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
Rote Memorization Won't Do
by DeNora Getachew
April 15, 2019
This interview with DeNora Getachew was originally published November 7, 2018 in our Civics issue.
DeNora Getachew is the New York City Executive Director of Generation Citizen, the flagship local site of a nine year old national nonprofit dedicated to bringing civics education back into the classroom through a new, engaging pedagogy: Action Civics. DeNora, an attorney by training, was a democracy nerd before it was in vogue. She had her civic engagement moment as a young pregnant teen advocating for her ability to remain at her high school instead of transferring to an alternative high school for pregnant teens. But it was not until after she graduated from law school and began working to eliminate the structural barriers to participation that she realized the power of her experience as a young pregnant teen.
This interview was conducted and condensed by frank news editors.
DeNora: Thanks for being with me today and giving me the opportunity to talk about Generation Citizen. I'm DeNora Getachew the New York City Executive Director of Generation Citizen. We are a 9 year old national non-profit focused on educating and empowering young people to be civically engaged. Our solution is simple and it's common sense, and it's necessary. We partner with schools to implement Action Civics in the classroom in order to give them the knowledge and skills they need for lifelong civic participation in our 21st century democracy.
Why does this not already exist in public schools?
Civics education does exist. It doesn't exist in the way that it once did. If we look back in our nation's history, back in the 1960s, students took as many as three courses before graduating high school relating to civics and democratic participation. And now, we're lucky if students take one class. But it's not about whether or not there's a class in schools, it's about the quality and caliber of that class.
The reality is, School House Rock might've been great for our grandparents, but if you can like and tweet and activate yourself online using social media, memorizing government facts isn't going make you feel like you can make a difference in your community. So it's about having Action Civics, having experiential learning as a way to educate and empower young people. Civics exists, and the majority of states have some class that pertains to civics, so it's about, is it experiential learning, project-based learning, is it student-led work – Action Civics.
When structuring courses for Generation Citizen, aimed at Gen Z, do you take into account their online lives?
It's a delicate balance because we want to both meet the millennials and Generation Z'ers where they are without also tipping the scale.
I want to be clear, both as a leader, but also when we talk to our educational partners, that you have to engage students to be digitally engaged civic learners, but you also have to teach them that systemic change includes the other tools in the toolbox that require us to meet elected officials in person, call them, write letters, engage in petitioning, etc. and that isn't only going happen online. You still need the actual face-to-face engagement in order to fuel long-term systemic change.
What do you think about organizations that focus on civic engagement through celebrity?
I honestly think that participating in democracy is a full-contact sport, so when you're engaged in a full-contact sport you're going need all the tools in the toolbox. I don't want us to over-celebritize civic engagement, so I am glad that everybody from the Taylor Swift's of the world to President Donald Trump are using social media and celebrity to get people to be engaged in a way that we've never experienced, or we haven't experienced, in a long time in our democracy. We still need every day Americans to know that their voice matters and that they too can push for systemic change, and that's the work we're doing. Both in our urban centers like New York, Boston and the Bay Area, but also in rural communities in Texas and Oklahoma.
Why do you think civics has been largely taken out of the classroom?
I say this with all due respect for the STEM/STEAM movement, we can date it back to the 60s, but when we look at the history it was this moment when America was having its Sputnik moment and thinking about how it stayed globally competitive in the STEM sector, and really how do we race to get to the forefront of that. That forced us to de-emphasize, probably not even intentionally, experiential civics learning in the classroom.
Our founders founded this democracy with the goal of having an electorate, a populace, that understood how democracy works and that they were gonna engage in it. And again, I say that to go back to this fundamental notion that I believe that it takes all of us to participate actively in democracy, and that isn't all day, every day, but we all have to engage with it, and not just on election day.
Once we started thinking more about what it meant to be active Americans from a capitalist's perspective, and not as much from a citizenship perspective and a democracy perspective, we lost sight of the priority, both of our public education system but also of democracy at large and its responsibility to make sure that all Americans can participate in democracy.
What tools are most effective to get people to learn this?
We have to meet people where they are, and I think that's the power of Generation Citizen and our work, and our Action Civics curriculum. We are nine years old and we've been doing this work in six states by-and-large over the last nine. We're in Rhode Island, where we were founded on Brown University's campus at a pivotal moment for our American democracy. It was 2008, if we harken back to that moment, America was having a historic election, potentially to elect the first African-American president of the United States.
And our co-founder and CEO, Scott Warren realized at that time when he was a student at Brown University that Americans are standing in line for hours and participating at record levels at the Federal level, and in national elections. Almost very similar to this one where we are now, where we're seeing early voting turnout in Georgia, three times above what it normally is, but that people don't turn out in local elections, that people don't wait in line to vote for their city council member or their mayor or their public advocate, because they don't view it as a critical responsibility or it doesn't impact their lives in the same way.
He had this idea of, how do we get to the root cause of fixing civic participation at the local level. By reinvigorating civics education in the classrooms. He had this idea of piloting this Action Civics approach in the Providence school district, expanded to Massachusetts, down the Northeast corridor here in New York where I have the pleasure of being our New York City Executive Director. We went to the Bay Area where there's also this big urban center, and a big education system that we thought we could influence there.
Then took a pause in our organizational growth, and launched our two new sites in Oklahoma and Texas, and realized in this moment, what is missing, is we are not teaching young people experiential learning as much as we are in the classrooms anymore. With all due respect to the education system, it is by and large driven towards metrics based outcomes – how well do you perform on a standardized test. But not all learners perform well on standardized tests. In fact many young people who drop out of high school, one of the largest reasons they drop out of high school is because of the fact that they don't perform well on standardized tests, and in fact experiential learning resonates better with them.
When we think about the work that we are doing, to reinvigorate civics education and making sure that it's student led, it's project based, it is action oriented, is making sure that we could make it the most exciting subject that's taught in the classrooms again as opposed to the most boring.
By getting young people to build consensus about an issue that is personal and local to them, and getting them to understand that they can be in the drivers seat for how they can affect change in their community, we are activating them to use all the tools in their toolbox to be change-agents, be that now in the short-term in the confines of a classroom, or, and more importantly, in their lives largely.
I want to say unequivocally that we do this work in a nonpartisan way and we do it with the goal of activating young people to be civically engaged long-term. It isn't just about what happens in the classroom, it's about how does that civic knowledge, understanding the branches of government, the School House Rock component if you will, and those civic skills, so if I have a problem in my community, who are the decision makers, what am I asking them to do? Is it legislative, is it policy-making, is it budgetary in nature, is it increasing youth voice in decision making, the skills are what's going help them understand how to use that knowledge and apply it and be motivated and have that sense of agency or disposition long-term.
What are the biggest challenges you face in achieving that goal?
That that's the exact opposite of what's happening in a public school classroom. When you ask teachers, when you talk to them about the importance about civics in the classroom and experiential learning, they're excited about it, they're hungry for it, but no one's educating them, no one's equipping them to teach that in the classroom. In fact, the incentives structure and how we compensate teachers is driven towards that metrics-based, outcome-driven success for students, so if their students are performing better on standardized tests, then they achieve tenure, or they get bonuses, or they get raises. When instead we're not preparing teachers to prepare students to be citizens. Often times the barriers that we face are that educators themselves don't have that sense of civic knowledge or civic skills. And so they're like, how do I teach someone else how to participate in democracy when no one's taught me? The number one question we often get at Generation Citizen is, do you have this for adults? And the reality is, many of us need this.
It's a problem for our democracy. We don't actually understand how it works, understand why it relates to us, then how are we going engage in that full contact sport? The biggest question and the biggest obstacle we face, is educators who don't want to reveal that they themselves don't have that core set of knowledge and skills. We want to equip them to do it, so that they can equip the next generation to do it.
What's been the most surprising thing about working at Generation Citizen?
I don't know if it's surprising as much as it is inspiring, that young people, we don't give them the benefit of the doubt. So part of it is as a society, there are certain things you cannot do until you reach the age of majority. To be that 18 or 21, depending on what it is you're trying to accomplish. But that young people have this insatiable appetite for change and for thinking outside of the box that we don't always give them credit for.
What's powerful to me about this work, is that when you go into a classroom, you have these young people who started the semester skeptical, and they'll be honest. Because they're also so pure, the cynicism hasn't set in yet, they don't understand what they can or cannot achieve. They look at us and they're like how did you get here, who invited Generation Citizen to the classroom? And so they're skeptical and they're like what is this Action Civics thing, why do I care, how is this different from anything else I'm doing?
You're going let me, during class time, call an elected official, or write a piece of legislation, or advocate for something that I need in my community, be it something as simple as a traffic signal at a dangerous intersection, to legislation to allow for updating the school curriculum around how addictive opiates are? You're going to let me do that, in this classroom?
Once you see that spark get lit up for them, to me that's what's inspiring. It's both an obstacle and a source of inspiration for why I do this work. Then you see the power of young people to lead change, and if you look at it from a history-nerd's perspective, that young people are always at the forefront of change, we just don't always give them credit for it because the adults always have the bigger microphone, the bigger voice, the better kind of sophisticated language to talk about what it is. I'm always proud of that, of just seeing that if we let young people lead, if we give them the chance and the opportunity and the tools to do so, they rise to the occasion again and again.
What's one key take-away that you want people to know about civics education that they don't already?
That despite it feeling in vogue now, my phone rings more often, I get more emails inquiring about our work and how to engage with it than I ever did, two years ago when I started here, having left the structural barriers to the participation side of the house, as I fashion myself a democracy nerd for life, civics education was always this luxury item that was gonna be at the bottom of the list. If we fixed all the structural barriers, we'll make elections more accessible by having reforms like early voting, and automatic voter registration and online voter registration, you name it. And if we can have a better campaign finance system so that every day Americans can run for office, then we could re-institute civics.
I got here two years ago, and I'm like, but no we need to re-institute civics now, and forever, because if we don't, if we get rid of all the structural barriers of participation it'll be for naught because no one will understand why it matters. For me, that's the power of Action Civics and that's why we need it now and forever. I don't want to get caught up in this cliché of like, "it's the most important thing we need," or "this is the right moment." We've always needed it, the founders believed that over 240 years ago, I'm sitting here very humbly saying we need it today, and I want all of us to understand why.