Consider the examples of social and political activism we discussed in class. How did digital interfaces and environments facilitate and change and affect issues like the Saudi driving ban and the #metoo movement? What other movements and communities work to utilize digital literacies in order to advocate for change, express ideas, or open conversations on sociocultural issues? How can we learn more about digital affordances and constraints by tracing translatios of specific social or political issues through various material, visual, and multimodal media? How can we learn more about the interfaces and environments of digital communication by tracing translatios across various social online platforms, too?
- Choose whether you would prefer to work individually or with a small collaborative team of 1-2 colleagues.
- Choose one social issue or movement from the CPP3 post or posts on Focal Topics. I’m open to any idea you have here, so follow your heart. 🙂
- Research! You’ll want to scour the internet to examine how and when this issue is discussed and circulated through various online environments like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitch, YouTube, Discord, MeWe, Wikipedia, etc. Are activists using memes? Hashtags? Videos? Also, you should consider the material and embodied forms of this movement or issue as well. Research how people have used protests and marches, legal actions like civil suits, or other forms of public and embodied demonstration and consider the relationship between IRL advocacy and digital activism. Ultimately you and your team will locate 5-7 translatio examples in at least 3 different online environments to construct a larger analysis of how digital literacies can and are used to circulate ideas and make social change.
- Once you’ve gathered your translatio examples, you’ll compose an analysis as a written blog post that MUST substantively address the following questions/requirements:
- How does each different environment or platform offer specific affordances and constraints to writers attempting to make social change?
- Who, from a critical literacy perspective, is empowered or disempowered by each different mode and each different environment?
- How do digital translatios of the social issue, movement, or community compare to IRL material and embodied activism? Do digital literacies and environments help or hinder this issue? How?
- What does all this tell us about digital and multiliteracies? What does all this tell us about how change is made in virtual spaces? Why does this matter?
- Analysis should be 2,000 to 4,500 words
- Once your project draft is complete, we’ll submit our analysis and begin to think about how we can best participate in the conversation on our chosen focal topics as media producers and digital activists! 😀
English 213 