Research Update 5/12

TITLE: Toward a genre theory of contemporary student organizing: An exploration of alternative and activist new media perspectives ABSTRACT:  Alternative and activist new media provide new ways and tools for contemporary college students to participate and engage in activism and social justice organizing. Relying on Lievrouw’s book on the subject, this paper explores mobile- and web-based media activist practices of millennial college-goers. Further, popular and scholarly conversations on college students and millennials are engaged to firmly situate a more pressing argument for 1) broadening understandings of student use of social media, and 2) reframing student organizing within the digitally-mediated contexts and experiences of  contemporary college and university life. Implications for future research and social justice organizing in college are discussed. TITLE: New media, culture jamming, and the college student reclamation of social justice in contemporary hip-hop ABSTRACT:  Lievrouw’s concept of culture jamming refers media in which images, sounds, and text are appropriated from popular culture for points of social and cultural critique, political commentary, and similar analyses. Using this framework, in tandem with Petchauer’s archetype of the hip-hop collegian, I present an ethnographic account of millennial college student organizing in the South. More specifically, I discuss hip-hop collegians (re)appropriation of contemporary hip-hop, as popular culture, in recombinant ways with new media, creating unique organizing and mobilizing practices. Implications for higher education research and social justice education in college are discussed. Without your support, these two proposals could not have been written. We look forward to updating you later this summer once we hear if our proposals have been accepted. Also, stay tuned for our forthcoming report this fall as well as more interview footage with the outstanding student organizers, the Dream Defenders. Principal Investigator & Executive Director activistmillennials.com