Alternative and Activist New Media and the Social Movement Repertoire of Contemporary Student Organizers in College

• In Event: 68.031 - "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised": Contested Terrain, Student Activism, and Racial Campus Climates

Abstract

This paper presents data from a 2-year multi-sited ethnographic study of a multi-campus social movement organization of Black and Brown college students in Florida, collectively known as the Dream Defenders. Building upon resource mobilization perspectives and new social movement theories, I use Lievrouw’s (2011) concepts of mediated mobilization and culture jamming to frame the alternative and activist new media practices of contemporary college student organizers. My findings delimit a tactical repertoire across four discrete and overlapping conceptual domains, which include occupation and agitation, power building, civic demonstration, and political engagement. Each conceptual category includes an arrangement of tactical methods and organizing practices enacted through a dynamic combination of on-the-ground and new media projects.

Author

• Charles Harold Frederick Davis, University of Pennsylvania