Ephemeral Media, Persistent Action: Public Pedagogies of Collective Resistance

• Main Author: Weber, Jessica Ketcham
• Other Authors: Pirbhai, Reza
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: LSU 2010
• Subjects: English
• Online Access: http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-06182010-090736/

In Ephemeral Media, Persistent Action: Public Pedagogies of Collective Resistance, I argue that representations of contemporary activism against corporate globalization, as analyzed in three different sites of commercially-driven media textsnewspapers, film, and websitesteach people to move away from public forms of collective activism and towards privatized and institutionally-sponsored forms as part of the larger project of neoliberalism. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on the representations of, and responses to the representations of, two eventsthe protests against the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Washington in 1999 and the protests during the Republican National Convention in 2004 in New York Cityas moments that simultaneously capture the burgeoning movement in the United States against corporate globalization and the development of digital tools for citizen and social media. I analyze digital media interventions in these representations and give examples of how composition teachers might use these same digital tools and what I call an ethos of tactical ephemerality to encourage students to compose not just in response to, but in dialogue with, multiple and precarious publics and counterpublics.