Week 1: Media activism in a time of pandemic (lecture and workshop)

To kick off this module, we will begin by examining the kinds of activism that have taken place all around the globe during the Coranavirus pandemic when public health measures constrained the right to assemble initially diverting people from the streets to mass Zoom calls and then witnessing the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. We shall situate this moment in the history of digital media activism.

Week 2: Theoretical perspectives on activism under neoliberalism (lecture and seminar)

To lay the groundwork for this module, we will be looking at various theories of political economy, governmentality, society, and subjectivation and agency that explain the conditions and constraints of political activism under neoliberalism, as well as the possibilities and limitations of digital platforms for organising.

This week’s theoretical perspectives are largely drawn from European philosophers of the late 20^th and early 21^st century who have devoted considerable attention to the ways in which power and subjectivity are articulated together across all aspects of our lives and have reflected on how the changing conditions of work and social reproduction intersect with technological innovations to change how politics takes places today.

Week 3: Tactical media, performance, design (lecture and workshop)

This week we will look at at the earliest phase of digital media activism, which was chiefly characterized by variety of critical-aesthetic interventions, including electronic civil disobedience, DOS attacks, cybersquatting, Floodnet applications, tactical cartography and visualization, and so forth. We will investigate media activism as a performance and aesthetic practice and the role of art and design in critical media interventions.

Week 4: Media squares (lecture and seminar)

This week we shall explore the deployment of digital technologies of communication and participation in the Arab Spring, and the Occupy, 15-M and Nuit Debout movements, examining the relation between digital and real-world organising, as well the possibilities and limits of digital platforms.

Week 5: Networked liberation struggles (lecture and seminar)

This week turns to the use of digital platforms as organising tools in a variety of of liberation struggles from feminist twitter campaigns to decolonising and indigenous movement-building. We will look at the way activists in the global South have developed innovative uses for social media platforms to provide connective tissue among networks from Africa to Latin America. The struggles of indigenous people are often entangled with environmental struggles, while queer activism contends with categories of identity, virtual and embodied.

Week 7: Designing media activism (workshop)

In-class crits with pecha kucha presentations of group design projects

Week 8: Digital populisms and far-right co-options (lecture and seminar)

This week we look at the use of digital strategies by populist movements today and at the advantage that the right appears to have in terms of online campaigning, including via the appropriation of critical and tactical-media approaches. We shall evaluate the political ramifications of these developments for the theory and practice of media activism.

Week 9: Digital parties and democratic reformations (lecture and seminar)

We now turn to the ways in which digital technologies are transforming democratic forms and institutions, with a focus on the potential for social media to reconfigure representation and the relation between leader and base. We will also touch on how big data is changing campaigning.

Week 10: Digital media futures (workshop)

Activism does not only fight against existing conditions. One of its chief tasks is also to propose alternative worlds and futures. In this final session, we will come together as an entire group for a hands-on exploration of online interventions, micropractices, and design fictions that speculate about or advocate for digital futures. We will create our own design fictions in groups as a way to imagine the possibilities of socio-political collective existence in the future.

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