Media Action Research Group: toward an antiauthoritarian profeminist media research methodology

Abstract

The Media Action Research Group (MARG) is an antiauthoritarian, profeminist (antiracist, anticolonial, queer, trans and anti-capitalist) group of activist-researchers both inside and outside the university, studying autonomous social movement media activism in Canada and beyond. In this article we map a taxonomy of activist-research, illustrating how MARG brings together five specific methodologies—activist-led issue-based research, militant participatory ethnography, feminist community research, prefigurative antiauthoritarian feminist participatory action research (PAFPAR), and autonomous media research—to study how women, people of colour, queer and trans people, and Indigenous people in antiauthoritarian or anarchist-leaning social movements are using grassroots media to support and report on these movements. We find that although MARG set out to create an antiauthoritarian research-activist collective, we are restricted in some ways by the intensification of neoliberalism in the university institution. Nonetheless we are able to conduct transgressive research at the intersection between antiauthoritarian activism and the academy, producing three direct and immediate impacts: within social movements, within media activism, and within the university.

Keywords:

• Social movements
• feminism
• alternative/autonomous media
• prefiguration
• horizontalism

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the work of members of the MARG and CRAC collectives, past and present, in generating and discussing some of the methodological frames presented here.

Notes

1. The systemic assumption that everyone is heterosexual, and heterosexuality is the presumed norm in society, which leads to discrimination against non-heterosexuals.

2. Discrimination or oppression targeting transgender and transsexual people, where cis-sex or cis-gender refers to a person who identifies with the sex or gender, respectively, assigned at birth.

3. Discrimination against people with disabilities, including the assumption that everyone is able-bodied, and that being able-bodied is the presumed norm in society.

4. The mass removal of Aboriginal children from their families to be placed in foster care or put up for adoption (Fournier, Crey, and Neel 1997); see http://nbmediacoop.org/2015/06/09/pjilasi-mikmaki-surviving-the-sixties-scoop-audio/

5. https://pjilasimikmaki.wordpress.com/

6. See Edmonton Heritage Council: https://twitter.com/yegheritage/status/659067151618150400; and St. George’s Bay: https://www.facebook.com/St-Georges-Bay-Mikmaq-Nujioqoniik-141054435980538/

7. See http://www.mmnn.ca/2015/06/new-bilingual-mikmaqenglish-podcast-series-launched/

8. One of the co-authors of this article was a member of CRAC from 2008–2012, and although CRAC is no longer active, some collective members continue to work together on research and/or activism.