A social movement is a loosely organized effort by a large group of people to achieve a particular goal, typically a social or political one. This may be to carry out a social change, or to resist or undo one. It is a type of group action and may involve individuals, organizations, or both. Social movements have been described as "organizational structures and strategies that may empower oppressed populations to mount effective challenges and resist the more powerful and advantaged elites". They represent a method of social change from the bottom within nations.
Alternative media are media sources that differ from established or dominant types of media in terms of their content, production, or distribution. Sometimes the term independent media is used as a synonym, indicating independence from large media corporations, but this term is also used to indicate media enjoying freedom of the press and independence from government control. Alternative media does not refer to a specific format and may be inclusive of print, audio, film/video, online/digital and street art, among others. Some examples include the counter-culture zines of the 1960s, ethnic and indigenous media such as the First People's television network in Canada, and more recently online open publishing journalism sites such as Indymedia.
Judith Stefania Donath is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, and the founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. She has written papers on various aspects of the Internet and its social impact, such as Internet society and community, interfaces, virtual identity issues, and other forms of collaboration that have become manifest with the advent of connected computing.
Henry Jenkins III is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He also has a joint faculty appointment with the USC Rossier School of Education. Previously, Jenkins was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities as well as co-founder and co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has also served on the technical advisory board at ZeniMax Media, parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks. In 2013, he was appointed to the board that selects the prestigious Peabody Award winners.
Justice for Janitors (JfJ) is a social movement organization that fights for the rights of janitors across the US and Canada. It was started on June 15, 1990, in response to the low wages and minimal health-care coverage that janitors received. Justice for Janitors includes more than 225,000 janitors in at least 29 cities in the United States and at least four cities in Canada. Members fight for better wages, better conditions, improved healthcare, and full-time opportunities.
Benjamin Mako Hill is a free software activist, hacker, author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and The Official Ubuntu Book.
Anne McCarty Braden was an American civil rights activist, journalist, and educator dedicated to the cause of racial equality. She and her husband bought a suburban house for an African American couple during Jim Crow. White neighbors burned crosses and bombed the house. During McCarthyism, Anne was charged with sedition. She wrote and organized for the southern civil rights movement before violations became national news. Anne was among nation's most outspoken white anti-racist activists, organizing across racial divides in environmental, women's, and anti-nuclear movements.
Frances M. Beal, also known as Fran Beal, is a Black feminist and a peace and justice political activist. Her focus has predominantly been regarding women's rights, racial justice, anti-war and peace work, as well as international solidarity. Beal was a founding member of the SNCC Black Women's Liberation Committee, which later evolved into the Third World Women's Alliance. She is most widely known for her publication, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female", which theorizes the intersection of oppression between race, class, and gender. Beal currently lives in Oakland, California.
David Naguib Pellow is Dehlsen Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously he was Professor, Don Martindale Endowed Chair, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His area of specialisation include issues concerning environmental justice, race and ethnicity, labour, social protest, animal rights, immigration, free trade agreements, globalization, the global impacts of the high tech industry in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere.
The 2007 MacArthur Park rallies were two May Day rallies demanding amnesty for undocumented immigrants which occurred on May 1, 2007, at MacArthur Park, in Los Angeles.
"The whole world is watching" was a phrase chanted by anti-Vietnam War demonstrators as they were beaten and arrested by police outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Cybersectarianism is the phenomenon of new religious movements and other groups using the Internet for text distribution, recruitment, and information sharing.
VozMob or Mobile Voices/Voces Móviles is an open-source "mobile media project that supports immigrant and low wage workers in the Los Angeles area in the documentation of their own stories and communities." It is "specifically aimed at those on the dark side of the digital divide." It enables people with cellphone access to send content to an internet site, and to communicate to a larger audience.
Presente.org is the largest online advocacy group for Latin American immigrants in the United States. It was co-founded by journalist Roberto Lovato and artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez in 2009 in order to "amplify the political voice of Latin@s" across the country and to help offer sustainable and stable standards of living for Latino immigrants whose political representation has been largely overlooked within the contemporary American society.
Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good. Forms of activism range from mandate building in a community, petitioning elected officials, running or contributing to a political campaign, preferential patronage of businesses, and demonstrative forms of activism like rallies, street marches, strikes, sit-ins, or hunger strikes.
Online social movements are organized efforts to push for a particular goal through the use of new communications and information technologies, such as the Internet. In many cases, these movements seek to counter the mainstream public, claiming there is a wrong that should be righted. Online social movements have focused on a broad range on social and political issues in countries all around the world.
Tourmaline is an American artist, filmmaker, activist, editor, and writer. She is a transgender woman who identifies as queer. Tourmaline is most notable for her work in transgender activism and economic justice, through her work with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Critical Resistance and Queers for Economic Justice.
Dalida María Benfield is a media artist, researcher, and writer. In Benfield's research-based artistic and collective practices, she produces video, installation, archives, artists' books, workshops, and other pedagogical and communicative actions, across online and offline platforms. She is currently faculty in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Visual Arts program, and was a Research Fellow and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (2011–2015).
Marisa Morán Jahn, also known as Marisa Jahn is an American multimedia artist, writer, and educator based in New York City. She is a co-founder and president of Studio REV-, a nonprofit arts organization that creates public art and creative media to impact the lives of low-wage workers, immigrants, youth, and women. She teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a lecturer, Teachers College of Columbia University, and The New School. Jahn has edited three books about art and politics.
The Algorithmic Justice League (AJL) is a digital advocacy non-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 2016 by computer scientist Joy Buolamwini, the AJL uses research, artwork, and policy advocacy to increase societal awareness regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in society and the harms and biases that AI can pose to society. The AJL has engaged in a variety of open online seminars, media appearances, and tech advocacy initiatives to communicate information about bias in AI systems and promote industry and government action to mitigate against the creation and deployment of biased AI systems. In 2021, Fast Company named AJL as one of the 10 most innovative AI companies in the world.
