Full Description
The intersection of virtual and physical spaces at the heart of contemporary political protests is a pivotal element in new practices of activism. In this new and global ecology of dissent and activism, different forces, stakeholders, and spaces, once defiantly discordant, come together to define the increasingly malleable nature and terms of participatory politics and the performance of democracy. This book explores the emerging sites, aesthetics and politics of contemporary dissent as a critical attempt to foreground their mediation and negotiation in an era of neoliberal globalization. Contemporary forms of media activism occupy deeply ambivalent spaces, which Ardizzoni analyzes using the lens of what she calls "matrix activism." Rather than confining the analysis to a single platform, a single technology, or a single social actor, matrix activism allows us to explain the hybrid nature of new forms of dissent and resistance, as they are located at the intersection of alternative and mainstream, non-profit and corporate, individual and social, production and consumption, online and offline.
Contents
Introduction: Emerging Practices of Media Activism
I.1 Media from the Margins: Civic, Radical, Alternative, Tactical?
I.2 The Revolution Will (Not) Be Televised: Media Technology and Activism
I.3 Commercialism, Commodification, and Contemporary Social Action
I.4 Matrix Activism
Part I: From Rooftops to Squares: Space, Politics, and Media
1. Squatting Frequencies in Italy
1.1 The Telestreet Project
1.2 Insu^tv from Naples
1.3 Tactics of Interventions
1.4 Street Television and Radical Democracy
2. Networks of Protests in the Arab Spring
2.1 Genesis of the Uprisings
2.2 Politics, Participation, and Physical Spaces
2.3 Mediated Spaces and Political Embodiments
Part II: Body Scripts and Tactics of Change
3. Rising Against Violence: Eve Ensler's Global Campaigns
3.1 Campaigning for Gendered Justice: the V-Day and One Billion Rising Initiatives
3.2 Branding Gender Activism
4. Culture Jamming and Veiled Bodies in French Guerrilla Graffiti
4.1 Veiled Identities and Gendered Politics
4.2 Princess Hijab's Tactics of Subversion
4.3 Culture Jamming and the Re-Gendering of Public Spaces
Part III: Choreographies of Dissent: Performance, Music, and Social Change
5. Posse's Music of Occupation and Practices of Social Justice
5.1 Squatted Spaces of Resistance: the Italian Centri Sociali
5.2 Global Beats, Local Dialects, Shared Resistance: Italian Posse Music
5.3 Zero Plastica's Local-Global Nexus
6. 'Enough Is Enough': Senegalese Hip-Hop and Civic Engagement
6.1 A Fight for Political Justice: The Origins of Y'en a marre
6.2 Y'en a marre's Performative Activism and Social Action
6.3 Media Activism between Tradition and Renewal
Epilogue: Towards New Understandings of Contemporary Media Activism
