In the 1940s, it was 16 mm film. In the 1980s, it was handheld video cameras. Today, it is cell phones and social media. Activists have always found ways to use the media du jour for quick and widespread distribution. InsUrgent Media from the Front takes a look at activist media practices in the 21st century and sheds light on what it means to enact change using different media of the past and present. Chris Robé and Stephen Charbonneau's edited collection uses the term "insUrgent media" to highlight the ways grassroots media activists challenged and are challenging hegemonic norms like colonialism, patriarchy, imperialism, classism, and heteronormativity. Additionally, the term is used to convey the sense of urgency that defines media activism. Unlike slower traditional media, activist media has historically sacrificed aesthetics for immediacy. Consequently, this "run and gun" method of capturing content has shaped the way activist media looks throughout history. With chapters focused on indigenous resistance, community media, and the use of media as activism throughout US history, InsUrgent Media from the Front emphasizes the wide reach media activism has had over time. Visibility is not enough when it comes to media activism, and the contributors provide examples of how to refocus the field not only to be an activist but to study activism as well.

This anthology examines how activists have used media technology to effect social and political change from the 1940s to today. In the 1940s, it was 16 mm film. In the 1980s, it was handheld video cameras. Today, it is cell phones and social media. Activists have always found ways to use the media du jour for quick and widespread distribution. InsUrgent Media from the Front looks at activist media practices in the twenty-first century and sheds light on what it means to enact change using different media of the past and present. The term “insUrgent media” highlights the ways grassroots media activists challenge hegemonic norms like colonialism, patriarchy, imperialism, classism, and heteronormativity—while also conveying the urgency of this work. With chapters focused on indigenous resistance, community media, and the use of media as activism throughout US history, this anthology emphasizes the wide reach media activism has had over time.

The Department of Justice sought information on all who visited the DisruptJ20.org website for Donald Trump's inauguration. Undercover agents infiltrate BlackLivesMatter protests. Police routinely command bystanders to stop filming them by falsely claiming it is a crime. Agricultural states like Iowa, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming enact laws that criminalize the filming of factory farm cruelty while allowing other-the-human animal suffering to continue unabated. Dissent and poverty are increasingly criminalized by the state as precarity grows. Abolishing Surveillance offers the first in-depth study of how various communities and activist organizations are resisting such efforts by integrating digital media activism into their actions against state surveillance and repression and for a better world. The book focuses on a wide array of movements within the United States such as Latinx copwatching groups in New York City, Muslim and Arab American communities in Minneapolis, undercover animal rights activists, and counter-summit protesters to explore the ways in which government surveillance and repression impacts them and, more importantly, their different but related online and offline tactics and strategies employed for self-determination and liberation. Digital media production becomes a core element in such organizing as cell phones and other forms of handheld technology become more ubiquitous. Yet such uses of technology can only be successfully employed when built upon strong grassroots organizing that has always been essential for social movements to take root. Neither idealizing nor disparaging the digital media activism explored within its pages, Abolishing Surveillance analyzes the successes and failures that accompany each case study. The book explores the historically shifting terrain since the 1980s to the present of how historically disenfranchised communities, activist organizations, and repressive state institutions battle over the uses of digital technology and media-making practices as civil liberties, community autonomy, and the very lives of people and other-than-human animals hang in the balance.

The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society discusses media around the world in their varied forms—newspapers, magazines, radio, television, film, books, music, websites, social media, mobile media—and describes the role of each in both mirroring and shaping society. This encyclopedia provides a thorough overview of media within social and cultural contexts, exploring the development of the mediated communication industry, mediated communication regulations, and societal interactions and effects. This reference work will look at issues such as free expression and government regulation of media; how people choose what media to watch, listen to, and read; and how the influence of those who control media organizations may be changing as new media empower previously unheard voices. The role of media in society will be explored from international, multidisciplinary perspectives via approximately 700 articles drawing on research from communication and media studies, sociology, anthropology, social psychology, politics, and business.

This book illustrates a distinctive lineage of critical interventions in moving image culture and in the public sphere through the trajectories of a small number of film and video organizations established between the 1970s and the early 1980s in Western Europe and North America mainly by women and still operative today. The six case studies examined (Drac Màgic, Women Make Movies, Groupe Intervention Vidéo, Leeds Animation Workshop, bildwechsel, Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir) have maintained a discrete yet continuing presence within an audiovisual industry and a cultural system dominated by institutionalized and corporate forms of production and distribution. Their longevity – quite a rarity in the independent circuit – makes a strong case for the sustainability of feminist/LGBTQ media activism in the public sphere, in spite of its low-key profile. This volume will be of interest to academicians of history and communication studies, feminist and LGBTQ topics, and gender-related cinematic culture.

The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies gathers leading work by critical scholars in this burgeoning field. Redressing the lack of environmental perspectives in the study of media, ecomedia studies asserts that media are in and about the environment, and environments are socially and materially mediated. The book gives form to this new area of study and brings together diverse scholarly contributions to explore and give definition to the field. The Handbook highlights five critical areas of ecomedia scholarship: ecomedia theory, ecomateriality, political ecology, ecocultures, and eco-affects. Within these areas, authors navigate a range of different topics including infrastructures, supply and manufacturing chains, energy, e-waste, labor, ecofeminism, African and Indigenous ecomedia, environmental justice, environmental media governance, ecopolitical satire, and digital ecologies. The result is a holistic volume that provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of the current state of the field, as well as future developments. This volume will be an essential resource for students, educators, and scholars of media studies, cultural studies, film, environmental communication, political ecology, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Celluloid Democracy tells the story of the Korean filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors who reshaped cinema in radically empowering ways through the decades of authoritarian rule that followed Korea's liberation from Japanese occupation. Employing tactics that ranged from representing the dispossessed on the screen to redistributing state-controlled resources through bootlegging, these film workers explored ideas and practices that simultaneously challenged repressive rule and pushed the limits of the cinematic medium. Drawing on archival research, film analysis, and interviews, Hieyoon Kim examines how their work foregrounds a utopian vision of democracy where the ruled represent themselves and access resources free from state suppression. The first book to offer a history of film activism in post-1945 South Korea, Celluloid Democracy shows how Korean film workers during the Cold War reclaimed cinema as an ecology in which democratic discourses and practices could flourish.