Movement Media: In Pursuit of Solidarity
From newsletters and zines to hashtags and social media posts, social movements frequently generate and circulate media to define political goals, build solidarity, and articulate theories of change while also organizing and struggling against the challenges of NGO-ization, neoliberal identity politics, private technologies, and liberal carceral reform. Movement Media assesses the possibilities and limitations of crafting solidarities across racialized differences through media-making processes and communications practices. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and ethnographic fieldwork, the book revisits key movements––Third World feminism, environmental justice, migrant justice, and police and prison abolition––and situates these movements alongside shifts in technological developments and the communication landscape, making the case that building and sustaining solidarity requires time and work to develop shared political analysis and practices.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Making People, Making Politics
Chapter 2: Building Women of Color Feminist Formations
Chapter 3: Connecting Grassroots Networks
Chapter 4: Movement Technology under the Shadow of Empire
Chapter 5: Mediating Asian America in Political Relation
Conclusion: In Pursuit of Solidarity
Content Summary and Classroom Resources
Artwork by Mon M.
introduction: movement media
What are movement media? Movement media constitute the broad array of media forms produced and circulated by and within social movements for organizing purposes (p. 5). As a theoretical and methodological framework, movement media provide a lens through which to understand race, communication, politics, power, and activism. The introduction contextualizes movement media through theories of race and power and takes as a grounding premise that U.S. liberal democracy has been secured through racial and colonial violence. The introduction also outlines the methods used throughout this book as a way to demonstrate interdisciplinary and multi-method approaches in studies of politics and communication.
Examples of Movement Media (p. 5).
chapter one: making people, making politics
“[Transforming people and politics] “takes a lot of time and patience, a lot of hard work and struggle” [and requires] “a continuing relationship from and to the revolutionary and progressive social forces within our society and the continuing expansion and enrichment of revolutionary vision.”
Movement media engages productive tensions between political vision and practice by drawing attention to mundane communicative practices, such as outlining guidelines and commitments for participation, providing structured agendas for meetings and note-taking, or printing copies of reading materials for workshops. This chapter details the purposes and processes of movement media to trace how movements theorize power, negotiate different tempos of movement time, and navigate obstacles of state violence and technologies of racialization. Bringing together archival materials from letters, pamphlets, essays, and speeches from organizer and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs alongside original interviews with organizers in working-class community of color-led formations, this chapter demonstrates how organizers use movement media to shape ideology and consciousness and build organizational processes and structures.
Federal Bureau of Investigation memo NY 157–6167 targeting the publication Triple Jeopardy (Third World Women’s Alliance). Courtesy of the Third World Women’s Alliance, Bay Area Chapter Records (SSC-MS-00697) and the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History.
chapter two: Building Women of Color Feminist Formations
As internationalist and Third World feminist movements from the 1960s and 1970s waned and identity-based nonprofits became more emergent in the 1980s and 1990s, their media and communications processes offer insight into the material practice of solidarities. This chapter foregrounds the difficulties of creating movement media as organizations struggled to sustain revolutionary political frames. This transformation of revolutionary organizations into nonprofits draws out the tension between mass movement and liberal inclusion as some formations seek out institutional support and legitimacy. This chapter examines internal documents, including memos, meeting minutes, statements of principles, and codes of conduct, from the Third World Women’s Alliance and its subsequent iterations as the Alliance Against Women’s Oppression and Women of Color Resource Center as well as from the early formation of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. As cases, these organizations demonstrate how women of color feminist formations navigate tensions between individual identity and collective politics.
Clinton’s “Stop ‘Em at the Border Plans'“, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) Network News (Jan-Feb 1994, pg 7). Courtesy of the Miriam Ching Yoon Louie Papers (SSC-MS-00719) and the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History.
Chapter three: connecting grassroots networks
Through the 1990s, under an atmosphere of instability with increased policing, anti-immigration measures, and the shrinking of welfare, different organizations came together to form multiracial political coalitions and alliances. Building movement capacity in this landscape cultivated different groups’ relationships with media and technology as they created communication infrastructures to form coalitions and alliances.
This chapter focuses on the medium of newsletters from organizations engaged in local, national, and transnational alliance and coalition building as a way to map relationships and analysis between grassroots left organizations (as a different approach to the promises of networked connectivity by new technologies) and a history of how federal investment in technological empowerment by the Clinton/Gore administration intertwined with the exacerbation of racial and economic violence through carceral reform.
Chapter four: movement technology under the shadow of empire
This chapter focuses on digital organizing and the ways digital technologies (e.g. cloud storage, messaging applications, and social media platforms) as infrastructures make possible and limit political work. As organizations incorporate digital technologies into their movement infrastructures, they do so within a landscape where technological apparatuses reinforce practices of national security.
Part One - Technological Solutions to Empire’s Problems discusses state technology investment into counterterrorism after 9/11. Using primary source materials from the Government Accountability Office’s technology procurement audits and original interviews with organizers across different formations, this section makes a critical intervention against national security frameworks and the limits of technological solutions in building movement safety.
Part Two: Movement Technologies and Political Contradictions focuses on how movement formations navigate technological practices under the long shadow of liberal empire. Using an original case of a New York City–based abolitionist campaign against new jail construction, Part Two also tells a story of movement media and movement management under post-9/11 digital culture.
Resource: Dis/Organizing Toolkit: How We Build Collectives Beyond Institutions, Hacking//Hustling, 2021
Chapter five: Mediating Asian America in Political Relation
“Asian America is an evolving construct and idea. It provides us with an anchor to unify together and offers a mobilizing home politically [but] can’t hold all of our different identities and experiences in and of itself.”
Resource: Asian American Digital Politics
This chapter examines movement media produced by Asians and Asian Americans articulating a political relation to Black liberation movements during periods of heightened racial violence. Particularly, this chapter focuses on Asian Americanist critiques of policing and incarceration, emphasizing police as a category of violence. The chapter focuses on the 2014 shooting of Akai Gurley in a public housing stairwell by Peter Liang, a Chinese American New York City Police Department officer, and challenges discourses of “stopping Asian hate” in 2020 and beyond. It discusses the mobilization of historical narrative and racial analysis through movement media work, especially in more intimate domains that are often less visible, by Asian American political actors to demonstrate the possibilities and challenges of building solidarity across racial lines.
Conclusion: In Pursuit of Solidarity
As the deep entrenchment of racist and patriarchal ideology and structures in U.S. culture and politics remains ever clear, what can be done? What can we do? “In pushing against the impulse and tendency to offer prescriptive solutions and seek expert guidance toward fixes, perhaps a way to begin answering this question is to pose a different one: what is a movement? Taking the longitudinal view to social movements and tracing nonlinear processes for transformation and change allows us to move past singular events and campaigns and individual leaders and organizations to instead understand movements as interconnected forms of protracted struggle in the face of contradictions and conflicts. Through movements, people work together to figure out new visions of what it takes to get us collectively to liberation” (p. 196).
“Movements come together to organize around shared political imaginations. The turn to organizational formalization for some groups has brought forms of stability and necessary resources, and the uses of various new technologies for groups can support internal and external movement building activities. However, these are all contradictory practices that weigh practical questions such as how we get money and resources to our people or how we access a sustained organizing space aligned with our political visions. At the same time, we must remember that organizations in and of themselves are not movements, and the end goal of a movement is not to form an organization” (p. 197).
“We are always organizing under compromised conditions of violence. There is no purity and perfection in the use of technologies in our organizing” (p. 198). “The work ahead is continuing to navigate political contradictions at the level of theory and practice. There is a revolutionary and radical politics inherent in uncertainty and not knowing all the answers—we can be open to future possibilities without knowing exactly where we’re going” (p. 200).