Week 12: Fight the Power
It took everything in me not to play “Fight the Power” in class this week, but I held it together. Week 12 focused on centering students in a timeline of activism from the past and present while projecting the role of protest into the future. In the book #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, hashtag activism is defined as “the creation and proliferation of online activism stamped with a hashtag” (xxxiii). Many times, digital or hashtag activism is used to raise awareness, mobilize large groups of people around a cause, and the hashtag itself acts as a mechanism for grouping, archiving or following the coverage of a particular event or movement. In linking the past and present, I have noticed that many times a binary is created between offline/online and past/present when it comes to activism. Especially through the context of this class, there has been a view of the online world as somehow less real than the offline world. This same binary is re-created when we see critiques of digital or hashtag activism which positions it as less real or less effective than more traditional or historic forms of activism. By positioning hashtag activism as one strategy in the organizing toolkit, this week focused on how online and offline activism do not have to be viewed as complete opposites, but instead as complements to each other.
Therefore, the questions of focus for the week are:
What is the relationship between protests of the past and the present?
What do you imagine protest and activism will look like in the future?
How can we think about the role that digital tools and technology play in opposing systems of oppression?
Especially when teaching more political and social justice oriented topics, I find it important to not position struggles for liberation as something which only happens outside of academia but to bring the topics home through examples and framing that reflect student experiences and their relationship to the local city, campus, or university. In this lecture I chose to center the college campus through a timeline of political struggle beginning with the birth of Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, and the many student revolutions of the 1960’s and beyond. Connecting the birth of Black Studies to Black Liberation Movements and mainstream media coverage of Black Power rhetoric, I continued to trace this thread to the incidents which sparked #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName. Demonstrating the relationship between the campus and the larger community, we discussed various examples of campus protests which persist around both institutions and societal ills such as protests which call for disarming campus police or for more campus diversity and inclusion initiatives. We also discussed examples of what protest looks like in the city and on campus, as well as the many ways that students and organizers use social media to promote important socio-political agendas.
Lecture ended with a class discussion about our (which were mostly my) predictions on the future of protest, and in particular speculating about what’s next for digital and data activism. One of the most pressing concerns and predictions was the need for the creation of technologies to make protest safer and more anonymous. While applications like Signal and Counter-Surveillance apps have been created, our past readings about facial recognition software and location tracking gave many reasons as to why we need more discrete ways of engaging with on the street political work. In addition, we discussed the need for more policy initiatives that are focused on the use of data and algorithms, as well as protests which could raise awareness around the importance of privacy, ownership, and greater data sovereignty for citizens. These protests or online activism would focus on holding corporations, government(s), and institutions accountable for the lack of privacy and ownership that we currently experience. In giving examples of organizations which are doing this type of work, we also discussed Data 4 Black Lives, which focuses on public policy and the ethics of data collection and analysis by bringing the concerns of Black communities into conversations on digital tools and technologies. The last question that we considered was then: How can we use data to change the lives of Black people?
The workshop for this week then focused on the article “Beyond the hashtags: #Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, and the online struggle for offline justice”. Following a discussion of methods and analyzing Twitter data, the students worked through an exercise in hashtag analysis. Specifically, the class was introduced to the Twitter content curated by Documenting the Now. An excellent site for students, scholars and researchers, DocNow is a collection of tools and resources to document our current moment in time through social media data with a focus on the ethics and archiving of the online experience through things like Tweet Catalogs, News Trackers, Badges and Labels, etc. Through exploring the tweet catalogs, I encouraged the class to think through questions around the difference between Big and Small Data, as well as pulling out themes of interest within the catalogs.
This week in particular, I began to notice how often I play the role of the techno-dystopian in the classroom. This dystopian/utopian push and pull between myself and my students was something that I began to notice in the second week of class, but it was not until now that I understood its usefulness. In many ways, my performance of pessimism or a bleak outlook on the future and the structures/institutions which contain us makes space for my students to do speculative work by kindly refuting my claims and offering me hope and optimism. This hope holds me accountable to the future, even as I find myself sometimes invested in throwing away the entire timeline and starting over again. I am especially pleased when they respond to my questions, not only through the lens of rebellion and anarchy, but through an investment in re-imagining the old to make something new. This engagement gives me extra hope for next week’s meeting which is focused on Afrofuturism (as well as my thoughts on Afro Pessimism and Optimism). Building on this week’s discussion of digital and data activism, next week’s readings and recordings imagine the Black Digital Future.
Readings
