C4FCM Reading Group
This page is the future home of a reading group on social movement and civic media currently being organized by Sara Wylie, Karen Brennan and Benjamin Mako Hill. This page might ultimately be modeled after the page for the Free Software Reading Group held in the fall.
Goals
- Basic background into the recent history of the literatures on social movements (e.g., resources-based understandings, framing, etc.)
- Contextualize technological projects in the C4FCM about social movements using communications technologies
- Unpacking what we mean by social; we talk about civic, social and and such but it's not really clear what we mean
- Touching on the connection between social movements and corporations, particularly as it connects to media technologies
Suggested Sessions
Session 1: Introduction and how to think about social movements
Alinsky, Saul. 1971. Rules for radicals a practical primer for realistic radicals. 1st ed. New York: Random House.
Melucci, Alberto, and John Keane. 1989. Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. Temple Univ Pr.
Session 2: Social movements and corporations
Selznick, Philip. 1949. TVA and the grass roots : a study in the sociology of formal organisation. New York: Harper and Row.
Grefe, Edward, and Martin Linsky. 1995. The new corporate activism : harnessing the power of grassroots tactics for your organization. New York NY: McGraw-Hill.
Session 3: Social movements and new technology
Scott, James C. 1987. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press.
...more.
Session 4: New communications technologies design for activism and civic engagement
Rheingold, Howard. 2007. “Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement.” The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning -:97-118.
...more.
Session 5: What do we mean by social?
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
...some more methods related work on studying social movements.
Session 6: Final session
We'll decide the readings for the final session based on perceived holes or requests as the course goes on.
Other book Suggestions
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968. Rabelais and his world, Cambridge Mass.: M.I.T. Press.
Brandt, Allan. 2007. The cigarette century : the rise, fall, and deadly persistence of the product that defined America. New York: Basic Books.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gerlach, Luther P, and Virginia H Hine. 1970. People, power, change movements of social transformation. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Harding, Susan Friend. 2001. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Princeton University Press.
Melucci, Alberto. 1996. Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge University Press.