Transformative media: Intersectional technopolitics from Indymedia to #BlackLivesMatter
Sandra Jeppesen | 2021 | book published by UBC Press
In 1999, Seattle activists adopted cutting-edge livestream technology to cover protests against the World Trade Organization. The global Indymedia network that emerged established the importance of alternative, anti-capitalist media for marginalized groups.
Transformative Media explores subsequent developments as the anti-oppression practices of digitally facilitated movements and media activists began contributing to a nascent intersectional technopolitics: harnessing the transformative power of technologies for political purposes. Drawing on years of participatory research, Sandra Jeppesen investigates the complex, often contradictory digital and offline practices of grassroots media and social movement groups, such as the Indignados, #BlackLivesMatter, Idle No More, 2LGBTQ+, and #MeToo. These projects develop not just alternative media frames and counter-publics but also activist media practices that attempt to re-appropriate the exploitative structures of capitalist social media platforms.
This groundbreaking work examines how a broad array of anti-capitalists, women, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC), and 2LGBTQ+ people are contesting interlocking systems of capitalism, gender oppression, racism, colonialism, and heteronormativity. Transformative Media offers new insights into the challenges and contradictions behind the scenes of some of the world’s most exciting and controversial social movements.
Scholars and students of media and communications, social movements, feminist media, intersectionality, and alternative media will find this innovative, forward-looking study invaluable, as will media and social activists.