Movement Media: In Pursuit of Solidarity

From newsletters and zines to hashtags and social media posts, social movements frequently generate and circulate media to define political goals, build solidarity, and articulate theories of change. These acts of media-making play a crucial role in developing relationships rooted in collective political visions across racial differences. Yet, in past and present movements, building solidarity across uneven race, class, and gender differences has often been a tenuous pursuit. How do social movements use media to create and sustain solidarity?

In Movement Media, Rachel Kuo assesses the possibilities and limitations of crafting solidarities across racialized differences through media-making processes and communications practices. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and ethnographic fieldwork, Kuo revisits key movements--Third World feminism, environmental justice, migrant justice, and police and prison abolition--to assess the mundane and less visible forms of movement building that help various groups navigate the politics of difference in theory and in practice. Kuo situates these movements alongside shifts in technological developments and the communication landscape, making the case that building and sustaining solidarity requires time and work to develop shared political analysis and practices.

As contemporary movements organize and struggle against the challenges of NGO-ization, neoliberal identity politics, private technologies, and liberal carceral reform--all of which seek to subsume and manage the efficacy of political organizing--Movement Media tells the important story of how communities build and sustain solidarity through media.

Rachel Kuo is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective and founding member of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. Her writing and commentary on race and politics has been published in several academic journals, including Journal of Communication; Media, Culture and Society; New Media and Society; Political Communication; and Frontiers: A Women’s Studies Journal. Kuo’s work has also been featured in The New York Times, CNN, NBC, NPR, and Teen Vogue.