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
What Does the Future of Global Plastic Pollution Look Like?
by Katherine Shayne
January 29, 2019
Katherine is an environmental engineer, UGA College of Engineering faculty, and Co-founder & CEO of Can I Recycle This, Inc. Focusing on solutions to the ocean plastic pollution problem, Katherine serves as a SOA Youth Ocean Leader where she chairs a committee to inform international governments about youth-led solutions to marine debris.
I'm an environmental engineer, I do environmental research consulting, working with companies around the issue of global plastic pollution, and ways in which we can find solutions to the problem. One of the companies that I'm currently working with is Parley for the Oceans. They take what is deemed ocean plastic, and turn it into products that consumers can buy and reuse. It's what some people call an upcycling mechanism, so you're taking something that is virtually trash, and you're making it into products that are sellable in the global market. Which is a big part of recycling in that when products are recycled, if they don't have a market value, they tend to become trash. Non-valuable materials are taken to the landfill, which ultimately actually costs the recycling system in many ways, through transportation and fees at the landfill.
One of the biggest things we see is that there isn’t enough market value for the post-consumer plastics we're creating. We've developed a company called Can I Recycle This, which uses artificial intelligence, specifically image and voice recognition, to inform consumers about the end of life of their products. Therefore reducing contamination in recycling centers if people are putting the right things in their recycling bin.
For example, you could say, "Hey Alexa, ask Green Girl ..." Green Girl is like our Alexa, she's our personality. "Hey Alexa, ask Greengirl if I can recycle this coke bottle." First she's going to figure out where you are, because you have location services enabled, and then she'll come back and say, "Is it plastic or is it glass?" If you say, "Plastic." Then most of the time, your city is going to take plastic PET Coca Cola bottles, and then if you say glass, you actually might not be able to recycle that, depending on your location.
What we found is that every city, every county, or what we call an MRF shed, takes different products and materials. Recycling is not the same across all boundaries in the United States, it's actually very different. Right now in Athens, where I live, glass is something that's taken by the recycling center, whereas in my hometown of Columbus, Georgia, it's not taken. But most consumers don't know that, so we've developed this technology to help consumers, and we're still in the process of developing the business; it’s in the bootstrap stage. We are self funded currently.
Beyond that, partnering with big box stores and online marketplaces would be our next step. Something is shipped to you, say you get a box from online, within your packaging, on your receipt, it'll tell you, "Based on where we shipped this package, x is recyclable, and x unfortunately has to be thrown away." We want to put that language in there, unfortunately, because we really don't want things, like precious materials to end up in the landfill. Beyond that, if we want to go into the zero waste mindset, instead of having it on a printed receipt that's in the box, have it in the email that comes when it says, "Your package has arrived." And just have it in the email somewhere.
This concept comes out of my research and the research from the Jambeck Research Group. I was a part of the Jambeck Research Group for five years at the University of Georgia. Jenna Jambeck is one of the co-founders with me for Can I Recycle This, so I still am very much involved with the research group, but in a different capacity now. We know that mismanaged waste is tied to what goes into the ocean.
It's key from land, because that means that there's something that's being mismanaged in waste systems, for those materials to end up in the ocean, especially plastic. This concept of how do we manage our materials better, how do we inform consumers? Really hits home, because it does tie into what gets out into the ocean. And now the recycling markets have been turned upside down with China’s implementation of their National Sword policy.
Amy Brooks published a paper about how much plastic would be displaced by 2030 because of the National Sword policy. We used to ship all of our plastic scrap to China.
This has already had implications. Plastic has been stockpiling on coasts in mostly developed countries around the world. Because it wasn't just us, it was other countries that shipped their waste to China. This type of policy makes the US, and other developed nations rethink their recycling schemes.
We have to figure out how we can have less contamination in the recycling stream. Because if you have a lot, say you have a bale of PET bottles, and 10% of those are actually replaced by foam plastic, like your styrofoam containers, because those were accidentally put into the stream, immediately that bale becomes way less valuable than it was if it was just PET bottles. We found that companies like Coca Cola, Unilever, Proctor Gamble, these big companies that produce a lot of these products that use plastic have goals for the future about using recycled content in their products.
By 2030, Coca Cola has said that they're going to use 50% recycled material, post consumer plastic in their products. To be sustainable, there has to be a stream of recycled content that comes from recycling facilities around the nation. That's where contamination is a big problem, because it can't use those bales that are contaminated.
I guess this is one of the reasons I really like waste, and products and waste management, is because it has this inherent human factor that we consciously have to think about what we purchase, what we throw away on a daily basis, and we're in contact with these things. It’s one of the only civil infrastructure systems that you really have to have a personal connection.
Do you think infrastructure is enough? Considering the mass amount of plastic we’re producing?
No, I definitely do not view waste management and solid waste infrastructure as the end all be all to our massive waste problem. I promote reduction of waste practices. And research has shown that small, individual acts of reduction and reuse actually make a tangible difference in decreasing waste into the ocean. Reusing bottles and things that you have, or purchasing reusable bottles, things that you can refill, because ultimately the water that you're drinking out of a plastic bottle is just tap water, so why not drink something we already have for a very reduced cost? In the US that's very possible, however I do a lot of international traveling for research, and in many countries this is not necessarily the case.
There are a lot of countries that rely on using bottled water, rely on using packaged materials for hygiene, because they don't have clean drinking water. So in these places, this isn't something they can necessarily do. Changing that type of infrastructure is important as well. Having refill stations, or places that do filter water stations. Solid waste infrastructure is different in every country. Informal waste sectors are very much prevalent in other countries. They are still here in the US, we still have informal waste, and people that are going and searching out valuable materials, but it's much more prevalent in other places around the world.
Waste management is not necessarily the end all be all, but it's a key solution. Definitely the reduction of waste in the first place, the reduction of plastic production and use has to be part of that solution as well.
To put this into context, this would be the equivalent of 25,000 Empire State Buildings by weight. We’ve produced 6300 Million Metric tons of plastic waste and only roughly 9% of what we generate of plastic waste is recycled. We're throwing away tons of plastic that could actually be valuable. Not only that, but we're producing a lot of plastic to replace material like glass, wood, metal, and other materials that we could definitely continue using. We would just have to figure out how to use them in a sharing economy.
If you have a glass bottle, make it accessible to refill stations or places that sell in bulk. Instead of having everything packaged in plastic, have grocery stores and wholesale stores sell in bulk quantities, where you can refill bottles, or containers with what you need. We've seen some of this change, but it's still a very niche market change. We are always open to larger marketplaces, making this something that is more mainstream. Right now we're seeing it in very mom and pop shops, or places like Earth Fare, where it might not be economical for someone in a lower socioeconomic level to shop. Making these market changes to where these services are available for everyone is another place I’d like to see change.
There's the reduction side and reuse side, but we have to start looking at new materials as well. That's also a solution. We've moved to plastic for packaging overtime because of the weight and the cost of shipping that, but what can we use besides plastic? Instead of this more or less toxic material, why aren't we looking at more bio benign materials, biodegradable materials? I think on the packaging side we're going to see more, and on the food packaging side especially, we're going to see more materials that are being made with properties not harmful to the environment, harmful to people, and are easily managed.
We do some of this research at UGA, at the New Materials Institute, and we're looking at the biodegradability of certain types of bio-based polymers, and how this fits into a consumer composting scheme. If we produce these materials, how do we let consumers know that these are compostable materials? Because they look and feel like plastics. Are there composting infrastructures for collection? Because you can produce these materials and make them biodegradable, but if people don't have access to a composting facility, they're going to end up in the landfill or in the recycling. This would actually cause contamination because they're not the same type of plastic as other packaging.
Alternate materials are something I see happening for large store, food packaging and online marketplaces. With online shopping and shipping, I foresee an increase in post consumer packaging waste that isn’t recyclable. Packaging can become more circular through implementation of a thoughtful design process. Companies can employ green design principles, where end of life is thought of at the beginning of the design process, and products and packaging are made to be easily disassembled. New materials could fit into this design process. Image if you could just compost all the packaging your products, food, etc. was shipped in?
When you really start to research plastic, a lot of the information comes from people like you, from places like the Jambeck Group. What is it like watching reporters, civilians, politicians, interpret then promote or disregard your work?
When I first started, the space for waste management and plastic discussions was kind of crappy. You could put something on Twitter about a turtle ingesting plastic, and no one really cared, which was sad. Now the climate is totally different. I think that plastic use, plastic generation, the work that's being done around it ending up in the ocean, the attention that it's getting is just astronomically different now, compared to what it was five or six years ago. I'm even a newcomer in this space compared to some of the people I admire, who have been doing this work for 20+ years.
That's really exciting for me to say, because people are starting to realize that we can't continuously use and waste everything. It's not going to work. We have to use our resources wisely, we have to think consciously about what we put in our bodies every day, what we put on our bodies, what we use. I think that trend is not something that's going to go away anytime soon.
Some of it can be doom and gloom, like we can never clean up the ocean, we can never stop this from happening, we can't reduce our waste generation, and sometimes you just have to realize who might be putting out that content, and kind of fight against it. Because this is a very visible issue, it's something that's tangible, it's something that people can see and connect with. Even if they're not by an ocean, they've probably been to a body of water once in their life, and can somehow connect with polluting our waterways and polluting our ocean. It is so intrinsically tied to humans and tied to our daily routines and our daily habits that it's something that people can connect with, and I really love seeing that part of it.
Do you think with other countries following in China’s footsteps a solution for US production of plastic and waste will be forced?
Yes. For sure. Yes. Countries have already started to do that. I know Malaysia's one, Thailand's another one that said, "No more. We're not taking your waste either." It’s already forcing the US to reevaluate our system and our recycling and say, "What are we doing wrong? How can we reduce contamination, and how do we inform citizens?" Plastic scrap is accumulating and I think we're going to have to find markets to use it. We should be asking ourselves, “How do we makes these materials valuable? What companies, start-ups, etc. could develop products to use these materials?” I think that is a solution which will happen quickly in the US.
What does your future research look like?
Understanding composting in the US, because I do believe that a lot of our packaging is going to be shifting towards biodegradability, and then how we manage that, so I think that composting is going to be something that is on the rise in the US.
Secondly, we're doing some work with specific community assessments. Essentially looking at a community and figuring out what are the inputs into a community, how do they use their materials, how do they use the resources, and then what are the outputs? Then, where's the leakage to the environment? This research is being done in the group by one of my colleagues, Amy Brooks, right now, and it's something that can be applied globally.
Then thirdly, I'm currently heading a group through the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, which is a collection of global ocean youth leaders, looking specifically at the plastic pollution problem, and identifying solutions in specific countries. The Sustainable Oceans Alliance Group is made up of representation from 50 countries by youth leaders. I developed this group to develop white papers to for government and figure out what solutions are working in their specific countries. We’re going to make them aware that there is a youth presence in their countries who have actionable solutions to implement.
We are always looking to research sustainable waste infrastructure, and how to integrate then into developing economies. Like I mentioned before, there are cultural and social contexts to developing these systems that are inherently part of design process. They can’t be excluded, and I firmly believe that. So it’s exciting to see what we can learn from the informal waste sector, and community led initiative around solid waste management for reuse and reduction to curb input of waste into the ocean.