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
Keller Easterling On Free Zones, Urban Porn, and the Politics of Planning
by Keller Easterling
May 8, 2018
This interview with Keller Easterling, an architect, urbanist, writer, and teacher at Yale University, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Tell me a little bit about yourself, your background, how you found yourself in the world of planning and urbanism.
I went to school as an architect, but was mostly doing theater, and was playing both of those at the same time. I didn't know which one was going to win out. And still, my whole life, have been doing both in parallel. Now as a writer. To make my living I ended up being an architect, then ended up going into academia as an architect.
While I know how to build buildings, and I teach design, what I was most interested in was looking at the way in which space was part of global politics. What it allowed me to do was actually write a kind of footnoted fiction, so that I could carry on with this kind of writing. That would also let me describe the hyperbolic ways in which space was becoming a political pawn in global politics to a broader audience. But to my own profession, showing just how consequential space is, but not the space that we really work on in my discipline.
Can you give an example of space being used as a political pawn?
I've been studying spatial products, which are sort of repeatable formulas for space. We all know what they are: resorts, golf courses, airports, ports, parking lots, malls, franchises, all of that. I'd been studying those, and I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was, to discover that the more they were rationalized to deliver on the bottom line, the more strangely they became a vehicle for irrational fictions. And that these things which had been designed to be instruments to optimize bottom line, were also really useful as kind of fictions and pawns on the political stage. So, nations using a spatial product to tell a story. I mean, the one that I use as a kind of mascot of this idea was, The Isle of Cruise from South Korea to North Korea in the late 90s. Here was a spatial product that one wouldn’t expect to find in the situation, being used to bargain. It was part of a much broader set of urban developments proposed for the entire Eastern seaboard of North Korea.
That's incredible. Where has your work been most focused recently?
Recently, the book called Enduring Innocence, had several different kinds of stories about these kinds of spatial products landing in political situations. The next book I wrote called Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, is, I suppose, about infrastructures more broadly. Much larger sociotechnical organizations. Free Zones, which are kind of like, if you can take a space, or resort, and make it repeatable. Free Zones make whole world cities into repeatable formulas. So I was working on a slightly bigger scale, but somehow that book was interspersed with contemplations about how do you design and manipulate this space?
My most recent book called Medium Design, is going even further into that contemplation. How does looking at these gigantic cloud formations prompt different habit of mind about problem solving? And aesthetics and politics as well.
Can you define a Free Zone?
There are many different kinds of Freeports, and small states, and territories, and enclaves. I'm calling a Free Zone something that wants to call itself a Free Zone. It's distantly related to the old Freeports.
It's something that really starts in the early 20th Century, as formulas started by the United States for foreign trade zones, for storing custom free trade. Which evolved or mutated into a formula that was promoted by the UN for jumpstarting the economies of developing countries. And then once China started to play with that form in the late 70s, early 80s, it became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It just started propagating around the world incredibly quickly. By the 80s and 90s, there were over 66 terms for something that one would call a Free Zone.
Streamlined customs, taxes, streamlined labor, a menu of exemptions that are different in different countries. It’s a space of exemption. There are whole countries like Mauritius, in which you can legally establish a zone.
The other kind of phenomenon is that they are very hard to follow. They are like a million butterflies mutating very quickly, but they also breed with each other, so you start to get Free Zones and software technology parks as a new form, or Free Zones in science, or Free Zones in planned communities, and so on.
For someone who is new to the idea of a Free Zone, why is it important to look at them critically, especially now?
Because they have become the the world city paradigm. The most contagious formula for making world cities. Any country that's entering into the global market and is trying to attract global business, wants to give these corporations incentives and good deals. It's become impossible not to provide this kind of urbanism. Now, certain things that would have been located in cities, are located in Free Zones, to enjoy this kind of lubricated situation. By the thousands, these cities are offering Free Zones around the world.
What effect does a Free Zone within a city, have on the rest of the city?
Of course there are Free Zones which are entire cities. A megacity is Shenzhen, which is a Free Zone, within a Free Zones, and so on. One of the things that I've been noticing is a situation where there is an existing city, take some city like Nairobi, which will then become ringed by these new instant cities. Initially, those cities would get the premium infrastructure. The air conditioning would work, the Wi-Fi would work, but right outside, the infrastructure would be crumbling.
A lot of what I've been talking about is diverting a lot of that foreign investment into existing cities to develop the economy.
The workers will be working in a compound, or factory compound, and may never see the city. There are these fault lines that are also part of the picture.
Is the United States an advocate of Free Zones?
It's an interesting question in that we certainly have made deals, free trade deals like NAFTA, and so on. We are in any number of other deals as companies that might not be expressed by the U.S. government. But U.S. companies are using these Free Zones to manufacture things, to put their headquarters in, to shelter money.
So it’s purely an economic incentive?
You wouldn't be able to go back to your board and provide another rationale. It is the voice of the corporation, because how can you afford to miss out on these savings? In this so-called race to the bottom. In terms of what the United States is currently talking about, in a new nativist tone, it's hard to imagine that somehow all these other jobs would come back to the United States. Knowing what I know now, looking at thousands of these things which make up a gigantic physical plant all around the world, where jobs and manufacturing are going abroad, it's very hard to imagine suddenly coming back, just because you have the pro-American sentiment.
Are there existing protections on a global level for labor?
There are some non-binding guidelines and standards, and some watchdog lists and blacklists. Ways in which a company can be audited.
How did you come to be fascinated by this scene that operates globally, from an architecture background, living and teaching in New York and Connecticut?
I just started to follow where these formulas were going. I had initially studied special products like highways and suburban houses in the United States. When I first started looking at them, I was looking at the export of U.S. style. Only to realize how stupid that was because there were special products moving around in all directions. It was good evidence for a critique of that center periphery idea.
The way I have been doing it is largely through ephemera. It's not proper field work, where in order to do it you have to roll up your sleeves and show up there.That's not how I work. I'm often looking at how these organizations promote themselves. Their ephemera, their promotional material.
You mentioned before the promotional videos that you have collected a bunch of.
In part because everyone who wants to enter the global market is taking the same bargain. That they need to attract business in this confidence game of urban form. And urban form has become the hyperbolic attractor of that business. So these promotional videos are really wild cartoons. Emotional. They always start out the same exact way. That's why they're fun to collect. This drop through clouds to find a new center of the Earth, and there's stirring music that you'd hear in a thriller or a western or something. It's always the same. Then there's this swoop through these cartoon skylines and human figures walking around on Boulevard's and pleasure boats, and so on.
Do you have any predictions about where this moves in the future?
I don't know. One of the things that makes me hopeful is that the form mutated from something like a grey, back of house space, to a megacity in 30 or 40 years. Here's this thing, which is kind of gathering cultural scripts and desires as it goes, which are so far away from the initial economic calculation. It makes me think, what's the next script? One of the biggest scripts is that the Free Zone likes to call itself a "city". "Dubai Internet City", I mean, there are hundreds of them that have city in the title. Dubai is made up almost exclusively as an aggregate of these little mini things called "cities", Dubai Internet City, Dubai Humanitarian City, it goes on and on. I keep thinking, is there a way that one could use the Free Zones desire to be a city, as the antidote of its reversal? Is that a way in which we could encourage investment in existing cities? Rather than the newly minted ex-urban enclaves?
Stepping back to the profession for a moment, can you discuss the separation between planners and urban designers?
I am more of an urbanist or urban designer. Where I think of a planner as someone who is much more involved in policy and real estate, and has some different training, but can be a designer. There's a kind of funny gray area where someone who would be called a planner, could also be an urban design, and also a policy expert. But I would consider myself more of an urban design.
Can you define that further?
A planner might be somebody who designs a master plan. Goes to the city, designs a plan for it that is to be phased and rolled out over a period of years. As an urban designer, I don't really think that way. The way we are doing urban design, is working on things at all different levels. It's more of a rewiring of all kinds of things in a city. How a street works, how much larger systems work. But it involves the skills of a designer.
An urbanist now can be working on another kind of chemistry of parts within the city.
What's the process of going from thought to practice?
What I think is important about information about these kinds of freezones, for my students, is that they might be working at a firm like KPF, which is a big corporate firm. They do everything. They do buildings, and furniture, and gigantic masterplans. They might design a skyscraper in one Free Zone, and then do the master plan for a whole other Free Zone. If you didn't study it, you wouldn't really know what the politics of the space were. You would just be focusing on the detail of designing the skyscraper. I think it's important that architects know the politics of these places that they're working in.
Right.
But for instance, that firm designed a whole Free Zone. It has, from a certain angle, the dream of the master plan, of the architect somewhere distantly in it. It’s distantly the heroic modern architect and planner in the background.
We've looked a lot at the debate over Jane Jacobs. Shifting between bottom-up planning vs. top-down planning. In your ideal world how would planning work?
I'm already pulling away from the kind of planning we see as the bureaucratic view of planning. Or planning as a solutionist approach. The urban design that I'm doing is much different than that. The Free Zone is this kind of weird accidental cartoon of the planners dream, you know? Somone like Jane Jacobs, the way that she is thinking about all of the solids that are moving around in real time in a city, is closer to the way that, now, thinking as an urban designer, and seeing the art of that, the possibilities that makes for design.
She's being looked at as someone who was really interested in information systems, and who was originally trained that way. The way that she worked in time, and as a kind of complex temporal framework, that's closer to the way I would look at it now. Which is as an information system. As a heavy information system.
There's also a back and forth between whose job it is to make plans for the future. Is it up to the planner? Or the citizenry?
I'm sort of excited about the ways in which urbanists might be thinking up protocols. Things that reverse engineer sprawl. They're another kind of document. They're not a solution. They're multiple problems working together. There can be explicit instructions for some of these protocols that have a chance to work on retreat from the coast. I'm trying to look at urban space as a much broader mixing chamber for all different kinds of information systems, and asking, is that really more information rich than some platforms that purport to be information rich, but might be filtered through a dumb binary of likes and dislikes? Is there another space of friction and mixing in this city.