[Air-L] [ecrea] New Book: Feminist Activism and Digital Networks

[Adam Fish]

New Book: Technoliberalism and the End of Participatory Culture in the
United States



By Adam Fish



Palgrave MacMillan



This new book examines whether television can be used as a tool not just
for capitalism, but for democracy. Throughout television’s history,
activists have attempted to access it for that very reason. New
technologies—cable, satellite, and the internet—provided brief openings for
amateur and activist engagement with television. This book elaborates on
this history by using ethnographic data to build a new iteration of
liberalism, technoliberalism, which sees Silicon Valley technology and the
free market of Hollywood end the need for a politics of participation.



Three-part interview with Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of
Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern
California, about Technoliberalism and the End of Participatory Culture.



Part 1:

http://henryjenkins.org/2017/04/what-ever-happened-to-the-promise-of-participatory-television-an-interview-with-adam-fish-part-one.html



Part 2:

http://henryjenkins.org/2017/05/what-ever-happened-to-the-promise-of-participatory-television-an-interview-with-adam-fish-part-two.html



Part 3:

http://henryjenkins.org/2017/05/what-ever-happened-to-the-promise-of-participatory-television-an-interview-with-adam-fish-part-three.html





Chapters Include:



Introduction: Liberalism and Video Power



Histories of Video Power



Liberalism and Broadcast Politics



Corporate Liberalism and Video Producers



Technoliberalism and the Origins of the Internet



Technoliberalism and the Convergence Myth



Silophication of Media Industries



Neoliberalism and Terminal Video



Toward the Beginning of a New Participatory Culture



Review:



“Adam Fish's ambitious book is at once empirically and theoretically
incisive; it charts the rise and fall of 'technoliberalism' as it confronts
generation after generation of hopeful new media and their relentless
incorporation within capital.  It is an essential and creative
clarification of the tangle of contemporary technologies, political
theories of freedom and equality, and the desires involved in making and
consuming media.” (Christopher Kelty, University of California, Los
Angeles, USA)



Publisher’s site: http://www.springer.com/gb/book/9783319312552#reviews





Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and senior lecturer
in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. He employs
ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and
political power interconnect. Using theories from political economy and new
materialism, he examines digital industries and digital activists.
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

On Sat, May 13, 2017 at 12:08 AM, Carpentier Nico <nico.carpentier at vub.ac.be
> wrote:

>
> "Feminist Activism and Digital Networks: Between Empowerment and
> Vulnerability”
>
> By Aristea Fotopoulou
>
> Palgrave Macmillan
>
>
> This book sheds new light on the way that, in the last decade, digital
> technologies have become inextricably linked to culture, economy and
> politics and how they have transformed feminist and queer activism. This
> exciting text critically analyses the contradictions, tensions and
> often-paradoxical aspects that characterize such politics, both in
> relation to identity and to activist practice. Aristea Fotopoulou examines
> how activists make claims about rights online, and how they negotiate
> access, connectivity, openness and visibility in digital networks. Through
> a triple focus on embodied media practices, labour and imaginaries, and
> across the themes of bodily autonomy, pornography, reproduction, and queer
> social life, she advocates a move away from understandings of digital
> media technologies as intrinsically exploitative or empowering. By
> reinstating the media as constant material agents in the process of
> politicization, Fotopoulou creates a powerful text that appeals to
> students and scholars of digital media, gender and sexuality, and readers
> interested in the role of media technologies in activism.
>
> Table of Contents
>
> 1) Introduction: Conceptualising Feminist Activism and Digital Networks
>
> 2) Women’s Organisations and the Social Imaginary of Networked Feminism:
> Digital and Networked by Default?
>
> 3) The Paradox of Feminism, Technology and Pornography: Value and
> Biopolitics in Digital Culture
>
> 4) From Egg Donation to Fertility Apps: Feminist Knowledge Production and
> Reproductive Rights
>
> 5) Space, Locality and Connectivity: The End of Identity Politics as We
> Know It?
>
> 6) Epilogue: Looping Feminist Threads
>
>
> Endorsements
>
> "How are new forms of political subject and political practice possible?
> The focus of cultural studies for decades, this question acquires new
> urgency in the digital era with its radically new possibilities for acting
> together and in view of each other. Aristea Fotopoulou¹s exciting book
> explores, across diverse and imaginatively selected case studies, the
> potential for feminist and queer activists to establish new ground and, in
> the process, change our vision of what politics might be. Highly
> recommended.”
> (Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
> And author of "Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after
> Neoliberalism")
> "What do feminism and queer activism mean in an era when digital
> technologies are so intimately entangled with cultural, economic and
> political life? In Feminist Activism and Digital Networks, Aristea
> Fotopoulou gives us an original take on this question, steering a careful
> course between celebration and despair, and offering nuanced discussions
> of contemporary digital biopolitics from alt porn to fertility apps to
> anarcho-queer placed-based interventions.”
>
> (Rosalind Gill, City, University of London, UK)
>
> “Feminist Activism and Digital Networks is an urgently needed antidote to
> what Dr. Fotopoulou refers to as the invisibility of gender and sexuality
> as embodied practices in communication studies and social movement studies
> alike. Focusing on the lively and important forms of feminism occurring in
> digital networked cultures as spaces of tension and contradiction,
> possibilities and foreclosures, Dr. Fotopoulou brilliantly helps us
> understand the complex nature of activism and connectivity in contemporary
> feminist theory and activism. This book should be required reading for
> social justice classrooms.”
>
> (Carol Stabile, University of Oregon, USA,
> Managing Editor, Fembot Collective, Co-editor Ada: A Journal of Gender,
> New Media, and Technology)
>
> About the Author
>
> Dr Aristea Fotopoulou is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications,
> School of Media, University of Brighton, UK. She researches critical
> aspects of digital culture, emerging technologies and social change.
> Currently she writes about cultures, practices and subjectivities that
> relate to self-tracking and big data, from a feminist perspective.
>
> Publisher website: http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137504708
>
>
>
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