Media Activism

Chapted co-authored with Simon Blanchard.

Edited by Laura Mulvey and Sue Clayton (with research and editorial assistance from C.M. Holdsworth) Other Cinemas (I.B.Tauris) brings together voices, established and new at the cutting edge of research into radical British cinema and the moving image, to explore theories, politics and works important to this diverse context.

The Independent Film Makers’ Association (IFA) was founded in 1974 to promote the interests shared by a diverse coalition of ‘independent’ filmmakers working in Britain. The Association’s campaigns helped to bring new voices and visions into film and television at the time and provided a forum in which to meet, debate and campaign. Prepared by Simon Blanchard, who was a member and participant/observer at IFA meetings and a National Organiser at the IFA from 1980, in conversation with archivist and researcher Claire M. Holdsworth, this chapter offers a Commentary and brief Chronology of this cultural network, with some reflections on its significance.

This chapter is supplemented by other contributions on Channel 4 and the Workshop Declaration as well as a separate chronology, also published in this book.

https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/36198/

Brazil Beginning in June 2013, Brazil was struck by a series of explosive, chaotic, and oft-violent protests. Rallying around the slogan " A Gigante Accordou " (" The Giant Has Awakened "), these protests were the largest displays of citizens taking to the street since the end of the military dictatorship in the 1980s. 1 Though the demonstrators raised multiple grievances including reckless public spending on mega-events like the Olym-pics and the World Cup, entrenched governmental corruption, and the arbitrary raising of public transportation fares, one of the most common claims was an intense dissatisfaction with the way the nation's news media were failing to represent the views of the Brazilian citizenry. When observing this situation, international commentators writing for media outlets from the Wall Street Journal to the Guardian observed that the protests were throwing into clear relief a dissatisfaction over oligopoly control of mainstream media and its impact on information access and news production. In turn, the protests offered what many international journalists called the " beginning of an alternative media sphere in Brazil. " 2 At the center of the shifting media landscape was a social media–based citizen journalism project calling itself " MídiaNINJA. " Launched in late 2012, NINJA (a Portuguese acronym for " Independent Narratives, Journalism, and Action) has received copious attention for using footage recorded on mobile phones and aired via social media to record police violence and unsanctioned arrests during the 2013 protests. Publically besmirching mainstream news conglomerates like the Globo Network, NINJA claims that it is opening up a new space for Brazilian citizens to make media. 3 While it officially " launched " in 2012, NINJA grew directly out of and was incubated by Fora do Eixo (FDE), a much larger arts and culture organization. While FDE initially focused more on organizing music festivals and public art installations than promoting citizen journalism, its explicit focus on opening chapters and sponsoring events outside of preexisting cultural hubs like Rio, São Paulo, and Recife laid a foundation that NINJA would use to establish many of its own regional centers. On the technological level, NINJA draws heavily on both the recording functions of smart phones and the distributional capabilities of social networking sites including TwitCasting, Twitter,

Arab spring images: aesthetics, politics and digital medias. In this article, we emphasize the role played by images produced during the protests brought down state leaders in North Africa in the beginning of 2011. Conceived in a context of violence and body risk, registered by means of mobile devices and distributed by digital media, these images carry aesthetic-political elements that are potentiated due to the organic-technological environment where they are inserted. Such particularity results in a set of signs whose flow contributes to the distribution of the sensible and a consequent reordering of the contemporary political sphere.

Por meio da compreensão do ativismo de fãs como uma forma de resistência cotidiana cultural, econômica e criativa, o objetivo deste capítulo busca problematizar as relações entre participação, resistência e consumo de fãs do jogo on-line League of Legends (LoL). Enquanto suporte empírico, apresenta-se um mapeamento sobre algumas práticas do ativismo de fãs-jogadores no antigo fórum oficial de LoL no Brasil, a partir de uma triangulação metodológica com destaque para o uso de inspirações etnográficas. Após as reflexões teóricas e as análises, propõe-se uma tipologia das práticas de resistência cotidiana na comunidade de LoL baseada em quatro modos. Os resultados desta abordagem indicam que a diversidade do universo das produções digitais e práticas de parte dos fãs de LoL ressignificam as compreensões sobre resistência e participação, questionando a dualidade existente entre a cidadania e o consumo da cultura pop, agindo como catalizadores que reinterpretam e excedem os limites do fandom.

Debate over consumer trust in traditional media has intensified due to the appearance of networked social movements, particularly considering media coverage of the protests, the emergence of alternative media and social media as information sources. A survey was created for this study to provide insight into the association between media exposure, trust and political participation in networked social movements, specifically among 15M Movement activists. Data is presented to show to what extent to 15M activists view traditional and alternative media as trustworthy. The article also looks at the causes of
trust and mistrust in those media.

Results indicate that politically-interested online users placed more trust in information disseminated by alternative media than by conventional media. Furthermore, exposure to social media is associated with trust in media, while age and gender are not. This means that the increased use of alternative and social media involves a decreased trust in information provided by traditional media. Instead, those who do not use social media and those who use traditional media are those who trusted mass media the most.

Over recent decades, the consolidation of the Internet as an important source of information (Pew Research Center, 2011) has caused a change in the information-seeking behaviour of the population in general and of young people in particular. Nowadays, young people consult traditional media less often, especially in their analogue format. As a result, getting informed has become a social event which is also transmedia and decentralized. The information is spread through multiple platforms, overflowing conventional media (Williams
and Delli Carpini, 2011). These new trends imply that work within traditional newsrooms is being challenged and questioned by a whole new era of citizen-journalists (Compton and Benedetti, 2010) and this contributes to the appearance of new actors on the information stage. Among these are the various nodes of the networked social movements (Castells, 2012) that have originated since 2009 such as Occupy in the United States, the uprisings in the Middle East and North African countries or the 15M Movement in Spain, among others. These movements are characterized by the occupation of public space and the use of social media to disseminate political information and to mobilize citizens.

"Cinema is the most powerful weapon " – Benito Mussolini's motto loomed in capital letters over the 1937 inauguration of the massive production hub being built in the outskirts of Rome, reminding the film industry what was expected of it. Notwithstanding the effort to deploy cinema as a key technology for governing the nation and the empire, in the early 1940s film became a battlefield for the Regime. This excavates from the closet of memory the story of the Cinema cell, the group of young film enthusiasts who, in fascist Italy, engaged in what today we would call " media activism " : they put their lives on the line, infiltrated the film industry, and shouldered the movie camera as their initial weapon of combat against a defiant totalitarianism. Here, I focus on how the underground formation elaborated an iteration of filmic realism that countered the implantation in the body politic of racialized fantasies of national identity. In tracing the cell's efforts to develop a gaze on the nation that would oppose the race-driven realism advocated by Mussolini's son Vittorio, among others, I establish a genealogy for Visconti's 1943 Ossessione and its display of queerness as the authentic alternative to fascist life. By way of conclusion, I disentangle the system of intimacy and affectivity harnessed by this film from the one that postwar neorealism contributed to securing.

The artistic use of error has a long history, and this essay attempts to reconstruct the genealogy of the relationship between artists and error. It then goes on to analyze the characteristics of technological error used in art along with the reasons for its appreciation by media artists and media activists. Finally, it contextualizes the practices of media art and media activism taken as exemplars in questions bound to contemporary technological power. The aim of this theoretical trajectory is to understand how error is used, for what purposes, and with what outcomes. Further, its goal is to determine whether and how the current popularity of technological error is bound to a certain relationship with technological power, the characteristics of which are control, regulation, prevention, and normalization.

This article engages with the activities of the alternative international media centre FC/MC which was established and operated during the 2017 G20-Summit in Hamburg. Rather than following established narratives on alternative media or mobilising discourses on aesthetics of resistance in the arts, the specific operational logics of affective and preemptive politics of perception define the main scope of developing what is termed “activist sense” and the emergence of potential “aesthetic counterpowers” as part and parcel of an affective politics of perception. Drawing on the conception of affect in social media studies and on the notions of field and information in the works of gilbert Simondon, the FC/MC will be analysed as a building block in the overall infrastructure of affective resistance against dominant and platform-based narratives of violence and threat amplified by mainstream media. Through a field-based conception of affect and perception, the question of “making-sense” takes on a pervasive yet potentially more inclusive and activating dimension of future forms of media-infused modes of resistance.

The accessible, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) nature of radio technology lends itself to innovation and activism (Douglas 1999 p.357), contributing to its status as the “epitome of alternative media” (Waltz 2005 p.36). Radioactive International is an online radio station providing over 1750 hours of free, on demand, alternative radio and hosting almost forty independently produced programmes from around the world. Developing from the 1990s Dublin anarcho-punk scene, it remains grounded in the DIY ethos of anti-capitalist freedom of expression. Radioactive International is one example from a growing number of DIY radio programmes and formats produced by original participants of 1980s and 1990s anarcho-punk, now in their forties and fifties. This research draws on interviews with individual producers to explore the links between punk and radio amongst older DIY activists. Making radio is considered as a natural extension of ongoing multiplatform DIY punk practice, demonstrating a lifetime commitment to DIY politics and values.

This article examines the evolution of Maori filmmaking since the 1980s and explores the Indigenous cinema in the context of developments in the New Zealand film industry. It does so by focusing on the predominantly state-funded production of Maori feature films while having Barry Barclay’s idea of Fourth Cinema in mind. This essay is divided in three parts. The first part traces the beginnings of Maori cinema back to the 1970s and introduces the first three feature films directed by a Maori filmmaker, Ngati (Barry Barclay, 1987), Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988), and Te Rua (Barry Barclay, 1991). The second part discusses the mainstream success of Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, 1994) and the film’s paradoxical contribution to Maori cinema in the 1990s. The third and final part explores the intensified course of state-funded Maori filmmaking since the 2000s and addresses some of the opportunities and challenges facing the Indigenous cinema in the current environment of institutional and commercial globalization.

Th e 1940s was a contentious decade for US media policy. Activists, policy- makers, and media industries grappled over defining the normative foundations that governed major communication and regulatory institutions. At this time, a reform agenda took shape at both the grassroots social movement level and within elite policy circles. An analysis of the rise and fall of this postwar media reform movement
holds at least three key lessons for contemporary media activists. First, it reminds us of the imperative to maintain a strong inside/outside strategy that keeps regulators connected to the grassroots. Second, we learn that media activists retreat on structural reform objectives at their own peril. Finally, we must remember that media reform rises and falls with other political struggles and radical social movements. With these lessons in mind, media reformers should seek to build liberal- left coalitions and, perhaps, a new popular front.

Neste artigo buscamos responder o que é, afinal, Jornalismo de Guerrilha. Empreendemos uma revisão de literatura evidenciando definições e dimensões ao mesmo tempo complementares e contraditórias para tal noção. Colocamos à prova nossa compreensão com a análise do fenômeno do Mídia Ninja, observando mais especificamente suas transmissões simultâneas, para verificar como o coletivo desenvolve suas formas de atuação e se ele se enquadra ou não em tal nos aspectos que caracterizam tal noção conceitual. Ao final, tecemos considerações que sinalizam o caráter exploratório da apreciação frente ao fenômeno observado e a complexidade em delimitar o conceito pretendido.

This introduction to the special issue, ‘Engagement, Witnessing and
Activism: Independent Chinese Documentary Filmmakers’ Different
Positions, Approaches and Aesthetics,’ argues that how the political
is registered and expressed in Chinese activist documentaries
cannot simply be read through Western ideas, concepts and
aesthetics. Rather, Chinese work has been shaped partly in
relation to state-sanctioned public discourse, and partly through
the localising of international influences according to Chinese
socio-political conditions. Contemporary Chinese activist
documentary makers have chosen as their primary modus
operandi an open, exploratory engagement with the ‘grassroots’
(jiceng). The core commitment in this approach is to the truth of
the on-screen subject’s experience as they themselves see it. Modes
of engagement with the grassroots include: making visible people
and identities that state-sanctioned representations hide or gloss
over; bearing witness to events and situations that are similarly
hidden, or presented in a very particular manner, in state sanctioned
representations; and exploring memories and historical
experiences which are otherwise unacknowledged or presented
within narrow interpretive parameters in state-sanctioned media.
This introduction details how the articles in this special issue
analyse and discuss Chinese activist works that utilise one or more
of these modes.

This chapter discusses the emergent use of digital technology to inspire, connect, and sustain student activism on campus. An overview of student activism, opportunities, and challenges of this technology, along with recent case studies and implications for practice, are presented.

-Discusses the influence of Slow philosophy, Slow Food movements, and social and environmental policy on principles and practices as they relate to media
- Offers a new ethical framework, rooted in sustainability, for the production and consumption of news media and digital devices
- Provides insight on media non-use and renegotiating media habits through mindfulness
- Introduces emerging vocabulary such as Slow Media, Mindful Media, and Green Media

This chapter helps to fill gaps in our knowledge of the relationships among right-wing activists, conservative media, and alternative journalism. The vast majority of research on alternative and activist media, especially in the U.S., has to date assumed a progressive orientation and focused on liberal sources, messages and audiences. By contrast, this paper revisits the literature to illuminate how the field has variously examined and neglected the ideas, practices and publics of right-wing media users. It reports a new analysis of survey data revealing both similarities and divergences between conservative and progressive audiences in regards to their attitudes toward alternative and mainstream media—in particular, toward the individual and structural biases of professional journalism. These findings will help scholars, journalists and other actors to better understand, theorize, and study the role of alternative media users in mainstream political communication. It also suggests several points of departure for future work on alternative journalism, partisan rhetorical strategies, media criticism, and public engagement.

Feminist activism is currently on the rise and has created a demand for new and unique ways of activism. Research shows that the rise of 21st century feminism, combined with our evolving digital world, has led many feminists to expand their activism to social media platforms. This way they can spread their word faster and reach a broader audience. This study aims to determine the importance of Instagram’s platform affordances for feminist activists, and it asks: What does Instagram afford for feminist activism? This study was executed by reviewing literature on current feminist discourse and by analyzing three separate feminist Instagram accounts with varying amounts of followers. This analysis provides an insight into how feminist activists utilize the platform to spread their campaigns and messages. Feminists use the platform according to common trends, but their content focus varies depending on their individual passions regarding feminism and women’s rights.

As imagens têm papel essencial na construção de estratégias de engajamento e mobilização no contemporâneo, pois é por meio delas que as causas conseguem projetar-se local e globalmente pelas redes de comunicação digital. Fotografias e vídeos podem ter características estéticas particulares que fundem elementos de impacto sensorial, tais como o uso da violência, o senso de imediatismo e a utilização do corpo, com aspectos ligados à circulação nas mídias e à mobilidade dos aparelhos de gravação, reprodução e divulgação.
A intensidade com que algumas dessas imagens foram repercutidas nos coloca questões como: que aspectos estético políticos carregam as imagens produzidas em manifestações contemporâneas? Que impacto elas têm sobre a audiência imersa em ambientes midiáticos híbridos e móveis? O que há de particular na experiência política proporcionada por essas imagens?
Estas e outras questões são abordadas no decorrer deste livro, que faz uso de exemplos de ações ativistas com grande repercussão afim de contribuir para a reflexão do papel da imagem nas práticas políticas contemporâneas.

http://www.pacolivros.com.br/Ativismo_Digital_e_Imagem/prod-4597415/

In the course of the past three decades, participatory researchers have
increasingly conducted empirical research within social movements as
research activists in order to document, understand, and archive knowledge
about social movements and media activism. While this trend allows
for more directly experiential empirical research findings, it has also raised
a host of ethical questions related to the exercise of power in research practices aiming to create equitable relations. Faced with this changing researchscape, participatory researchers are integrating a consideration of these questions into their research design and practice, with new approaches to ethics protocols, relationship building, discourses, and processes emerging.

The Public Broadcasting Act’s 50th anniversary provides an opportune
moment to reassess justifications for creating a noncommercial media system. This commemorative occasion coincides with a particularly precarious moment for public radio and television’s future, adding some urgency to revisiting and reasserting its normative foundations. With this in mind, it is instructive to look back at public broadcasting’s long history to recover some of the original arguments for establishing an alternative to commercial news media. These earlier visions suggest a social democratic ideal for broadcast media, one clearly recognizing that a market-driven system cannot provide for all of democratic society’s communication needs.

Risk  in  education  in  the  creative  field  of  communication  design  is  usually  seen  in  connection with creativity as subjective expression and innovation as desired impact. This  article  positions  risk  in  relation  to  the  political  in  design  education.  It  puts  forward  the  argument  that  a  particular  type  of  risk-taking  in  education  can  work  towards  shifting  design  from  a  position  of  a  service-providing  activity  towards  a  more  emancipated  practice,  which  would  not  comply  with  the  pressures  of  neo-liberal  capitalism.  To  counter  the  current  state  of  compliance  this  article  suggests  a  three-level  model  of  extradisciplinary  risk-taking  as  institutional  critique.  The  case  of Memefest and Design Futures is discussed. Theoretical analysis is combined with (auto) ethnography and qualitative research.

This chapter considers some of the legal issues facing citizen journalists, especially those engaged in “radical” or activist reporting, in an online context. It suggests that the conceptualization of the citizen journalist must consider the status of this type of journalism in relation to law, the application of which is especially challenging in an online environment that is said to transcend jurisdictions. The extent of legal provisions recognizing citizen journalists as being privy to special
protection are in dispute, though there appears to be a growing recognition of their claim to substantive rights as citizens and as journalists. In this chapter, I shall argue that state authority and law is adapting—if rather slowly—to take account of changes in international relations (or globalization) with important implications for citizen journalism’s forms and practices deserving of close attention.

With over five years of hindsight following historic protests around the world, we review scholarship published on “Social Movement 2.0” (SM2.0)—our shorthand for the convergence of Web 2.0 platforms and protest, movements, or other resistance activities. Initially, we review 97 articles as offering disparate assumptions concerning social movement, agency, and the relationship between humans and new communication technologies (NCTs). We suggest SM2.0 scholarship could benefit from following debates in social movement rhetoric and media ecology. Particularly, building upon rhetoricians’ critiques of traditional movement theory, we encourage scholars to amplify the constitutive meanings and identities created through NCTs in protest (rather than rely upon functional paradigms). Building upon media ecology scholarship, we critique SM2.0 analysis that leverages technological determinism or isolationism to address media’s power in social change. We feature instead scholarship that unpacks the relationship between media and the unique contexts in which protestors build networks of resistance. We call for greater complexity in scholarship at the intersections of movement and media.

Emerging global social movement and media activist practices are integrating intersectional politics into technologically facilitated activism. Based on a multiyear empirical study, this article proposes a preliminary theoretical framework that maps 5 key dimensions of an emergent intersectional technopolitics: (1) intersectional anticapitalist politics enacted in meta-issue movements; (2) distributed online–offline media
architectures and motility; (3) multiplicities of genres, forms, technologies, and spaces; (4) translocal solidarity economies and technologies; and (5) liberatory intersectional mechanisms of collective autonomy. The author argues that intersectional technopolitics is an innovative and complex set of coherent global social movement and media activist practices rooted in meta-issue movements integrated with transmedia digital technologies. The article concludes with a critical analysis of contradictions encountered by intersectional technopolitics activists as they interact with the structures of broader social movements, social media technologies, and societal hierarchies.

We all have a body image. We all have feelings about the way we look. We have ideas and feelings about how others think about our looks. Your overall body image can range from very positive to very negative. We do not develop our body image all on our own. The people around us and our culture strongly influence it. We get both positive and negative messages about our bodies from family and friends all the time, starting from when we’re very young. We also get messages about body image from television, magazines, films, and other media. Many of the beliefs we have about the way women and men “should” look come from the models and celebrities we see in the media.

Trump’s election laid bare structural flaws in our news and information systems. As mainstream news media sensationalized and trivialized what was at stake in the elections, social media amplified misinformation and propaganda. These media pathologies paved the way for the triumph of a demagogue. While criticism of such problems has escalated since the election, the underlying policies that enabled them have largely escaped scrutiny.

Still and moving images are crucial factors in contemporary political conflicts. They not only have representational, expressive or illustrative functions, but also augment and create significant events. Beyond altering states of mind, they affect bodies, and often life or death is at stake. Various forms of image operations are currently performed in the contexts of war, insurgency and activism. Photographs, videos, diagrams, interactive simulations and other kinds of images steer drones to their targets, train soldiers, terrorise the public, celebrate protest icons, uncover injustices, or call for help. They are often parts of complex agential networks and move across different media and cultural environments. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the role and function of images in political life. Balancing theoretical reflections with in-depth case studies, it brings together internationally renowned scholars and activists from different fields to offer a multifaceted critical perspective on a crucial aspect of contemporary visual culture.

"Performing Protest" offers a cultural approach to protest media. I argue that social movements use protest media strategically in creative and productive ways that go beyond representation. Based on a multi-sited and digital ethnography of the trans-urban EuroMayDay movement I show that protest media were constituent in its formation and central to its performativity. Contrasting my own position between the fields of activism and academia with formats of participatory or un-biased research, I come up with the concept of 'reflexive activist scholarship'.

Throughout the 2000s, the simultaneous Euromayday Parades on International Workers’ Day in over 40 European cities were highly visible public performances. Using complex media arrangements, activists circulated plurivocal imageries of precarity. Mediated repertoires of contention established credible political actors, and circulated struggles across regional and national borders.

Despite increasing interest for protest media in social movement- and media studies, their culturality had received little theoretical and methodological attention at the time of writing. I reviewed approaches from social movement scholarship, critical anthropology, European ethnology, and cultural studies, as well as theories of practice, post-operaism, and governmentality.

My research is based on a processual, flexible multi-sited ethnography, and grounded in micro-politics. I traced imageries circulating in the Euromayday network, and contextualised their historical and contemporary contexts through digital ethnography, participatant observation and, most importantly, formal and informal interviews with activists.  This enabled visual and textual analysis of selected media products, and a comparative study of the precarity frame in the global cities of Milan, London and Hamburg as well as from a network perspective.

I found that media need to be aligned with specific cultural settings to unfold their performative power. Imageries and narratives of precarity were aligned with everyday life, popular culture, symbolic time and urban space. Mediated practices of meaning-making generated situated knowledge on precarious conditions, empowered political subjectivities based on difference, and contributed to new forms of organising.