Tuesday, March 1, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.
This talk, based on five years of research within the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, introduces the theory of transmedia mobilization and invites us to rethink the relationship between social movements and the media opportunity structure. Rather than ask 'is the internet good or bad for social movements,' we will discuss tools and practices used by movement actors to spread their ideas. In addition, we'll look at the increasing importance of participatory media production to social movement formation. Transmedia mobilization involves engaging the social base of the movement in participatory media making practices across multiple platforms. In a transmedia mobilization strategy, rich media texts produced through participatory practices can be pushed into wider circulation to produce multimodal movement narratives that reach and involve diverse audiences, thus strengthening movement identity formation and outcomes. Yet vertical organizations continue to find transmedia mobilization risky, because it requires opening movement communication practices up to diverse voices rather than relying only on experienced movement leaders to frame the movement’s narrative. Transmedia mobilization thus marks a transition in the role of social movement communicators from one of primarily content creation to aggregation, curation, remix, and recirculation of rich media texts through networked movement formations.
About Sasha
Dr. Sasha Costanza-Chock has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Civic Media and will begin teaching at MIT in the fall of 2011.
Sasha Costanza-Chock is a scholar and media maker who works in the interrelated areas of social movements and information and communication technologies; participatory technology design and community based participatory research; and the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights, including comunicación populár.
His work has involved the use of mobile phones for social change; digital literacies and digital inclusion; and race, class, and gender in digital space. He has done research on the transformation of public media systems; the political economy of communication; and information and communications policy.
Dr. Costanza-Chock holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate; he is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he has worked on a variety of civic media projects with community-based organizations, including the award-winning VozMob.net platform <http://vozmob.net/en/about>. More information about Sasha's work can be found at http://schock.cc.
Links
- Prezi on Transmedia Mobilization
- More info about Sasha
- Andy Oram liveblogged the talk (O'Reilly Radar)