Streaming through ‘the Trump Era’: Alternatives to the Right Now in Media Advocacy

• In Event: Seeing Through Trump

Abstract

This paper unpacks a series of media interventions that were produced and circulated during the time period discursively constructed as the “The Trump Era.” It examines the conditions under which alternative media successfully challenge or reproduce ahistorical and parochial media frames. Livestreams for example are ambivalent: they present compelling citizen-produced, real-time evidence of historical processes and resistance to them. But these broadcasts also depend on a never-ending spectacular present that can discourage historical or transnational analysis. This empirical account draws on the author’s own media advocacy including his ejection from a Trump rally by South Carolina police, attacks on protesters during the Trump inauguration, organizing with international students against the travel ban, and the alt-right rally in Charlottesville. The paper considers what these forms media activism contributed to public education on the global intensification of border imperialism, carceral states, militarized policing and other historical processes beyond the “Trump Era” framing.

Author

• Chenjerai Kumanyika, Rutgers U - School of Communication and Information