Reimagining Communication: Action

Michael Filimowicz, Veronika Tzankova, Michael Filimowicz, Veronika Tzankova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351015219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Médias numériques

As a part of an extensive exploration, Reimagining Communication: Action investigates the practical implications of communication as a cultural industry, media ecology, and a complex social activity integral to all domains of life.

The Reimagining Communication series develops a new information architecture for the field of communications studies, grounded in its interdisciplinary origins and looking ahead to emerging trends as researchers take into account new media technologies and their impacts on society and culture. The diverse and comprehensive body of contributions in this unique interdisciplinary resource explore communication as a form of action within a mix of social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. They emphasize the continuously expanding horizons of the field by engaging with the latest trends in practical inquiry within communication studies. Reflecting on the truly diverse implications of communicative processes and representations, Reimagining Communication: Action covers key practical developments of concern to the field. It integrates diverse theoretical and practice-based perspectives to emphasize the purpose and significance of communication to human experience at individual and social levels in a uniquely accessible and engaging way.

This is an essential introductory text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, along with scholars of communication, broadcast media, and interactive technologies, with an interdisciplinary focus and an emphasis on the integration of new technologies.

1

Reimagining Activism as Combative

Billie Murray

Speaking Truth To Power™ was an epic waste of time and energy. Power already knows the truth; that’s why it spends so much time and resources trying to suppress it.

Screw speaking truth; it’s time to start talking smack to power instead.

(Tweet from political cartoonist Mike Flugennock @flugennock, October 4, 2018)

At its most basic, activism is understood as any practice that involves direct, vigorous action in support of or opposition to a particular cause or issue. There are as many theoretical understandings of activism as there are practices of activism. Frey and Carragee (2007) tell us that “literally thousands of books have been written about activism theory and practice” listing close to fifty of those citations, and that was over a decade ago. In their more recent volume, they add subdivided lists of scholarship on media activism and specific cause-based activisms – lists adding hundreds more individual citations (Frey & Carragee, 2012). Despite this extensive work, these lists are still likely an incomplete picture of the scholarship, as research on “activism” sometimes avoids the word altogether in favor of terms such as social movement or collective organizing. However, Kahn and Lee (2011) argue for “activism as the key lens through which we understand politics, democracy, and social change” (p. 1), and so I frame my arguments here according to that term, while also including some reference to the others.

It might seem that there would be little else to add to such a robust conversation about activism; however, that is my task – to reimagine activism and to challenge prevailing conceptions of activism in communication studies. In what follows, I will, of course, not be able to review even a modest amount of the thousands of texts on activism theory and practice. So, I would ask the reader’s forgiveness as I condense what I see to be the key understandings of activism in our field’s vast number of works on the subject into two tropes. These tropes will serve as a useful (though unavoidably incomplete) starting point for reimagining activism, particularly in a moment of increased activist organizing and resistance to racism, nationalism, fascism, sexism, and other “isms” worldwide. This evolving context, I argue, necessitates an expanded understanding of activism as combative.

The arguments presented here are drawn from my research as a rhetorical scholar-activist who explores how various publics respond to instances of hate and fascist organizing in their communities. Since 2014, I have worked with diverse publics including anti-racist organizations, anti-fascist groups, and unaffiliated people organizing online and in public spaces of protest to combat hate in communities across the United States (Murray, 2016b). I have utilized both rhetorical field methods (Endres, Senda-Cook, & Middleton, 2011; McKinnon, Asen, Chávez, & Howard, 2016) and communication activism (Frey & Carragee, 2007; Frey, Pearce, Pollock, Artz, & Murphy, 1996) in these spaces as both an intervention and a mode of inquiry in order to answer questions about relationships among rhetorical protest, activism, and public space. In addition to analyzing accounts from my fieldwork and activism at protest actions, I have compiled and analyzed artifacts from media accounts of actions that I was unable to attend. The case study developed here draws specifically on anti-fascist organizing online and in public spaces of protest as a heuristic for understanding activism as combative.

This chapter will proceed by identifying two common tropes of activism – as persuasive and as nonviolent – followed by examples from anti-fascists’ combative tactics that will serve as provocations to expand our understandings of activism in our contemporary moment. This leads to two conclusions. First, that reimagining activism involves exploring a multitude of tactics and opening up avenues for understanding how they can work in concert to effect social change. And second, that communication scholars have much to offer other disciplines’ approaches to understanding activism (as well as anti-fascism). Such a reimagining is of paramount importance if we are to contribute to the ever-changing terrain of activism and interdisciplinary scholarship.

Activism as Persuasive

Although a basic search for the term “activism” reveals slightly varied definitions, the focus on direct and vigorous action is ubiquitous. Activism is often associated with public protests and social movement organizing, with additional considerations of the role of art, media, and dialogue. One can find foci on embodiment or the “performance” of politics or on democratic participation widely understood. Other foci have included tactics such as letter writing, pamphleteering, phone banking, and petitioning various powers for redress. What all of these tactics have in common is a focus on activism as a persuasive practice – to engage in activism is to work to convince certain audiences to support a particular ideology or a particular policy.

This focus on the persuasive nature of activism is partly due to the influence of rhetorical studies of social protest in our discipline. Edited volumes such as Morris and Browne’s (2013) Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest compile decades of studies that provide clear evidence of rhetorical studies’ influence on our understanding of activism as persuasive. Some of the earliest works in our field involved a functional approach to understanding social movement rhetoric that focused quite heavily on persuasion (Simons, 1970; Stewart, 1980). In their extensive summary and critique of early social movement rhetoric, Cox and Foust (2013) argue that, “critics had fashioned a conceptual vocabulary assigning rhetoric a central role in social change” (p. 85). However, this singular focus became too limiting as activist practices and rhetorical studies evolved. Such evolutions in the field led us to be careful not to understand rhetorical studies of activism as focused solely on persuasion. Much of the more recent work in rhetoric focuses quite appropriately on the meaning-making, constitutive, and consequential effects of rhetoric, not solely on its persuasive nature. However, it is clear that the early studies of movements still continue to influence our perceptions of activism, in the field and outside of it. The idea is that, at its core, activism should be audience-centered and persuasive.

When thinking about activism as persuasive, then, it seems important to think about who is being persuaded. Who is the audience? Activism can involve persuading the state, whether a federal, state, or local governmental power, to adopt, enforce, or reject a particular policy. Activists work to persuade these power holders to enact state-sponsored solutions to a dizzying array of public problems. The most common examples could include: labor movements that organized to have the state pass laws regarding child labor or workers’ rights; the Civil Rights Movement’s focus on ending state-sponsored segregation and protecting voters’ rights; or the Women’s Liberation Movement’s work to persuade the state to pass legal protections for women with regard to marriage, health care, and sexual violence. More contemporarily, LGBTQ activists have used forensic, persuasive efforts in the U.S. legal system resulting in the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) that expanded marriage rights.

Such activisms and their associated activists, of course, have never been solely focused on persuading the state. In their research on pro- and anti-choice activists, Palczewski and Harr-Lagin (2017) argue that activists may operate outside of existing power structures such as the state, and that, “the social is moved not because the establishment reacts, but because of interactions between nonestablishment agents” (p. 130). Activists working to persuade non-state audiences may seek to convince others to raise their awareness about oppressions affecting them or others, or to get involved in activist practice, among other goals. Such persuasion involves many communicative tactics such as consciousness-raising groups, public speeches, media activism, and other forms of public dissemination work.

In his book Rhetoric for Radicals, Del Gandio (2008) argues that activists’ “ideas are circulated among our own communities and are often absent from the wider sphere of public talk. … Basically, there is a communicative gap between our efforts and the public’s reception of those efforts” (Del Gandio, 2008, p. 2). This reinforces an understanding of activism as persuasive and audience-centered. Although he is careful to talk about rhetoric as more than just persuasion, Del Gandio identifies clear persuasive goals that every activist should adopt, including dealing with the media and public speaking, among others.

Although I have separated out these persuasive audiences for analytical purposes here, it is important to note that activists often, if not always, address multiple audiences and use a variety of persuasive tactics. Occupy activists provide a particularly compelling example as they used various communicative tactics over the course of their occupations around the world. They called for state action and also built communities of people committed to “doing democracy.” Such tactics have been adopted by subsequent activists, such as those associated with Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. These tactics include non-hierarchical deliberative decision-making groups, dissemination of messaging across mainstream, independent, and social media platforms, physical occupations of public spaces, and street protests (Murray, 2016a). A list of activisms related to any number of causes that do this persuasive work for multiple audiences could likely go on for pages. The key point here is that understanding activism as persuasive has been central to how scholars theorize about activism and activists and influences how people understand what activism is (and is not) in the public sphere.

Understanding activism as persuasive is directly connected to the tactic of speaking truth to power. A commitment to this tactic draws on the idea that, if activists can persuade audiences to see the truth of a situation – how people are hurt by particular policies, how they would be better protected by other policies, how everyone should be treated equally and justly – then power holders would use their power to make change. An activist’s job is to speak the truth (persuasively) and hold power accountable – the very root of deliberative democracy. This is a tactic that many scholars, activists, and other publics have accepted as central to activist organizing, and with good reason. Showing an audience the “truth” of a particular injustice is often necessary, as we are oftentimes ignorant of the oppression we ourselves or others are suffering. In those situations, speaking truth to power, or being persuasive, is of great importance.

However, this approach can be limited in its effectiveness because it adheres too closely to a transmission model of communication in which the solution to a problem is simply more transmission of information or “truth.” Speaking truth to power is rarely enough to ensure systemic change. As Bowen (1963a) argued during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, some citizens and office holders were “not likely to be won over to the [Black] civil rights cause by any means of persuasion” (p. 11). The problem activists often face is not the need to transmit more truth, but the need to counter and disrupt centuries of complex and imbricated rhetorics that construct and reify injustices, inequalities, and oppressive power structures – a far more difficult task. As the case study in the final section will discuss, persuasive activism does work in particular contexts, but can be more effective in assuring systemic change when reimagined as working in concert with other activisms – including combative activism. However, it is necessary first to discuss a second trope of activism that appears in and outside of the field – activism as nonviolent.

Activism as Nonviolent

What much of the focus on activism as persuasion does is presuppose a commitment to nonviolent modes of communication as the primary (or perhaps only) avenue to social change. Nonviolent persuasion is a cornerstone of democratic practice in the liberal humanist tradition. A commitment to peaceful expression is so ubiquitous in our field and in broader publics’ understandings of ethical activism that it is rarely questioned. Even those who support more disruptive forms of communication, such as protest or civil disobedience, stop short of supporting violence of any kind, even symbolic violence. In DeLuca and Peeples’s (2002) extensive analysis of the violence during the ‘Battle of Seattle,’ they state that:

both establishment voices and nonviolent activists denounced the violence, especially the symbolic violence of the anarchists. (By symbolic violence, we mean acts directed toward property, not people, and designed to attract media attention.) The dominant response lamented the violence as drowning out the message of the nonviolent protesters.

(p. 138)

Although DeLuca and Peeples only focused on this one event, a cursory review of media coverage and general public opinion about violent tactics, even in support of just causes, reveals similar reactions time and again. This is, of course, understandable, as most of us have been taught from a young age that violence is not how you solve problems and is unethical in nearly every communicative context.¹

Unquestioning commitment to nonviolence appears in the field’s literature on activism as well, particularly in the copious amount of literature on dialogue as a mode of public problem-solving (e.g., Barge & Little, 2002; Black & Wiederhold, 2014; Norander & Galanes, 2014; Phillips, 2011). In his influential work, Speaking into the Air, John Durham Peters (2001) argues that, “dialogue has attained something of a holy status. It is held up as the summit of human encounter, the essence of liberal education, and the medium of participatory democracy” (p. 33). A dialogic approach privileges personal narratives, civility, and conversation as tactics for speaking truth and overcoming differences, thus leading to social change.

In their work on promoting deliberative democracy through dialogue, Jovanovic, Steger, Symonds, and Nelson (2007) argue that their work with the Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation Project sought to discover if the ‘promise of dialogue would result in a viable method to positively address our community’s ills’ (p. 69). Specifically in this case, they focused on the ills wrought by the racially and politically motivated massacre of five activists by the Ku Klux Klan in collusion with local law enforcement in 1979. This example, and many others, indicates that dialogue is held by many in our field as a remedy for even the most heinous of community conflicts and injustices.

Despite a nearly ubiquitous commitment to nonviolence via dialogue in the field of communication, there are some critiques of this mod...