[Commlist] panel on the representation of contemporary activism @ ECREA

Delia Dumitrica is seeking contributions to a panel on the 
representation of contemporary activism (e.g. protests, boycotts, 
hashtag movements, etc.) in popular culture for the Communication & 
Democracy section at the European Communication Research and Education 
Association ECREA 2020 conference.

If interested, send a 500 words abstract by December 19, 2019 to Delia 
Dumitrica at (dumitrica /at/ eshcc.eur.nl)

Panel title: Representing activism in popular culture
While the news coverage of activism – and particularly protest – is a 
rich research problematic, work on the symbolic construction of activism 
across cultural texts such as novels, films, documentaries, advertising, 
memes, songs, art installations, etc. is largely missing. Such cultural 
texts contribute to the shared political imaginary by informing public 
values and social identity, proposing shared cognitive maps for 
political sense-making, and discussing public norms (Curran, 2011). 
Furthermore, by rhetorically constructing popular memory of and 
arguments about past activism, such texts have a long-term impact on our 
political imaginary (Borda, 2010; Edgerton, 2001; Griffin, 2003).
The panel is particularly - but not exclusively – interested in mapping 
the representation of contemporary forms of activism, from Occupy and 
the Arab Spring to hashtag movements such as MeToo, Black Lives Matter, or
Fridays for Future.  Contemporary activism’s creative use of digital 
mediation for self-representation and grassroots mobilization has itself 
commanded the attention of cultural producers as a herald of a 
revitalized polis (Dumitrica and Bakardjieva, 2018).
The panel’s interest in the portrayal of activism in popular culture is 
driven by questions such as: What tactics and strategies of civic action 
are legitimized across these texts? What civic subject positions are 
constructed? To what extent do they participate in the constructing 
engagement as an individual gesture? How do they construct trust in 
democratic politics and in the political prowess of digital technologies?
References

Dumitrica, D., & Bakardjieva, M. (2018). The personalization of 
engagement: the symbolic construction of social media and grassroots 
mobilization in Canadian newspapers. Media, Culture & Society, 40(6): 
817–837. Borda, J.L. (2010). Women Labor Activists in the Movies: Nine 
Depictions of Workplace Organizers,1954-2005. McFarland.
Curran, J. (2011). Media and democracy. London: Routledge.
Edgerton, G. (2001). Television as historian: A different kind of 
history altogether.  In Edgerton, G. and Rollins, P. (Eds.). Television 
histories: Shaping collective memory in the media age (pp. 1-16). 
Lexington, University Press of Kentucky.
Griffin, C.J.G. (2003). Movement as memory: Significant form in eyes on 
the prize. Communication Studies, 54(2): 196-210.

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