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
We're Teaching Our Kids Too Late
by frank
April 19, 2019
This interview was originally published on November 18, 2018 in our Civics issue.
This interview with the students of The Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem was conducted and condensed by frank news.
From left to right: LaShay Fernandez, Morgan Carter, Javeria Amir, and Fargana Alden.
Morgan: Right now, we're learning about how to take an issue that we feel passionate about and see how we can impact our local government - legislative, the mayors, governors. To see how we can change the issue, or see if we can get more engagement so people will pay attention. The issue we all picked was sexual assault in schools, from colleges, middle schools, high schools...
Why did you choose that?
Morgan: At first, it was separated for a week. Some people wanted to do education and the other side wanted to do sexual assault. We were debating for a week or two and none of us wanted to do it together, and then eventually we just had to decide - why don't we just put them together? Now we're doing sexual assault in schools. And how education and money affects why we don't have sex ed.
That's amazing.
Javeria: There's this thing that there's enough about raising awareness for it. It's time for us to take action and the way we can take action is contacting our local office members rather than just going for the governor or the president. We're saying oh my god the President's doing this and what are we doing? We know we can't directly affect what the President is doing himself, but we can work at a local level which is what we're going to do now.
Who are your local officials?
Javeria: Our mayor and our city council members. We would start contacting them rather than the governor.
LaShay: We did a whole thing where we sat down with people in our neighborhood or district to look up all our local members and see what they're doing and see if they're good. We looked them up and really tried to see if our representatives are everyman or superman. To see how much of our representation is actually what we want, or actually accurately depicts the people that are there - us.
What's the conversation around sexual assault? What are the things you want to see done and what are the sort of modes of getting those things done?
Morgan: Today we learned about root causes and systemic causes. We're starting in elementary schools and high schools. People have sex ed, but we realized that a lot of the problem is that people don't actually know what counts as sexual assault. No one has consent classes. You can't just start at high school, because by that time a lot of people are already having sex. We said that maybe we could start with 7th and 8th graders and give them sexual education - maybe not assault, but basic knowledge so that later on they can know - this is what we do, this is how this works.
LaShay: It's very hard because since people are so young and it's such a fragile thing even though yeah, you should learn about it, we're also talking about different ways to tackle the situation. Instead of just saying "consent" and just straight talking about sex with 12 year olds, it's using different methods. There's this video that a college made about tea and offering people tea and it's really weird, but it really pushes the message of consent and not forcing people to do what they don't want to do.
Fargana: To add on, some parents don't have a lot of knowledge on sexual assault or how to to keep safe, or they feel uncomfortable talking about it. For us to teach kids at a young age about safe sex and just making sure everyone's using protection, what no means if someone is saying no to sexual intercourse. It's very important for us, and also since we are young teens, it'll be easier to talk to students because we're in the same generation in a way. We would just be considered like their older sister, we'll have that bond if they ever need something, we can help them out.
Are you learning about how to communicate with your representatives directly? How can you make sure your voice is heard outside of the classroom?
Javeria: We haven't gotten to that point yet. We're trying to figure out what part of the issues are we focusing on, what are the factors that are leading to such issues, and once we have those down, then we can go and be like this is what's wrong with our system, and this is what we have to fix. Once we get that correctly done, then we'll be approaching them, but we haven't learned how to do that yet.
Morgan: It's hard because sex ed is like - a lot of parents don't want their kids learning about that and it's not just girls, it's boys that have to learn about it, too. It's kind of hard knowing exactly what we want them to do because it's often a societal thing. It's hard for them to say, oh we want a rule against this. You have to make something specific.
Do you guys feel empowered by the class?
LaShay: Yes, I was just talking to a friend about it today because I think a lot of times we sit in our class, and especially going to TWYLS, we talk about this stuff, like since freshman year we've been talking about this stuff, and it's such a big issue and we always talk about it, but we never talk about what we're going to do about it. And I think sometimes when you're just in your little city, you think this is huge and this is happening in the government and I can't do anything about it.
Even if you're starting small, it's a ripple effect. I think that's what the class has really done for me. I can do stuff, even if it's really small, it's important.
Javeria: People talk a lot and they don't do anything about it. We have a social justice club and I feel like that has empowered us in general and then having Generation Citizen - being able to take action now, instead of just talking about it. What should we do? I feel like it's a wonderful opportunity for us to have.
Fargana: In addition, compared to other schools, TYWLS really prepares you. We're really thankful to be offered Generation Citizen because in other schools, again, they would talk about it - or not even, the topic wouldn't even come up in their conversations - it would just be ignored rather than at least being talked about it and seeing different ways how we can help. For us to talk about it and see how we can fight as young teens, it really impacts us.
Can you tell us more about the social justice club?
Javeria: The social justice club is led by Jessica Taylor, our 10th grade global history teacher. In that club, anyone - I think it's mostly high schoolers - can come in the beginning of the year, we focus on an issue and advocate for the issue we think is affecting our community right now. We're in 10th grade and we raised some funds for the Syrian refugees, that was around $500 by doing food sales. It's just the little things we're doing. We're seeing what current issues are affecting the people around us. It's giving back and even though our school doesn't have that much, we're trying to take initiative.
Fargana: We donated a bunch of toiletries to a women's shelter as well. Every year we would do something - I think of it as a main project and then a mini project. So the mini things are some local things - like donate toiletries, donate money, and then our main project is what all of us are mainly focused on and how we can help.
That's amazing. Have you guys learned about civics anywhere other than Generation Citizen?
Morgan: I think some of us learn it at home, but in school, other than government or AP US History, not a lot. I think as a whole, they always push us to change something or if you feel something, talk about it, try to change it so not directly, but I think that we all get encouraged throughout our years of being here to try to change something.
Javeria: Our government class is coming senior year, it's important, but other than that we're not used to having that - what policies are, how they're made. It's senior year and Generation Citizen. For me, even if we're in AP Government, you're getting that in senior year which is a little late, but.
How early do you think civics should start?
Javeria: I feel like middle school. They're going into that 9th grade year where they're like we're going to be like high school, and they're already empowered so you might as well give them another boost.
Fargana: Yeah, it would really impact a person if you're starting in middle school. It would be perfect to teach them about the government issues and who's your local representative, what does it mean? Then when you're in high school, as the years go by, you'll have more knowledge. Each grade, we can all come together and create a bond within us and be able to go out and do something. For seniors, since we're capable of doing it, we can continue it in college and teach others that really didn't have this opportunity when we were in high school.
Are any of you about to be 18?
Yes, yes.
Are you planning on voting?
Javeria: Yes! I was going to say that. Us turning 18 - I feel like this is encouraging me at least to vote. That's one of the ways my voice can be heard, so why not? I feel like that's part of the issue. We need to tell them - yeah, voting may seem like your voice is not heard at all, but we're the people and you're one person so we need all the people to make that voice be heard, so vote, please.
Are you excited to vote?
Javeria: Yes, I'm really excited. I've been waiting. I've been waiting to turn 18 so I can vote.
LaShay: I think it's so funny that she's acting like that because my parents don't vote and it's really weird. I'm always like why don't you vote? "Well it's not gonna matter." I'm really glad I took this class because you're influenced by your political socialization - you're influenced by the people that you're around, and you inherit these ideas and you're kind of conditioned to believe this one thing and I think before I came to TYWLS, I kind of did have that mindset of well, I can't make a change, I'm one person. I'm so excited to vote now and it's so weird because before I didn't think it would matter.
Fargana: I don't turn 18 until another year, my parents are immigrants - they're both US citizens - so it's for them, the only main election they worry about is presidential because that's the big one, but I feel like now that I have more knowledge on this, I'm literally waking my mom up early so she can come with me to go vote. Well, for her to vote, I'm just gonna be there making sure she's there.
Morgan: I'm the exact opposite. It's weird because my mom has always been - my mom is the kind of person, even if she doesn't like anybody on the ballot, she'll still vote. She's always told me to pay attention to what's going on and vote. And I was always just like, I don't really care, but I think Generation Citizen has made me really want to do something now because every single thing counts. I kind of wish, like a lot of things, that we would've learned it in middle school.
I think the problem is we underestimate young people. They think they're not old enough to understand it. When a lot of times, the middle schoolers know more than you think they do. Like a lot more. And I think that they need to start encouraging them and teaching them because I feel like 11th graders and 12th graders, we're about to leave, there's no point. I feel like if I would've heard it in 8th grade, maybe I would want to vote more. I can change a lot more things than I thought I could have.
Never underestimate the youth.