Transformative Media
Transformative Media
Intersectional Technopolitics from Indymedia to #BlackLivesMatter
In 1999, Seattle activists adopted cutting-edge livestream technology to cover protests against the World Trade Organization. The global Indymedia network that emerged established the importance of alternative, anti-capitalist media for marginalized groups.
Transformative Media explores subsequent developments as the anti-oppression practices of digitally facilitated movements and media activists began contributing to a nascent intersectional technopolitics: harnessing the transformative power of technologies for political purposes. Drawing on years of participatory research, Sandra Jeppesen investigates the complex, often contradictory digital and offline practices of grassroots media and social movement groups, such as the Indignados, #BlackLivesMatter, Idle No More, 2LGBTQ+, and #MeToo. These projects develop not just alternative media frames and counter-publics but also activist media practices that attempt to re-appropriate the exploitative structures of capitalist social media platforms.
This groundbreaking work examines how a broad array of anti-capitalists, women, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC), and 2LGBTQ+ people are contesting interlocking systems of capitalism, gender oppression, racism, colonialism, and heteronormativity. Transformative Media offers new insights into the challenges and contradictions behind the scenes of some of the world’s most exciting and controversial social movements.
Scholars and students of media and communications, social movements, feminist media, intersectionality, and alternative media will find this innovative, forward-looking study invaluable, as will media and social activists.
This book is a distinctive blend of critical analysis and participatory empirical research and makes a compelling case for engaged social activism. A must-read for scholars and students in media studies, communications, critical cultural studies, and sociology.
Based on a thorough understanding of movements and their media, Transformative Media offers important insights and is a pleasure to read.
Sandra Jeppesen is a professor of media and communications at Lakehead University Orillia and former Lakehead University Research Chair in Transformative Media and Social Movements. Coeditor, with Paola Sartoretto, of Media Activist Research Ethics: Global Approaches to Negotiating Power in Social Justice Research, she has also published in Media, Culture & Society, the Journal of Alternative and Community Media, tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, Feminist Media Studies, and Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements.
Preface
1 Intersectional Technopolitics
2 Global Justice
3 Anti-austerity
4 Anticolonialism and Antiracism
5 2LGBTQ+
6 Transfeminism
7 Futures
Appendix; References; Index
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