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 Positive Adaptation Looks Like
by Morgan Phillips
September 30, 2019
This interview between Dr. Morgan Phillips, the co-director of The Glacier Trust (TGT), and Meleah Moore, a volunteer for TGT, was edited and condensed by frank news.
Meleah: Hey Morgan. Can you introduce yourself and give us a run-down of your work with The Glacier Trust?
M: I am the Co-Director of the Glacier Trust, a small UK NGO based in London. We exist to enable climate change adaptation in Nepal, more specifically in the foothills of the Himalaya. And as well as enabling climate change adaptation we are increasingly trying to advocate for adaptation both in Nepal, and in the UK, and trying to get it up the agenda a little bit more. We know that people are adapting anyway, so The Glacier Trust focuses on encouraging adapting in mindful ways. And not causing more harm than good in the ways they are coping with climate change.
Meleah: Can you explain more of what you meant when you say that adaptation can be more harmful than good?
M: We are getting to the stage where people are consciously and unconsciously adapting to climate change. Sometimes it's really incremental and small adjustments to the way people live. There is always a danger that they’ll adapt in kind of a self-interested way, that they might end up doing things which are good for them, but have a knock-on impact on other people.
Meleah: Do you have an example of unmindful adaption?
M: In London in the summer we now get prolonged periods of very hot weather, and so the sale of air conditioning units and desk fans is going up, as people try to keep cool. That’s an example of a maladaptation. In running these appliances they are using more electricity, which is coming from fossil fuels, which is causing more climate change. We’re in danger of that happening on a mass scale if people aren’t aware of how they are adapting.
Meleah: So working against nature instead of with it. Is there an example you can think of specifically in an agricultural sense that would be maladaptation?
Yes, climate change makes it harder to farm, so one way to cope would be to say, well, let’s cut some corners. Examples would be farmers using inorganic farming methods or pursuing a high yield through using inorganic pesticides, chemical pesticides and fertilizers.
Meleah: Can you talk more about the specific agriculture-based adaptation methods that The Glacier Trust is supporting in Nepal?
There are lots of intersections going on in terms of the development agenda and poverty eradication - if people improve their livelihoods they become more resilient to climate change.
Our work enables agroforestry, which is working with farmers to grow different tree species in a layer-farming method that increases agricultural productivity. Coffee production, which is becoming more popular in Nepal, is a perfect example. Without a shade tree, like banana or moringa, there is a danger that the sun will be too direct or pests will have more access. So, in farmers learning these techniques, the coffee has a better chance of surviving.
Meleah: Coffee is largely grown in regions that are extremely climate vulnerable. Have you noticed any changes in the industry more globally?
Climate change is having an effect on coffee plantations all around the world, especially in zones of lower altitude where the heat of the sun is lasting longer or the monsoon pattern is changing. It’s also having an effect because of insect pests coming to destroy the crop. The crops are not as resilient as they once were.
However, at the same time, as more people enter the middle classes and have the means to start buying coffee, the demand for coffee is increasing. We’re seeing new areas like Nepal, where they can grow at high altitudes, beginning to fill the gap in the supply. In Nepal, only around 5% of the land which could be growing coffee, is growing coffee. So there is a huge potential to grow a lot of it.
Meleah: We’ve talked before about the true cost of a cup of coffee, but in places like America and the UK its still pretty cheap. I just bought a cup for $2.50 this morning. There is a whole chain of events, from picking, processing, transporting, roasting… that lead up to getting coffee into your cup. Couple that with climate change and shifting regions of production. Is there enough getting back to the farmers? Is it a sustainable way to earn a living?
M: Yea, it’s tricky. I mean one issue is that value is added to the coffee once it leaves the country of origin. The people who grow it don’t tend to make the big profit margins on it, that tends to happen once it’s been roasted, packaged and marketed. The knock-on effect is the “if” - if coffee farmers aren’t getting a good price for their coffee, they will just stop growing it. It won’t be valuable to them. We’ve seen in Nepal that there are coffee plants but no one is looking after them, or tending to them, or picking the coffee beans, because they’ve never seen a way to make money from it.
What we’ve been doing is to try to get the coffee roasted in Nepal so that the money from roasting stays in the country. We’d like to be able to increase that even further up the chain, so the farmers themselves are able to roast the coffee.
The exciting thing with coffee is that there are so many benefits. In a layer farming method, you’re also growing fruit and vegetables, which improve local diets and can be sold in local markets. So it has a triple-win effect. At a very local level the small areas in which the coffee is grown are noticeably cooler, and helps people deal with the heat. It’s a mitigation effect as well.
Meleah: What are the transfer ideas or methods from Nepal and from crop sharing that could work in countries like the UK or US, were it’s not necessarily a development effort but it does need to happen?
Adaptation would be descaling from these massive factory farms, which have enormous machinery, fertilizers, all that stuff. We need to peel that back if we’re going to be working more in harmony with the land. Which would be going, I don’t want to say back, but in the direction of what we see in Nepal. More hands on and more people working the land.
The interesting thing, which I’m exploring at the minute, it’s that it can be less about the farmers adapting to climate change, and more about them adapting to people's concern for the climate. I read the other day that some farmers started growing chickpeas in the UK for the first time. That’s a response to the increased demand for hummus as more people eat plant-based diets. It’s literally that. It’s an indirect adaptation to climate change, because they’re adapting to consumer preferences changing. Consumer preferences are changing because of our knowledge of climate change.
Meleah: I think that’s really interesting.
M: I think that is becoming a bigger, faster driver of change.
But we have to ask the question - are they growing those chickpeas in environmentally sensitive ways? Or are they just growing them as cheaply and efficiently as they can to service the demand?
M: I mean we see more vegan and plant-based options everywhere… Do you have Impossible burgers yet?.
Yeah, that’s happening for sure. There are vegan options everywhere and more importantly, the brands are talking about them, they’re advertising the fact they’ve got them. They’re not embarrassed about them. It’s being pushed and it must be having an effect on what farmers are doing. They will meet that demand.
You hear different stories on avocado sales and how that’s affecting farmers of the world who are growing avocados and cutting down a load of forest to get it done. This is again about having mindfulness in adaptation.
It’s a bit of a ...
Meleah: A double-edged sword
M: Yea there’s a disconnect there. It could all be a lot less harmful if they started to do things like the layer farming and agroforestry methods and not doing monocultures and so on.
Meleah: I think it’s really interesting to talk about adaptation in this everyday sense. I want to unpack the difference between adaptation and mitigation. What are your views on what adaptation can achieve and what kind of balance do we need between adaptation and mitigation?
M: That’s a nice small question (laughs).
I think about this a lot. I came into this job three years ago, not knowing very much about adaptation. I came from an environmental NGO perspective, and in the environmental sector it seemed to me that adaptation was almost a dirty word.
We’re acknowledging that, with the best intentions, the Paris agreement or anything else isn’t going to prevent 2 degrees of warming and that change is locked in. Adaptation is going to happen anyway. So if we’re not talking about, we have no control over how it’s going to happen. It could lead to dangerous outcomes for marginalized people who don’t have a strong enough voice to be able to make sure they’re not being screwed over by people's adaptation policies.
A project like agroforestry is adaption, but mitigation at the same time. Because if you plant more trees it’s going to absorb Co2 and help mitigate climate change, while also adapting to it. So they’re not separate in that sense - there are overlaps. It’s good to be trying to do both within a project.
Meleah: So breaking down some boundaries of solutions thinking.
Yeah, if you try to keep the strategies separate and reinforce two camps it’s dangerous.
You can see that happening in response to the Jonathan Franzen article in the New Yorker last week. Lots of people from the mitigation ‘camp’ really attacked the article, and it deserved attacking in some ways because there was a lot of sensationalism in it, but at the same time Franzen was realistically pointing out, in ways that David Wallace Wells or Jem Bendell or Extinction Rebellion in the UK have been pointing out, that the truth is we are in a much more perilous situation than the media commonly tells us.
Franzen was adding to that job of saying, things are really bad, worse than you think they are, and we’re going to have to adapt to them. But people don’t like to hear that. So you’ve ended up with this kind of divide happening. And that divide is really dangerous because we should be looking for overlaps.
Meleah: I like the overlap idea, the visual of that.
M: Yeah, I mean, it has historically been the case that we think of an environmental movement on one side and an international development movement on the other, and the international development movement has always been promoting adaptation as part of poverty eradication and equality work.
Meleah: I guess mitigation gets to a global level, the carbon-capture and geoengineering and so on, but adaptation seems a lot more localized, or individualized even.
M: The difficulty is we need huge amounts of mitigation as well. Every 0.1 of a degree of warming we can prevent, the better. But the reality is there is only a limited budget for spending on climate change and the balance of the money is still heavily weighted towards mitigation, grant funding and climate finance. You can make more money off of mitigation projects. And so the danger is a load of money is put out for mitigation in the hope that it prevents the need to adapt, but the reality is that people need to adapt already.
A lot of the technologies that are being invested in, large scale carbon storage and negative emissions technologies - we don’t know if they’re going to succeed anyway. So it’s a gamble to spend it all there. We need to spend more on both, that’s the reality of it.
Meleah: That’s very true.
M: Overall for me there’s still a need to shout from the rooftops about adaptation because it is in the shadow of mitigation. Still. Although, it’s starting to emerge. I think during the next big UN COP adaptation is going to be far higher up the agenda than it was previously. Sometimes I see adaptation related stories on the news, on the mainstream news - which it never was before. Really, it’s time. The environments that we care about are being attacked by climate change, the environment is attacking itself.
Meleh: Well that’s a really positive note to end on.
M: No, I do have hope! I do have hope. I think that I've found hope by seeing adaptation projects work. Because if we just leave communities to cope on their own, without any investment, then there will be social collapse. But there are adaptation strategies we can implement.
Meleah : You’re work in Nepal is completely that. It's so cool to see a community given the tools and resources to thrive and change their situation.
M: Yea, it’s really inspiring. That’s where I find hope - there are ways to cope.