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
In Conversation with Hannah Teicher
by Hannah Teicher
May 31, 2018
How did the path you're on now begin?
By 2014, things had transitioned in the sustainability field towards an emphasis on climate change. I did a project looking at how the real estate industry in Boston was adapting, or if they were, because it seemed like city governments weren't doing enough. And it seemed like real estate companies should have major vested interest in doing something.
They seemed to be doing something, but still just the bare minimum, the low hanging fruit, and mostly disaster response or disaster preparedness.
I was lucky to see an ad for the Dutch Dialogues in Norfolk, Virginia.
Why is it called the Dutch Dialogues?
bringing Dutch experts to U.S. cities. It was started in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina by a big architecture and urban planning firm down there, Waggonner and Ball, that has led flood infrastructure projects since then. They had been looking at the Dutch example, and began this workshop process to bring Dutch and local experts together. To think about how you could address flooding in a more innovative and integrated way— and a way that wasn't necessarily typical of American design.
They replicated the process in Norfolk, because Norfolk is also one of the cities on the East Coast that is very vulnerable to sea-level rise. I went and it was a really interesting process. I was somewhat critical of the design approach, it was a little bit facile and convenient at times.
Right.
It's not that easy to turn a street into a canal.
So that's what really got me interested in the intersection of the defense presence and climate change. That's how I came to the topic I'm looking at in my dissertation.
Which is?
Urban defense collaborations for adaptation to climate change.
So, the Department of Defense and climate change.
Yeah. It's a tricky topic because I'm always concerned that people will see me as somehow being pro-military by looking at this but that's -
The idea that studying the military is in any way advocating for the military is ridiculous.
Ok, they are a hugely powerful institution in American society and they have a huge amount of money at their disposal. I wondered to what extent that could be a resource, and whether communities could leverage a military presence for adaptation.
And what's the conclusion been?
So far, I think there's a qualifying yes. It's one avenue that cities can take. New York City has Wall Street, other cities have other resources. This is one way some smaller cities, secondary and tertiary cities, might be able to get access to more dollars and federal resources. In Norfolk right now, there are several joint planning processes going on between multiple bases and municipalities that seem promising. They're actually sponsored by the Office of Economic Adjustment, which now appears to be on the chopping block. One of these vestiges of the welfare state, and Republicans have gotten hip to that. They're like, oh we can ax that too.
Does the DOD have a line item in the budget for environmental research?
No, not at all.
If anything, what they do is mainstream environmental and climate efforts into their larger codes and plans. That seems to be a way to make it more neutral, non-political, and less vulnerable to being axed.
The perspective I tend to hear is they're concerned about any and every threat. Clearly, climate change is a threat, sea-level rise, drought, whatever climate impacts. They're all a threat. They're going to be aware of those and plan for those.
What defines the community, and what is the difference between, let's say, the physical community adjacent to Norfolk, and someone's individual mission to be a leader in climate change adaptation?
When I say community I'm using it very loosely, and not how it's always used in planning.
I'm talking about what city elites are doing. And they seem to be the ones championing this. For obvious reasons, they have the power and the resources and the networks to do things.
But those efforts won't get where they want to go without larger, systemic support?
Without federal support. Right now, especially with us withdrawing from Paris, there's this huge move to want to say that cities are the answer, and cities can do it on their own. But cities don't have the resources for this scale of infrastructure. Whether it's gray infrastructure or green infrastructure, it requires a huge amount of money, and cities don't have that. That's why they need federal resources.
I do look to the Dutch model and other European models in terms of more comprehensive spatial planning, where it's not this fragmented effort.
We need comprehensive spatial planning, though I can't foresee that happening here.
The spatial planning toolkit seems to have been born out of the Army Corps and looking at nature as a threat. Is pushing adaptation out of the DOD furthering one idea that might actually be maladaptive?
That's always a big risk. Highly likely. The culture within the Army Corps is changing. Of course, the Army Corps is fairly de-centralized too. They are a bunch of different districts. I spoke to people in the Army Corps in the Norfolk district and there's definitely an interest there in starting to integrate these nature-based solutions. But their procedures are slow to catch up, so they have these ossified cost-benefit ratios that they use, and those don't really allow for adequate evaluation of what green infrastructure can do. But there is an awareness of that, and an effort to change that.
How does the conversation between the Army Corps and the Department of Defense happen?
That’s an interesting inflection point. I see the Army Corps as potentially being this boundary organization that does work across military and civil agendas— though they try very hard to keep them separate. There have been some efforts to bridge that, because it's clear, in the case of a large Naval base, that you can't just put a wall around the Naval base, or off the coast of the naval base, and then leave the rest vulnerable. It's been a really strong theme with almost everyone that I talked to. They realize there is inter-dependence between the bases and the communities, largely because of transportation.
It's really obvious. Roads get flooded and people can't get to the base. Most people who work on the base live off the base. There have been some lobbying efforts now to try to be able to bridge that fence-line. One of them is through Army Corps means. There's also a new initiative I found out about recently called the Sea-Wall Coalition. They're trying to expand defense access roads policy to infrastructure. It already allows military spending off-base to improve roads. All of these are very long term efforts, none of the change is going to happen quickly.
In resilience planning, you hear the rhetoric of ‘protect critical infrastructure first.’ Which can be used to justify protecting only the naval base.
All of this has a big risk. I don't think it's a necessarily good solution to open up defense spending to be able to be spent off-base, because clearly it's still going to protect certain interests, and it's not going to protect a lot more vulnerable people in the community.
Can you talk about the idea of threat and threat-multiplying, and how climate plays into the view of threat both at home and abroad?
2003 was the first defense report that was doing future scenario planning about climate change. It was Sherri Goodman who had been at the DOD and is now a defense analyst at the Wilson Center. She coined the term threat multiplier for climate change with the specific intent of getting political momentum behind that, and it seemed to really work. Convincing people that climate change itself wasn't going to cause conflict, but it would enhance all of the other drivers of conflict that might be out there. That's the basic thesis.
If you already had things that might be causing migration or resource wars, then climate will just enhance that, and it is much more of a international or geo-political view rather than a domestic view. That's one thing I'm trying to bring to this. Look more at the urban, and more at the domestic interface of military, climate change, and communities.
Some cities that are more advanced have formal relationships and procedures where they meet on a regular basis. The city and the base both let each other know about their plans.
How do you plan on getting this message out there?
What I'm most interested in coming out of this is how can communities partner with unlikely allies? I see the military as being one. But there are other ones. It really gets at best practices for collaboration and working together, and what can support that, and even what kind of political messages might help to do that. Climate security framing is really interesting from that perspective because it does seem to help bridge a partisan divide on climate change. It helps to reach a more conservative audience. There is also some potential for backlash against that, but from what I've been hearing on the ground, it sounds like it has been somewhat effective.
We’re not gonna talk about who's causing this...
Yes.
We'll skip that conversation, and that's a good way of getting past it.
Avoiding causes is kind of across the board, especially for more conservative audiences. But then the climate security angle, specifically saying that this is a threat to national security. When you have top military brass on the stage saying that, more people are going to listen than otherwise would.
Really my message coming out of this isn't that the military is some kind of cure-all. It's just one avenue to pursue. Another avenue that could be really interesting is the large hospital systems. They're also invested in having to weather disaster, and having to be there for the long-term. There's the whole public health argument for climate change.
I view that as potentially being very parallel.