Here’s our agenda <click the link!> for today’s class meeting; it includes a schedule and all the links we’ll need to coordinate our online collaboration.
This week we’ll study how social movements use network infrastructure to create resilient, decentralized, aligned progress towards collective goals. We will study organic, distributed, “emergent” social movements, and we’ll ask: can leadership truly be distributed, and can power be shared, in the process of creating positive social change? Is the pace of networked movement-building effective in the context of rapid political cycles and crisis events (like pandemics!), and what kind of infrastructure does it require?
Guest: Taeyoon Choi, Artist, Educator, Activist, Co-Founder of the School for Poetic Computation
To be reviewed before class:
- Taeyoon Choi, “Racial Justice in the Distributed Web,” Distributed Web of Care (January 11, 2019).
- Jo Freeman (aka Joreen), “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Jo Freeman, 1970 (See also: the Wikipedia page).
- Ethan Zuckerman, “The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure,” Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University (January 17, 2020).
- Post a reading response if you’ve signed up to do so?
Choose one of the following:
- Movement Strategy Center, “The Practices of Transformative Movements,” (June 2016).
James Lee Boggs, “Going Where We Have Never Been: Creating New Communities for Our Future,” in A Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader.” Detroit: Wayne State University Press (2011).- Laura Forlano, “Ethnographies of Future Infrastructures,” EPIC (May 10, 2016).
- Maria Elena Duarte, “Network Sovereignty” in Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country (University of Washington Press, 2017): 104-21.
- Jessica Feldman, “Nuit Debout | Strange Speech: Structures of Listening in Nuit Debout, Occupy, and 15M,” International Journal of Communication 12 (2018).
SUPPLEMENTAL RESOURCES:
- Manuel Castells, “Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society,” International Journal of Communication, Vol. 1 (2007).
- Cynthia Coburn at al., “Spread and Scale in the Digital Age: A Memo to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,” Informal Science (2013).
- Seeta Peña Gangadharan, “Technologies of Control and Our Right of Refusal,” TEDxLondon (2019) {video: 12:27}.
- Faye Ginsberg, “Indigenous Media from U-Matic to YouTube: Media Sovereignty in the Digital Age,” Sociologia & Antropologia 6:3 (2016): 581-99.
- Indigenous Connectivity Summit 2017.
- Zeynep Tufekci (excerpt), “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest.” Yale University Press 2017.
- Iris Marion Young, “Five Faces of Oppression,” reprinted in Seth A. Asumah and Mechthild, eds., Diversity, Social Justice, and Inclusive Excellence (State University of New York Press, Albany, 2014).