TOPICS: CIVIC MEDIA/TACTICAL MEDIA in Fall 2021 (CM5091)

“What is the revolutionary potential of media? Can people provoke, influence, and guide social, political or economic transformations through media? This course addresses the use of communication technologies for mediating public discourse, organizing democratic protests or denouncing state violence, ultimately interrogating the media’s capacity to enact social change.

From early agitprop and propaganda to hacktivists and political satire on television, alternative voices have been subverting from within the “operating system” of existing mass media to convey their messages. Militants during the Arab spring uprisings, protesters from Occupy Wall Street, Maidan Square or The Gilet Jaunes Square deployed new tactics to report on their struggles and inspire others to join them, often against official representations of their movements. With the help of social media, feminist and civil rights activists have recently provoked civic movements defending women’s and Afro-American’s against discrimination and violence, while environmental activists and simple witnesses of natural disasters have raised awareness on climate change and brought it to the forefront of international news. Simple citizens filming with their cell phones police violence against African Americans in the United States or against protesters in France have unveiled the crude reality of enacted state violence, overlooked and often undocumented by traditional news media.

These diverse movements contribute to the production of “civic media”, insomuch as civic media designs “possibility space, a way of imagining a future of technology that [is] pro-social and for public benefit” (Gordon and Mihailidis, 2016: 5). Throughout this course, we will thus try to explore the power of civic media, looking at a series of case studies and focusing particularly on contemporary social movements across the globe and their emergence on social media platforms. We will question these cases through a range of theori