Dick Gregory and Activist Style: Identifying Attributes of Humor Necessary for Activist Advocacy

Activist capitals in network societies: Towards a typology for studying networking power within contemporary activist demands

Network societies are characterized by social media, media that are supposed to level out power hierarchies, making political participation more inclusive and equal. By developing a typology for studying networking power within activist demands in network societies, such technooptimistic/deterministic assumptions are questioned. This typology is based on Bourdieu’s conceptual framework of socia...

An Activist Model of Democracy

The focus of this paper is that actual political systems do not appear to satisfy the property of convergence to an electoral center that is often predicted by formal vote models. The key theoretical idea is that the convergence result need not hold if there is an asymmetry in the electoral perception of the “quality” of party leaders (Stokes 1992). The average weight given to the perceived qua...

Subway: Activist Performance through Mediation

Subway is a participatory multi-located activist art project. It builds on the mediation of a dance performance by breaking a video apart into its image frames; creating a photo app in Android to re-use these frames as guides for a frame-by-frame reenactment; and finally reassembling the collected images into a new video. Through the affordances of digital and mobile media, it allowed participa...

Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy

Screen and song celebrate social justice movements that protested in the streets when they were convinced that existing institutions and their normal procedures only reinforced the status quo. Many rights have been won in democratic societies by means of courageous activism — the eight hour day, votes for women, the right to sit at any lunch counter. Yet contemporary democratic theory rarely re...

Toward an Activist Political Theory