent years, Latin@s have utilized new media to resist and challenge the mainstream. As a result, we have witnessed the appearance of Latin@-produced, non-commercial and/or activist oriented websites, videos, audio, and blogs that this thesis argues act as alternative and activist media. Latin@ alternative and activist media may be understood as typically small-scale projects that posses little to no budget and that generally critique the marginalization and exclusion of Latin@s in mainstream media and U.S. society. In addition to contesting the mainstream, Latin@ alternative and activist media express and question in-group identity and enact varying degrees of in-group civic participation and empowerment, resulting is the constitution of a multitude of Latinidades and the formation of Latin@ online communities and social media groups. Using Latino Rebels and Dreamers Adrift as case studies, this thesis examines the ways in which these particular examples of Latin@ alternative and activist media express divergent and/or radical perspectives of society through their processes and content while also connecting these media texts to the current social and political realities of [email protected]

Activism, transmedia storytelling and empowerment

This work explores activism through new media by applying narrative power analysis and story-based strategies for social change. From an interdisciplinary and internationally discussed theoretical and methodological framework based on peace research, communication theories and cultural studies, this paper aims at gathering a series of criteria to critically analyze and assess the new media politics of social movements. Specifically, it reviews a selection of present day activist discourses to propose a communication model defined from culturally effective practices aimed at peace cultures, cultural wisdom and empowerment for conflict transformation. This analysis elaborates on previous empirical research (Pinazo and Nos Aldás, 2013) which tested protest communication scenarios as the more adequate to boost social justice, engagement and empowerment. This text therefore takes as a case study some good practices of transmedia storytelling for social change and, through discourse framing analysis, it develops on how activist empowering frames, values and emotions of social change for social justice are an effective cultural alternative to hegemonic negative frames. All in all, this paper intends to further advance conclusions on new media politics for social justice from the experience of new social movements communicative scenarios of social empowerment through transmedia storytelling

Learning from each other’s struggles

Sociology has always been in dialogue with social movements, from Tocqueville, Marx and Durkheim to Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, Frances Piven and Toni Negri. As a young activist, wanting to understand the movements I was involved in and see how we could take them further, sociology was the obvious starting-point. I had grown up around human rights and anti-apartheid, the peace and ecology movements. Travel and study around Europe showed me whole movement scenes and subcultures – feminist, libertarian, socialist – with roots in the 1960s and 1970s and still generating new movements in the 1980s and 1990s. I started to research where these shared histories and cultures had come from, and how we could draw on them to build new alliances. My PhD, on the potential for radical alliances developing the everyday popular rationalities expressed by these cultures, was written against the background of the Zapatistas and submitted just in time to see the Seattle protests against the WTO validate its conclusions and change the movement landscape across the industrialised North. Writing the thesis went hand-in-hand with editing an activist magazine which tried to make those links in practical ways, and with small gatherings of activists from different movements – around the possibility of a new left, networking independent media, reviving the older alternative movements and trying to create cross-movement dialogues

Slacktivists or Activists?: Identity Work in the Virtual Disability March

Protests are important social forms of activism, but can be inaccessible to people with disabilities. Online activism, like the 2017 Disability March, has provided alternative venues for involvement in accessible protesting and social movements. In this study, we use identity theory as a lens to understand why and how disabled activists engaged in an online movement, and its impact on their self-concepts. We interviewed 18 disabled activists about their experiences with online protesting during the Disability March. Respondents' identities (as both disabled individuals and as activists) led them to organize or join the March, evolved alongside the group's actions, and were reprioritized or strained as a result of their involvement. Our findings describe the values and limitations of this activism to our respondents, highlight the tensions they perceived about their activist identities, and present opportunities to support further accessibility and identity changes by integrating technology into their activist experiences

Constructing 'the anti-globalisation movement'

This article interrogates the claim that a transnational anti-globalisation social movement has emerged. I draw on constructivist social movement theory, globalisation studies, feminist praxis and activist websites to make two main arguments, mapping on to the two parts of the article. First, a movement has indeed emerged, albeit in a highly contested and complex form with activists, opponents and commentators constructing competing movement identities. This article is itself complicit in such a process – and seeks to further a particular construction of the movement as a site of radical-democratic politics. Second, the movement is not anti-globalisation in any straightforward sense. Focusing their opposition on globalised neoliberalism and corporate power, activists represent their movement either as anti-capitalist or as constructing alternative kinds of globalised relationships. Threading through both my arguments is a normative plea to confront the diverse relations of power involved in both globalisation and movement construction in order that globalised solidarities be truly democratic. This is to challenge hierarchical visions of how best to construct ‘the anti-globalisation movement’

Covert repertoires: ecotage in the UK

Ecological sabotage (ecotage) has been a feature of the more radical parts of the environmental movement in the Western world for several decades. While it may be perceived as being the preserve of underground cells of 'eco-terrorists', in the UK those who carry out small-scale acts of sabotage are also often engaged in relatively conventional political activity; view sabotage as a complement to other action, not as an end in itself; and are committed to avoiding physical harm to people. Drawing on ethnographic data from research with British activists, this article seeks to define ecotage and to explain its place in the repertoires of the environmental direct action movement in the UK. It is argued that the self-limiting form of ecotage in the UK has its roots in cross-movement debates that have developed over several decades and that national traditions remain important in understanding the development of social movement repertoires

“It’s Not the Abuse That Kills You, It’s the Silence”: The silencing of sexual violence activism in social justice movements in the UK Left

Widespread doubt and disbelief of women and non-binary survivors who disclose, speak out and demand accountability for the violence they have experienced within social justice movements in the UK Left reveals a painful impasse and persistent barrier in movement building. Systemic failures of criminal justice responses to rape, sexual assault and domestic violence coupled with State violence and regulation of social justice movements and marginalised groups has led to consideration of community alternatives to help transform activist communities into cultures of safety and accountability. However, ‘counter-organising’ (INCITE! 2003; 2006) can distort, scrutinise and dismantle the work of survivors and their supporters in developing community accountability and safer spaces processes. The salvage research project (Downes, Hanson and Hudson, 2016) used participatory action research approaches and qualitative interviews with 10 women and non-binary survivors to explore the lived experiences of harm, violence and abuse experienced in activist communities in the UK. This article will explore how resistance to disclosures of gendered violence and anti-violence activism can be as (or more) harmful than the violence initially experienced. Five key silencing strategies are explored: (i) discrediting survivors and supporters; (ii) questioning the legitimacy of claim; (iii) questioning the legitimacy of community accountability; (iv) avoiding troubling recognitions; and (v) placing burden on survivors. The silencing of survivors and their supporters permits unequal power relations to remain unchanged and removes any need for the misogyny and sexism produced in activist communities to be critically examined