Media and Communication Activism
This book series grapples with recurring issues facing practitioners, teachers, students, and scholars of social movement communication. It also explores emancipatory practices that build culturally resonant, richly networked, empowering communication systems.
Core Themes
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Power
How do social movement communicators surface and dismantle media and communication inequalities between genders, races, classes, and geographic regions?
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Practices
How can emancipatory media and communication processes and strategies contribute to empowering social justice groups and collectives internally and externally?
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Rights
How can human rights platforms integrate information and communication rights, e.g., digital rights, technological sovereignty, security, freedom from surveillance, and more?
Publications
Today, media play a central convening role in political, economic, social, and cultural life. In response, we envision paperback volumes accompanied by e-books that introduce scholars, social practitioners, and practitioners-in-training to the fundamentals of media and communication activism.
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Media Activism, Artivism & the Fight Against Marginalisation in the Global South: South-to-South Communication
2023
Colonialism and neo-colonialism have left fragmented relationships between Global South peoples. South-to-South Communication describes how communication scholars and practitioners, media activists, “artivists,” and members of civil society sharing their different resources and skillsets can focus on restoring South-to-South relations. Authors Andrea Medrado and Isabella Rega argue that media activism (particularly digital activism) and art-ivism can fight marginalisation in different Global South contexts. The authors offer a thick description of media activist and artivist initiatives in Latin America (Brazil) and Africa (Kenya). The book captures moments when stories from plural Souths intertwine and transform each other, featuring as tools for movement building.
Photo by Andrea Medrado
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Communicative Justice in the Pluriverse: An International Dialogue
2022
Essential for students and scholars, this volume examines communicative justice from the perspective of the pluriverse, arguing that communicative justice can facilitate key pluriverse goals of environmental, cognitive, sociocultural, sociopolitical, and political economic justice. Editors Joan Pedro-Carañana, Eliana Herrera-Huérfano and Juana Ochoa Almanza first introduce the pluriversal framework using it to explain how unequal power relations limit the possibilities of communication activism; they map the challenges and difficulties faced by activists and communities, as well as the ways that communities and movements have confronted power structures through discourse and material action. In subsequent chapters, contributors describe their successes and limitations in creating new structures to promote the right to and future of communicative justice, their experiences of resistance and transformation in the Global South—Bolivia, Ecuador, India, Malawi—and collaborations between the continents of Latin America and Africa. Additional chapters provide notable studies from the Global North—Japan, Spain, and the United Kingdom—that defy hegemonic models.
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Indigenous Media Activism in Argentina
2022
Experimenting with a solidarity-based approach to research, Francesca Belotti explores the media practices adopted by Indigenous radio and television stations in Argentina after the passage of a 2009 law promoting media pluralism. Belotti bases her findings on extensive interviews with media practitioners from different Indigenous populations and regions in Argentina. She describes how Indigenous media practices contribute to defending and recovering both ancestral territories and cultures, in a decolonial effort that brings media practitioners to negotiate between indigenizing media, assimilating mainstream logics, and coping with practical constraints.
Photo by Sara Salome
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Contesting Austerity and Free Trade in the EU: Protest Diffusion in Complex Media and Political Arenas
2020
In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, waves of contentious protest against austerity and free trade agreements spread across Western as well as Eastern Europe. Scholar Julia Rone shows that far from an automatic spontaneous process, protest diffusion is highly complex, its success or failure impacted by the strategies and practices of key political players, bottom-up activists, intellectuals as well as trade unions, political parties, NGOs, and mainstream media.
Photo by Michael Kappeler/dpa/Alamy Live News
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Beyond Prime Time Activism: Communication Activism and Social Change
2019
Organizer Karen Jeffreys and sociologist Charlotte Ryan draw on their ongoing collaboration to provide students, practitioners, and researchers with an accessible introduction to media and communication activism. Using two statewide coalitions as cases, Beyond Prime Time Activism describes contemporary media and communication practices coupled with practical tools crafted over decades of social movement engagement. This book is ideal for anyone interested in how social movements navigate communication and media inequalities.
Editors Q + A
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Claudia Magallanes Blanco
Claudia Magallanes Blanco is Professor of Humanities at Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla Mexico where she co-founded the masters' in Communication & Social Change. A social justice scholar-activist, she has worked with collectives and organizations engaged with community and indigenous communication for more than 15 years. Her research centers on the participatory diagnosis, evaluation, and planning of indigenous and community media and communication projects.
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Alice Mattoni
Alice Mattoni is Associate Professor of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna, Italy. Her research focuses on how media - digital and otherwise - intersect with street protests and social movements. With European Research Council Funding, she is Principal Investigator of BIT-ACT, a project that investigates how civil society actors across the globe create and use digital media to fight corruption.
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Charlotte Ryan
Former labor and community organizer, Charlotte Ryan is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University of Massachusetts Lowell. She conducts community engaged research with Rhode Island activists and coordinates the Media Research Action Project archives.
Why a series on Media and Communication Activism?
The 21st century manifests deep, and in cases, widening inequalities between hemispheres, races, generations, genders, and classes. Predictably, constituencies marginalized in social, political, and economic life find themselves equally marginalized in communication arenas—marginalized unless they organize proactively.
While simple universalities regarding communication activism are unhelpful, media and communication activists organizing to challenge communication inequalities do share challenges worth attention. For instance, digital media conflate traditional distinctions between mediated and non-mediated communication confounding prior understandings of alternative and community media. Independent communicators now use technologies and commercial social platforms they do not control. This raises new challenges vis-à-vis digital access and surveillance, and the need to expand our understanding of digital rights, technological sovereignty, and emancipatory communication. It also raises new opportunities to develop emancipatory practices that build on movements’ strengths as culturally resonant, richly networked, multi-faceted communication systems. This is what this series hopes to share.
What types of books will the series publish?
We envision paperback volumes with e-books that introduce scholars, social practitioners and practitioners-in-training to the fundamentals of communication activism in a time when media play a central convening role in political, economic, social, and cultural life.
The series will adopt three complementary formats—core monographs, edited volumes, and focus volumes. Core monographs are single or co-authored introductory guides that tackle recurring issues while noting regional variation. Edited volumes will address regional variations in more depth while enhancing and extending learning regarding challenges raised in core texts. Focus volumes are usually shorter (40,000-50,000 words, references included); they tackle one or more series themes but focus on a limited number of cases linked to a specific geographical area.
What do authors need to submit?
We invite brief (2-3 pp.) statements of interest that fall within the series scope. We review these and ask selected submissions to prepare a book proposal according to Routledge’s guidelines and submit this along with 2 completed chapters. Full proposals are peer-reviewed according to standard university press practice via the series editors and external referees.
What should statements of interest include?
Short summary (150–word)
Short author biography, history of movement engagement (if relevant), contact info
Book aims, audience and purpose (how the book fits with the series’ mission)
Length estimate (40,000–80,000 words): Focus (40,000–50,000 words), monograph, or edited volume (80,000 words)
Estimated delivery date of completed manuscript
Have a book project in mind?
We welcome enquiries; please get in touch!