interviews
Observations on Media Activism
by Dr. Clark-Parsons
October 16, 2019
Dr. Clark-Parsons is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Activism, Communication, and Social Justice at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her teaching and research revolve around feminist social movements in the United States and their media practices, drawing on her own participation in and observations of contemporary feminist media campaigns. She can be reached via email at rosemary.clark@asc.upenn.edu
This interview with Dr. Rosemary Clark-Parsons was conducted and condensed by frank news and originally published on September 13, 2018.
frank: I would love to talk to you about your focus on feminist social movements and media practices. But particularly, digital media and social media, in both positive and negative ways.
Rosemary: Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that. Always.
Right now I am post-doctoral fellow in activism, communication, and social justice at the Annenberg School for Communication which is at University of Pennsylvania. I just wrapped up my PHD there over summer, and I sort of came to this research interest through a long-standing interest going back to college in gender in media. I was really interested at first in focusing my research on media representations of women, girls, and other gendered bodies.
But I found that that research area was so depressing and kind of stagnant. We know that the state of affairs when it comes to media representations of gender is pretty bad and has been pretty bad for a long time. That's where the story ends on the research side of things.
I was interested in turning toward the activists who are trying to do something with media to change the state of affairs when it comes to gender and power and representation. So, that's essentially how I got into my interest in studying activism.
frank: How did you end up combining them?
Rosemary: For me the answer came through a research method that we call ethnography which essentially involves participant observation. The data collection method comes from actually being involved in and participating in the thing that you're studying.
That meant getting involved with grassroots activist groups in the city of Philadelphia.
frank: What have you found effective in both your research and your activism?
Rosemary: A lot of my research has been focused on the fact that there are both strengths and weaknesses to using any sort of communication tools, whether we're talking about digital, or analog, or non-digital tools, for activist purposes. All of these tools have a fair amount of limitations, but a lot of the discourse in the early days of the internet was this is how the revolution is going to happen.
Twitter and Facebook, these were how we were going to change the world. But now we're seeing a shift toward identifying the fact that while there are many affordances to using these tools and we've seen some really powerful campaigns, there are also some serious limitations. I'm interested in how feminist activists are figuring out how to negotiate between those or take advantage of the good while also dealing with the downside of using some of these tools.
frank: What are those limitations?
Rosemary: One of the biggest limitations actually comes from one of the biggest strengths. Now we no longer need to have access to a big name organization, with lots of money, lots of people power, resources, and experience to launch a movement. And on the one hand, that's great. We can launch a big protest without requiring the same degree of physical organization. We don't have to be meeting for months at a time in person to organize some kind of political action whether that's a street protest or a boycott or what have you.
So, while we can launch an action really quickly, sometimes we have issues in these movements with long term struggles for social justice, with responding to new challenges as they emerge.
frank: One thing that keeps coming up in terms of effective activism is having very clearly outlined goals. With the ease of social media we can quickly gain a lot of attention but just as quickly forget the true desired outcome. How do you think people avoid that? What sort of leadership or communication does that take?
Rosemary: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that's another issue that comes from this sort of double-edged sword of doing digitally networked activism. On the one hand, if you look at hashtag campaigns, anyone can chime in and sort of bring their own personal reasons for participating to the table. I can share my story under the #MeToo hashtag, for example. But then when it comes to articulating a very clear set of, for example, policy goals, or just concrete steps toward social change, whether at the policy level or more at the cultural level, we're not seeing these movements come together to put out a mission statement. Does that make sense?
frank: Yes.
Rosemary: I think the more successful movements that we're seeing are combining the more old fashion elements of movement organizing, like meeting somehow in person together with a dedicated group of activists, organizing locally, and then also doing these sort of huge network campaigns at the same time. #MeToo is a great example of that, having both the long term struggle component led by Tarana Burke, and sort of branching off into the Time's Up movement. The Never Again movement that came out of the shootings in Florida is another great example of this as well. They're taking advantage of the participatory globally networked nature of social media platforms while also doing the difficult work on the ground to organize long term.
frank: Right. There seems to be a need for a more intense focus on the communities you're actually trying to help.
Rosemary: Yeah, I think that we especially saw this with the very impressive young activists who came out of the Stoneman Douglas shootings. You could see it play out in terms of the news coverage, the need for them to gain trust, not just within their local communities but to gain the trust of their audience. To gain respect of authorities on the issue of control despite the fact that they're these teenagers. Which was working against them.
I think trust, in terms of how you're received by the public, whether that's your immediate neighborhood, organizing for an issue on your block, or whether that's your national audience, as in the case of the Never Again movement, it's essential for social movements, and again requires some of that more old fashioned form of organizing. There were a couple of pieces written about how the teen activists in Stoneman Douglas came together and organized in the aftermath of the shooting. There's a story about them getting together at a slumber party at one of the activists houses and deciding “This is our strategy. This is how we handle the media. We cannot make mistakes, actually, because that will immediately be a reason to put us down. You know we already have our age working against us. We need to gain the trust of our audience."
Trust has always been a key component for a successful movement and continues to be. And it's become even trickier in our world of fake news and conspiracy theories circulating online. You really need to have some authority and gain the trust of your audience.
frank: What do you think about the commodification of cause? About activism as trend? I have a strong gut reaction when I see this stuff online, and think, I don't need to hear about x from you, but perhaps that doesn't matter and all voices added to the mix are important.
Rosemary: Yes, that's a great question. There are two big related changes I've seen with activism over the past five years. One is that it's becoming more mediated and the second is that it's becoming more personalized, like hashtag activism. All the people posting under the hashtag are united by the hashtag itself but they're sharing these very individualized, personalized stories or reasons for participating. That makes it really easy to coopt and commodify. When it's just this personal individual act, it's very easy to take that up and turn it into something that you can sell.
When activism becomes individualized, and personalized, it's not that difficult to make the leap between that and the acts of individualistic consumption and buying something.
We saw this unfortunately, and unbelievably to me, with the #MeToo movement. There were makeup lines branding their products with the #MeToo hashtag. We saw jewelry and clothing lines popping up around the campaign, even a whole bunch of different mobile apps. And they certainly have somewhat of a positive valance. We want to see these issues represented within popular culture, within consumer culture. But there's the danger there of suggesting that what's needed to solve a problem as big as sexual violence and sexual harassment is just this individual act of buying something rather than collectively organizing for structural change.
frank: If you have a large social presence or voice, and you want to be involved, how do you avoid personalizing everything, or avoid taking away from the movement's goals?
Rosemary: I don't think that there's necessarily anything inherently wrong in personalizing your involvement. Feminists in the U.S. have been saying the personal is political since the 1960s. The issue is keeping that connection between the personal and the political, reminding the people who are following you that your personal story is connected back to this structural issue, not just you. It's part of this, in the case of #MeToo, global issue of sexual violence.
frank: Do you feel like people, especially women who have a large voice or public presence, should feel a responsibility to contribute to the conversation, or do you think that we put too much pressure on people to fall into the categories and narratives that we would like to see them in?
Rosemary: One of the very valid concerns about the #MeToo movement, for example, is that we're putting a lot of pressure on not just women but anyone who has experienced sexual violence and harassment to come forward and tell their story. And one concern there is all of the focus is on the survivors and the victims rather than on actually holding accountable the people who are responsible for this behavior and for these assaults in some cases.
I think it can be an issue in terms of our focus on where the change and action needs to happen. We don't necessarily want to add to the weight that survivors are carrying, and we also want to be careful not to turn what is again this structural problem into some sort of media circus around individual people.
We see a lot of hype in the media, a lot of excitement, however misguided, when someone comes forward and says yet another big name renowned celebrity has committed some act of sexual misconduct, and then it becomes about the interpersonal drama.
Rather than the fact that this is huge problem that exists way beyond the scope or the story of two people. I think that there's a danger there in encouraging high profile people to continue to come forward, but at the same time, it's yet another one of these double-edged sword situations. When they come forward, they also encourage other people to feel less shame about their own experiences.
So, it's one of those sort of gray zone situations, to me.
frank: What do you think is next in terms of feminism and feminist movements? What do you think is the next big push and focus?
Rosemary: I think what seems to be on the horizon for feminism in the U.S. right now is figuring out how to take what has been for several years now a very visible surge of feminist activism that has been very much focused on the personal, on everyday fight the power and oppression, everyday encounters with sexual violence, and channeling that into more sustainable, long-lasting, efforts for social change, at the policy level, at the level of more formal institutions of power.
Because on the one hand, we're living in a moment where feminism is everywhere. We can, as we've talked about, buy feminist branded products in the store.
We live in this moment, where it's everywhere, but we also live in a moment where the reality is that Donald Trump is president and we're seeing a systematic roll back of women's rights, of civil rights, the rights in marginalized communities, on a near daily basis. So, there's a disconnect there.
Somehow, we have risen to this high level of visibility within popular culture, but we're not at the same time able to create these longer lasting institutional changes. I'm hopeful that that's going to shift, that the disconnect is going to come together a little bit more. We're seeing a lot of headlines heralding what they're calling the Year of Women. A lot of feminist candidates have been running for different levels of political office. The next big issue for these movements is figuring out how to turn that energy, turn that focus, on everyday sorts of injustice, everyday sites of power, and channel that into more institutional long lasting forms of change.
frank: What new policy for women's equality are you looking for? Or, is the change you're more interested in cultural?
Rosemary: I think we need to not lose sight of either one. I don't want the pendulum to swing too far into the direction of institutional policy and let go of some of the great work feminist activists have been doing around these more every day social forms of change. We're now more aware than ever, I think of sexual harassment as a social issue, but I think they need to be paired together. I would love to see the same amount of energy and the same amount of success in the area of shoring up our policies around sexual harassment, shoring up the resources we have for survivors who are seeking legal recourse or who are seeking some kind of transformative justice within their particular cases. We know that this is an issue that is everywhere and that's undeniable, but the question becomes now what?
We need to make sure that we're creating resources for survivors who want to hold their perpetrators accountable at whatever level, to be able to pursue that. I think that's a major issue right now.
frank: What do you feel is being overlooked right now? In terms of what your research is focused on.
Rosemary: This has been the common thread, I think, in what we've talked about already, but one point that I feel I try to make in my research is that we need to be paying close attention to this shift away from a time when big name formal organizations structured with movements which came with its own set of pros and cons. There are organizational resources on the one hand, and dedicated leaders, but then there are also all sorts of exclusion and gatekeepers filtering out who gets to participate and whose voices are heard.
We're seeing a shift away from that and towards these media platforms, actually becoming the way that movements are structured. So, whereas you might have had in the past, organizations controlling a movement's communication, today, the actual message itself, whether it's a hashtag, or whether it's a platform - these forms of media are at the center of a lot of social movements today and that comes with a whole range of affordances and limitations. I think that's a major shift that's being overlooked in conversations about the future of social organizing in the U.S. and one that I try to highlight a lot in my own work.
interviews
Vishaan Chakrabarti, Part 1
by Vishaan Chakrabarti
May 10, 2018
This interview with Vishaan Chakrabarti, the founder of PAU, was conducted and condensed by frank news. This is part one of an ongoing conversation between frank and PAU.
Okay, let’s begin. Would you introduce yourself?
I’m Vishaan Chakrabarti. I’m an architect and city planner, trained in both. I founded my practice, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, or PAU for short. I also teach at Columbia.
Then there's this third nebulous thing I do out in the clouds, which is lecture, write, or talk about issues I think are pressing to our field, that don't necessarily neatly fit into either practice or teaching. I wrote a book a few years ago called Country of Cities, I’m thinking about a second book right now. That’s always a third line of activity beyond practice and teaching.
What does planning as a profession look like?
It’s evolved. City planning dates back to ancient China and ancient Greece. It goes back millennia. It’s always had poetic and pragmatic aspects to it. A lot of Roman cities had different ways in which they felt humanity related to the cosmos, and would lay out cities according to that. Similarly with China, in which cities laid out in Cardinal directions, were related to the way in which people interpreted their relationship to deities. City planning has a very, very long tradition.
If you go to a city like Rome, you'll see layers and layers of planning that happened under Pope Sixtus VI, and in more modern times, axis that have been cut through the cities, and that ended up influencing post-enlightenment city planning. Haussmann and ultimately Robert Moses. There is a lineage. And all of that lineage was largely top-down. City planning was always thought to be a somewhat authoritarian enterprise until Jane Jacobs came along. She was really the person who revolutionized this idea of cities being planned by the communities that live in them, and not having top-down structures that would tell them where highways would go.
There are both good sides and bad sides to that story. Unfortunately, too often in city planning education, and even among lay people, there is this sense that the story is all good. The reason that it is not all good is that it has put us in a certain kind of paralysis, particularly in the United States.
Jacobs also never answered questions about how there are a lot of communities that don’t want people of color living in them. Are you supposed to listen to the community in that instance? Where that really plays out is the affordable housing battle, and through federal housing guidelines. Communities are supposed to take their share of affordable housing, and most cities actually fight that.
Look at what's happening in California today. Jerry Brown tried to pass this thing that said, if a certain neighborhood is within proximity to a mass transit line, we need to build density there, and we need to build a certain amount of affordable housing there. And it got defeated largely by a progressive state legislature because of this idea that communities would lose control.
To me, it's not necessary to come down on one side of that argument or the other,
Where that really comes to the tip of the spear is climate change. Climate change is completely changing the way we think about, not just city planning, but landscape planning, regional planning, how we are stewards of the planet. A lot of that stewardship requires an adult way of discussing what is rational, in terms of using that land, and often flies in the face of direct community control.
For instance, building density around transit stops, that's an easy one. When Katrina happened, people said, why should we rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward? It’s an area in harm's way. Yet no one seems to ask that question about suburban subdivisions in California that are in harm's way of wildfires or landslides. Or Fire Island. I've seen entire houses washed away in the Hamptons. If you go to a lot of those California hillside communities, in the wealthy parts of Berkeley, or Oakland, what it costs to provide water or fire up there, are not rational land use patterns.
How does one balance this idea? That it should not be all top-down authoritarian, yet we're not going to get at a lot of the problems associated with climate change unless we have a more rational way of using land. That is particularly true in a world that's urbanizing very rapidly.
You have some 200,000 people a day moving to cities, mainly in the Global South. If all of those folks choose to live the way a few hundred million rich people choose to live in the West, the world is screwed. The numbers are really quite clear on this. So, I think this is part of why I do what I do.
I think a lot of people in the affiliated fields, like architecture, planning, landscape architecture, environmentalism, are driven to go to work every day by this set of concerns. Again, going back to the ancients, how humans design habitation has an enormous impact on the planet, and on every ecosystem. We are at this inflection point, and it’s interesting that Jacobs didn’t really have a good answer to this.
It’s interesting because Jane Jacobs was a contemporary of Rachel Carson. You wish the two of them had gotten together. You can’t protect nature without a sustainable way for 7 billion people to occupy the planet. That 7 billion is going to be 10 billion by 2100. Those two things have to sit in balance. We have to find a way to balance the natural world and the physical world. That is at the heart of what good city planning is about.
Do you think there’s been enough progress since Jacobs’ book came out?
I think things have progressed. Certainly because technology has allowed a lot more communication within the community, and communities are much more interconnected than they used to be, and can organize around ideas in very important ways. People don't really believe it, but Friends of The Highline really did start as a grassroots organization. The notion that people can get together, volunteer their time, be concerned about their physical environment, and get things done, is very valid.
The larger issues since Jacobs wrote, is not so much at the community level, where I think people have been doing what communities do, which is organize around things that they’re passionate about.
They don't know what they’re about anymore. That's changing slowly, but it was a field that really went into doldrums in the 70’s and 80’s because all the stuff that Jacobs fought against. Robert Moses, urban renewal, all of that was seen as politically incorrect. People couldn't be city planners as you would traditionally think of them, physical planners: blocks are here or there, highways, transit systems.
When I went to school, I studied planning before I studied architecture, and I was interested in physical planning, and that is part of why I went into architecture because I had to keep pushing the idea of understanding the physical environment, it was really not PC. I went to MIT for City Planning, and I can’t remember how many people were in our class, but I would say maybe 15-20% were studying physical planning because it was considered verboten.
Is the profession coming out of that now?
Yes and no. Our firm just won a big master planning project for the city of New York,
You have to approach some of these questions a differently in terms of how you professionally get city planning done.
Do you think academia is still stuck? Do people think it is not PC to be a planner?
Again, it is changing. For example at Columbia, there is a built environment portion in the program now. I think things are changing.
What I mean by that is, in architecture and landscape architecture, it is still very common that you’re given a site and asked, what would you do? You are asked to speculate. But planning students are taught to ask, what does the community think, what does the data show you? Those are all incredibly valid questions, in fact that has permeated architecture and landscape architecture as well.
Think about bike lanes in New York City. When the bike lanes and Citi Bike were first introduced, people thought Janette Sadik-Khan was crazy. I don’t know what the numbers are right now, but the modal share is pretty high.
Look at places like Brooklyn Navy Yard. It has 7,000 jobs and it's 25 minutes away from the nearest subway station. I think Citi Bike has created a whole new modality of how people move around a place like New York City. That to me is speculation, it’s saying, what if...
I’m not interested in autonomous vehicles for the technology as much as thinking, how can we design the streets differently? If AV’s did learn how not to hit people, could you design a street completely different? In terms of the curbs, parking, how the curb cuts for wheelchairs. Think about New York City two days after a snowstorm, it’s just a nasty mess. That has a lot to do with the way our streets are designed. Keeping pedestrians safe from vehicles operated by people. Those forms of speculation are incredibly important because we have to design better cities, because we have to attract people to live in denser circumstances around mass transit, because we clearly have the data that shows those people have a much lower carbon footprint than their suburban counterparts. We have to create a much higher quality of life in our cities than we have today. That's going to require a lot of intervention.
There's a lot of data telling us that Uber and Lyft are actually increasing the amount of traffic we're seeing in our cities. I’m a huge mass transit advocate. People ask, why do you need mass transit if you have Uber? Do you know what Uber is doing? Both in terms of traffic, and in terms of air pollution?
We have to continue investment in mass transit. It's just fundamentally inefficient to use a 12- foot lane for vehicles with one or two people in them. When we can carry hundreds of people in that same lane.
We have to be careful with technology. Technologists are interesting. They think because they've invented something super cool that it’s a panacea. And oftentimes it can make things a hundred times worse. We redesigned the world around the internal combustion engine in the 20th century, largely to very poor effect. Our cities were much more interesting, wonderful places to be, pre-internal-combustion-engine world. There's a reason gobs of tourists go to Rome every year and not to Houston.