No. 21 - Sandra Jeppesen: Digital Movements: Challenging Contradictions in Intersectional Media and Social Movements

The past decade has seen an incredible increase in global social movements adopting a wide range of digital technologies to mobilize and represent the issues and images of their time. Social movement studies have only just begun to account for the use of social media in movements, and media and communication studies scholars are similarly asking how digital media are being adopted and adapted to support movements.

With the rise of the Arab and African Spring, Occupy, the Indignados, Black Lives Matter, MeToo, Standing Rock, and Idle No More, we have seen a profound shift in messaging, organizational forms, and digital media strategies emerging from an intensifying global network of interconnected social movements. No longer isolated causes, this network connects local issues to global movements, and marginalized groups from around the globe can connect to and organize with others at great distances. Connections are also built across issues in new forms of multi-issue organizing, often taking an intersectional perspective to reflect on how issues might shape, inform and impact each other. These can include, as in the list of movements above, causes related to generalizable issues such as corruption, austerity, and the banking crisis, which have been well researched, or related to the empowerment of marginalized, disadvantaged, excluded or oppressed groups such as women, Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) and LGBTQQIP2SAA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, Two-Spirit, asexual, and allies), shortened to LGBTQ+. These latter groups have not been as well studied in their communities of practice including mobilization of digital technologies for social change across intersectional shared issues.

About the author

Sandra Jeppesen
Sandra Jeppesen is Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies/Media Studies at Lakehead University Orillia, Canada (2010-present). In 2018, she was ZeMKI Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Bremen. As co-founder of the Media Action Research Group (MARG, mediaactionresearch.org), she researches with autonomous media and anti-authoritarian social movements from an intersectional LGBTQ+, feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist & decolonizing perspective. Funded by a five-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, MARG has conducted global interviews with grassroots media activists on issues of resources, collective memory and anti-oppression practices. As Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal (2007-2010), she was a member of the Collectif de Recherche sur l’Autonomie Collective (CRAC; Research Group on Collective Autonomy), which worked within ten anti-authoritarian groups and networks in Quebec to document and analyze their/our social movement and media activism. Currently Dr Jeppesen is a board member of the Research Centre for Sustainable Communities, and holds the Lakehead University Research Chair (LURC) in Transformative Media and Social Movements. Under the auspices of the LURC, she is partnering with the Orillia Native Women’s Group on a storytelling research project, which uses creative arts methods to better understand the importance of Indigenous women telling their stories in creating community and supporting healing and resilience. As part of a community knowledge mobilization strategy, she is working with local activists to develop a series of social justice workshops focusing on the recent transmedia hashtag activism and intersectional translocal protest movements #metoo, #IdleNoMore and #BlackLivesMatter. Under contract with UBC Press, Sandra Jeppesen is writing a book on Transformative Intersectional Media and Social Movements, due for publication in 2019.