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.
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.
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.
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.
This “well-researched, nuanced” study of the rise of social media activism explores how marginalized groups use Twitter to advance counter-narratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent (Ms.) The power of hashtag activism became clear in 2011, when #IranElection served as an organizing tool for Iranians protesting a disputed election and offered a global audience a front-row seat to a nascent revolution. Since then, activists have used a variety of hashtags, including #JusticeForTrayvon, #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen, and #MeToo to advocate, mobilize, and communicate. In this book, Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles explore how and why Twitter has become an important platform for historically disenfranchised populations, including Black Americans, women, and transgender people. They show how marginalized groups, long excluded from elite media spaces, have used Twitter hashtags to advance counternarratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent. The authors describe how such hashtags as #MeToo, #SurvivorPrivilege, and #WhyIStayed have challenged the conventional understanding of gendered violence; examine the voices and narratives of Black feminism enabled by #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, and #SayHerName; and explore the creation and use of #GirlsLikeUs, a network of transgender women. They investigate the digital signatures of the “new civil rights movement”—the online activism, storytelling, and strategy-building that set the stage for #BlackLivesMatter—and recount the spread of racial justice hashtags after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other high-profile incidents of killings by police. Finally, they consider hashtag created by allies, including #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite.
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.
The second edition of this formative collection offers analysis of the work rhetoric plays in the principles and practices of today’s culture of democratic activism. Editors JongHwa Lee and Seth Kahn—and their diverse contributors working in communication and composition studies both within and outside academia—provide explicit articulation of how activist rhetoric differs from the kinds of deliberative models that rhetoric has exalted for centuries, contextualized through and by contributors’ everyday lives, work, and interests. New to this edition are attention to Black Lives Matter, the transgender community, social media environments, globalization, and environmental activism. Simultaneously challenging and accessible, Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement is a must-read for students and scholars who are interested in or actively engaged in rhetoric, composition, political communication, and social justice. Chapters 1, 6, and 13 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Winner of the 2014 NCA PRIDE Book Award Why are some voices louder in public debates than others? And why can’t all voices be equally heard? This book draws significant new meaning to the inter-relationships of public relations and social change through a number of activist case studies, and rebuilds knowledge around alternative communicative practices that are ethical, sustainable, and effective. Demetrious offers a powerful critical description of the dominant model of public relations used in the twentieth century, showing that ‘PR’ was arrogant, unethical and politically offensive in ways that have severely weakened democratic process and its public standing and professional credibility. The book argues that change within the field of public relations is imminent and urgent—for us all. As the effects of climate change intensify, and are magnified by high carbon dioxide emitting industries, vigorous public debate is vital in the exploration of new ideas and action and if alternative futures are to be imagined. In these conditions, articulate and persistent publics will appear in the form of grassroots activists, asking contentious questions about risks and tabling them for public discussion in bold, inventive, and effective ways. Yet the entrenched power relations in and through public relations in contemporary industrialized society provide no certainty these voices will be heard. Following this path, Demetrious theorises an alternative set of social relations to those used in the twentieth century: public communication. Constructed from communicative practices of grassroots activists and synthesis of diverse theoretical positions, public communication is a principled approach that avoids the deep contradictions and flawed coherences of essentialist public relations and instead represents an important ethical reorientation in the communicative fields. Lastly, she brings original new perspectives to understand current and emergent developments in activism and public relations brought about through the proliferation of Internet and digital cultures.
