Social Justice Media: The Case of Occupy

 

by Dorothy Kidd on February 28th, 2015

A study of social justice media as used in the Occupy Movement by USF professor (and former MA board member) Dorothy Kidd. Media Alliance contributed to this essay.

Summary: “This article takes the Occupy movement as a case study, and examines its historical antecedents, composition of social actors, communications, repertoires and strategies of social change. My findings suggest that the Occupy movement was significant, not for its contribution to political change, but for its contribution to democratic communications. Occupy represented a new watershed in social justice communications, in which the movement itself directed its own media, reducing, for a time, the dependency of social justice groups on the dominant commercial media. Using a transmedia approach, beginning with the creation of communications commons in reclaimed public space, the Occupy movement converged many different social justice groups who employed a panoply of old and new communications repertoires. Although the movement itself has faded, its repertoire has been remediated in social justice movement communications practices throughout the world”

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