Presents studies that promote public dialogue and discussion and that demonstrate how communication consulting can be used to accomplish needed social change. This volume, along with the other volume, shows how scholars have engaged in communication activism to assist individuals, groups, organizations, and communities to secure social reform.
This book brings together academic and activist work on community media, feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous perspectives to digital activism, including Free and Open Communication in Latin America. The essays in this collection speak to major changes over the past decade that are reshaping digital media uses and practices. The case studies presented here question many commonly held assumptions around global media ownership, sustainability, and access relevant to countries beyond Latin American contexts.
Global movements and protests from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement have been attributed to growing access to social media, while without it, local causes like #bringbackourgirls and the ice bucket challenge may have otherwise remained unheard and unseen. Regardless of their nature – advocacy, activism, protest or dissent – and beyond the technological ability of digital and social media to connect support, these major events have all been the results of excellent communication and public relations. But PR remains seen only as the defender of corporate and capitalist interests, and therefore resistant to outside voices such as activists, NGOs, union members, protesters and whistle-blowers. Drawing on contributions from around the world to examine the concepts and practice of "activist," "protest" and "dissent" public relations, this book challenges this view. Using a range of international examples, it explores the changing nature of protest and its relationship with PR and provides a radical analysis of the communication strategies and tactics of social movements and activist groups and their campaigns. This thought-provoking collection will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of public relations, strategic communication, political science, politics, journalism, marketing, and advertising, and also to PR professionals in think tanks and NGOs.
Choice Top 25 Academic Title How activists and minority communities use media to facilitate social change and achieve cultural citizenship. Among the most well-known YouTubers are a cadre of talented Asian American performers, including comedian Ryan Higa and makeup artist Michelle Phan. Yet beneath the sheen of these online success stories lies a problem—Asian Americans remain sorely underrepresented in mainstream film and television. When they do appear on screen, they are often relegated to demeaning stereotypes such as the comical foreigner, the sexy girlfriend, or the martial arts villain. The story that remains untold is that as long as these inequities have existed, Asian Americans have been fighting back—joining together to protest offensive imagery, support Asian American actors and industry workers, and make their voices heard. Providing a cultural history and ethnography, Asian American Media Activism assesses everything from grassroots collectives in the 1970s up to contemporary engagements by fan groups, advertising agencies, and users on YouTube and Twitter. In linking these different forms of activism, Lori Kido Lopez investigates how Asian American media activism takes place and evaluates what kinds of interventions are most effective. Ultimately, Lopez finds that activists must be understood as fighting for cultural citizenship, a deeper sense of belonging and acceptance within a nation that has long rejected them.
Communication scholars have taken seriously the call for engaged scholarship, and this book examines the principles, practices, and outcomes of communication activism research for social justice. Communication activism research differs from other engaged communication scholarship through researchers promoting social justice, intervening collaboratively, and creating or assisting established collective actors that represent marginalized communities. Collective actors examined in this book include Black Lives Matter, the feminist movement, and LGBTQ+ groups. This book provides practical guidance on how to perform communication activism research, offering recommendations for managing its challenges and discussing qualitative and quantitative methods for evaluating research interventions focusing on significant contemporary issues. This book will appeal to scholars who study and teach communication and social justice activism as well as scholars from disciplines such as sociology, and it is ideal as a text in courses on communication and activism, engaged communication scholarship, communication and social movements, and communication research methods.
This textbook is an advanced introduction to quantitative methods for students in communication and allied social science disciplines that focuses on why and how to conduct research that contributes to social justice. Today’s researchers are inspired by the potential for scholarship to make a difference for society, to push toward more just and equitable ends, and to engage in dialogue with members of the public so that they can make decisions about how to navigate the social, cultural, and political world equipped with accurate, fair, and up-to-date knowledge. This book illustrates the mechanics and the meaning behind quantitative research methods by illustrating each step in the research design process with research addressing questions of social justice. It provides practical guidance for researchers who wish to engage in the transformation of structures, practices, and understandings in society through community and civic engagement and policy formation. It contains step-by-step guidance in quantitative methods—from conceptualization through all the stages of execution of a study, including providing a detailed guide for statistical analysis—and demonstrates how researchers can engage with social justice issues in systematic, rigorous, ethical, and meaningful ways. This text serves as a core or supplementary textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in research methods for communication and social sciences and fills a gap for a methods text that is responsive to the desire of scholars to conduct socially impactful research.
Education remains the best hope for addressing the social injustices that dominate society. Few educators, however, focus on social justice directly, and even when they do, typically, they make students aware of injustice but they do not teach students how to do something about it. This book introduces a unique form of education - communication activism pedagogy - that teaches students how to use their communication knowledge and skills to promote social justice.
This collection immerses scholars of communication and related disciplines in narratives of and conversations about social-justice-focused activism. Through autoethnographic essays, Mindful Activism chronicles the authors' experiences as activist academics challenging and seeking to remedy injustices on campus and in local and global communities. Those experiences range from engaging in a single activist act to collaborating over many years with oppressed communities and social change groups. Building upon Communication Activism Research and following a liberation-based Transformative Learning Model, the book shows both activism in action and deep reflection on that activism. The authors re-experience activist experiences, draw out lessons, and invite readers to apply those to their own social justice endeavors. Mindful Activism also demonstrates how mindfulness supports activists in deepening their awareness and understanding of themselves, others, and social systems. This orientation increases the likelihood that activists will remain grounded enough to respond to injustice mindfully/effectively. The book will enrich courses on activism, social justice, dialogue, narrative inquiry, qualitative methods, autoethnography, and general graduate studies and will resonate with scholars committed to building a more equitable and just world.
In this accessible introduction to communication activism, organizer Karen Jeffreys and sociologist Charlotte Ryan draw on more than two decades of ongoing collaboration, using the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless (RICH) as a case study. The book examines a community with shared values, decision-making, and conflict resolution procedures, tracking its organizing strategy and matched communication plan. The authors first describe a communication campaign during the welfare reform battles (1990–1995) in which they began to practice communication activism. In ongoing work with two organizations over the next two decades, they distil a model of communication activism that draws directly from vibrant traditions of empowerment communication in U.S. social movements and movements from the Global South. Beyond Prime Time Activism provides students and researchers with an invaluable look at contemporary activism practices and with practical tools tried and tested in two decades of social movement engagement. This book is ideal for anyone participating in social change movements or studying how they navigate communication and media inequalities.
This book is an extensive investigation of the complexities, ambiguities and shortcomings of contemporary digital activism. The author deconstructs the reductionism of the literature on social movements and communication, proposing a new conceptual vocabulary based on practices, ecologies, imaginaries and algorithms to account for the communicative complexity of protest movements. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on social movements, collectives and political parties in Spain, Italy and Mexico, this book disentangles the hybrid nature of contemporary activism. It shows how activists operate merging the physical and the digital, the human and the non-human, the old and the new, the internal and the external, the corporate and the alternative. The author illustrates the ambivalent character of contemporary digital activism, demonstrating that media imaginaries can be either used to conceal authoritarianism, or to reimagine democracy. The book looks at both side of algorithmic power, shedding light on strategies of repression and propaganda, and scrutinizing manifestations of algorithms as appropriation and resistance. The author analyses the way in which digital activism is not an immediate solution to intricate political problems, and argues that it can only be effective when a set of favourable social, political, and cultural conditions align. Assessing whether digital activism can generate and sustain long-term processes of social and political change, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching radical politics, social movements, digital activism, political participation and current affairs more generally.