#Eduresistance: a critical analysis of the role of digital media in collective struggles for public education in the USA

ABSTRACT

From Facebook-coordinated high-school walkouts to compelling Internet-based protest art that has accompanied recent teacher strikes, grassroots education activism in the USA has gone digital. Despite the proliferation of research on the mediatisation of education policy, few studies have explored the ways in which activists for public education engage with Web 2.0 technologies. This paper makes a contribution to this under-researched area by exploring selected activist accounts including Parents Across America, United Opt Out National, and the PS 2013 campaign in New York City. I draw on critical, feminist, and cultural studies theories of education and social movement media to analyse activist media practices in a policy and political milieu dominated by corporate media and neoliberal governance structures. The analysis reveals that progressive education activists strategically deploy digital media to amplify voice, build collective identity, and disseminate alternative knowledge to enable direct action. A situated analysis also reveals significant differences in activist media practice which are shaped by particular political histories and geographies. The paper concludes with a discussion about future lines of inquiry into the role of digital media in collective struggles for public education.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• education policy
• social movements
• community organising
• activist media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Nisha Thapliyal http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3081-6310

Notes

1 Scholarship in this area has been enriched by contributions from beyond the USA, UK, and Australia including South America, and south and east Asia.

2 The term social movement media should not be conflated with the term alternative media which tends to be used as a catch-all phrase to refer to citizen media, independent journalism, activist journalism, community media, and indigenous media. For an in-depth discussion of what constitutes alternative or radical media, see, for example, Downing (2003), Cox et al. (2010), and Rodriguez, Ferron, and Shamas (2014).

3 Urban public school teachers of course have been a key target of pro-market education reformers who have subjected them to an evergrowing barrage of positivist, quantitative evaluation measures in order to establish their lack of competence as well as accountability (see, e.g., Goldstein 2010; Weiner 2013; Naison 2014).

4 Occupy 2.0 secured greater mainstream media coverage in local radio shows as well as national news outlets such as Education Week, Mother Jones, The Nation, American Prospect, and even MSNBC’S The Cycle.

5 UOO secured a meeting with Education Secretary Arne Duncan during the 2012 Occupy Action in Washington DC (Johnson and Slekar 2014).

6 Critical scholarship has amply documented the tendency of social media to exploit free and voluntary labor for great profit and more broadly the ways in which the Internet platforms have facilitated the curtailment of the freedoms of citizens through surveillance and censorship (see, e.g., Fuchs 2011; Renzi 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Faculty of Education and Arts University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia [grant number 10.36171].