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Global Activism, Global Media

Global Activism, Global Media

Wilma de Jong | Martin Shaw | Neil Stammers

(2005)

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Book Details

Abstract

Radical political activist movements are growing all the time. Activist politics have come to influence 'mainstream' politics over fundamental issues such as trade, gender relations, the environment and war.

This book brings together activists and academics in one volume, to explore the theory and practice of global activism's relation to all forms of media, mainstream and otherwise. The contributors examine how global activism is represented in the mainstream press and explain the strategies that activists adopt to spread their own ideas.

Investigating Indymedia and internet activism, they show how transformations in communications technology offer new possibilities, and explain how activists have successfully used and developed their own media. Case studies and topics include the world social forums, an example of a campaign from the NGO Action Aid, a campaign strategy from an internet activist, Greenpeace and the Brent Spar conflict, the World Development Movement and representations in the mainstream press, the Independent Media Centre, transgender activism on the net, Amnesty International, Oxfam and the internet.

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Contents v
Introduction 1
Part I: Global Civil Society, Global Public Sphere and Global Activism 15
1. Networks of knowledge and practice: global civil society and global communications 17
2. Media and the global public sphere: an evaluative approach 34
3. Social movements and global activism 50
4. Between a political- institutional past and a communicational- networked future? 68
5. From Aldermaston marcher to internet activist 84
Part II: Global Activism and Mainstream Media 93
6. Dying for diamonds: the mainstream media and NGOs 95
7. The power and limits of media- based international oppositional politics 110
8. The World Development Movement 125
9. Peace activism and western wars: social movements in mass- mediated global politics 133
Part III: Global Activism and Activist Media 147
10. Activist media, civil society and social movements 149
11. If it leads it bleeds: the participatory newsmaking of the Independent Media Centre 165
12. Transgender activism and the net: global activism or casualty of globalisation 179
13. Bridging the gap: from the margins to the mainstream 194
14. Civil society organisations and the internet: the case of Amnesty International, Oxfam and the World Development Movement 208
Notes on the Contributors 223
Index 226