This article examines the tensions, communal processes, and narrative frameworks behind producing collective racial politics across differences. As digital media objects, the Asian American Feminist ...Collective’s zine Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus and corresponding #FeministAntibodies Tweetchat responds directly to and anticipates a social media and information environment that has racialized COVID-19 in the language of Asian-ness. Writing from an autoethnographical perspective and using collaborative methods of qualitative discourse analysis as feminist scholars, media-makers, and interlocuters, this article looks toward the technological infrastructures, social economies, and material forms of Asian American digital media-making in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Strategies of Ambivalence Shaw, Vivian
Radical history review,
10/2020, Letnik:
2020, Številka:
138
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In recent years, Japan has witnessed the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, a rise in racist hate speech, and the reinterpretation of the constitution to enable state militarization. In response to ...these crises, a segment of Japanese activists has adopted antifa to bolster their ongoing participation in antinuclear, antiracist, and antiwar social movements. This intervention focuses on what the author calls liberal antifa. Informed by its vexed relationships to the Japanese New Left, liberal antifa in Japan attempts to encompass a broad spectrum of political positions including liberal, left-wing, and even right-wing activism. This intervention traces linkages between liberal antifa and the resurgence of protest after Fukushima, drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews to analyze opposition to fascism within multiple, overlapping social movements. The author also shows how liberal antifa borrows from transnational influences to blend radical and popular cultural practices in relation to music, fashion, art, and food.
Situated in the emergence of hate speech and anti-racism counter protest in Japan, this article poses two questions: why do activists enact exclusions while attempting to fight against social ...inequality, and how do interpretations of gender shape activists' understandings of anti-racism? This article explores three findings: activists conceptualize the risk of being targets of hate speech and abuse as both gendered and racialized; anti-racist activists interpret anti-racism as a practice of redirecting vulnerabilities - a practice that is, itself, gendered; and anti-racist activist communities struggle with ambivalence around masculinity and other "gender problems." Although gender functions as a key lens through which anti-racism is conceptualized, movements devoid of an intersectional feminist analysis encounter exacerbated difficulties in resolving internal problems such as sexual harassment. This article focuses on the theme of vulnerability, which is enmeshed with the vocabulary of gender. Through analyzing vulnerability, this article offers an ethnographic account to explain why the reproduction of inequalities persist, even within social justice movements that aim to promote equality.
The Digital Edge S. Craig Watkins; Alexander Cho; Andres Lombana-Bermudez ...
2018, Letnik:
4
eBook
How black and Latino youth learn, create, and collaborate online
The Digital Edge examines how the digital and social-media lives of low-income youth, especially youth of color, have evolved amidst ...rapid social and technological change. While notions of the digital divide between the “technology rich” and the “technology poor” have largely focused on access to new media technologies, the contours of the digital divide have grown increasingly complex. Analyzing data from a year‐long ethnographic study at Freeway High School, the authors investigate how the digital media ecologies and practices of black and Latino youth have adapted as a result of the wider diffusion of the internet all around us--in homes, at school, and in the palm of our hands. Their eager adoption of different technologies forge new possibilities for learning and creating that recognize the collective power of youth: peer networks, inventive uses of technology, and impassioned interests that are remaking the digital world.
Relying on nearly three hundred in-depth interviews with students, teachers, and parents, and hundreds of hours of observation in technology classes and after school programs, The Digital Edge carefully documents some of the emergent challenges for creating a more equitable digital and educational future. Focusing on the complex interactions between race, class, gender, geography and social inequality, the book explores the educational perils and possibilities of the expansion of digital media into the lives and learning environments of low-income youth. Ultimately, the book addresses how schools can support the ability of students to develop the social, technological, and educational skills required to navigate twenty-first century life.
This dissertation analyzes race, citizenship, and social movements after March 11, 2011 (3/11), when Japan suffered a triple disaster of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, tsunami, and reactor meltdowns at ...the Fukushima nuclear power plant. This project builds upon on a growing body of literature that documents the significance of 3/11 as a watershed event that significantly popularized protest in Japan. I focus on a subset of this political wave —a nationwide counter movement against racist hate speech, a social phenomenon in which ultranationalist Japanese networks continually target Zainichi Koreans, foreigners, and other racial/ethnic minorities. Data for this project was collected using ethnographic methods over a total of thirty-six months in Tokyo and Osaka between 2014 and 2018 and includes participant observation, in-depth interviews (n=60), and analysis of social media, news media, and other cultural artifacts, such as documentaries. This project is organized around two research questions. First, why do disasters trigger broader social and political contestations about race, social inequality, human rights, and inclusion? Second, in what ways do “post-disaster” politics reiterate, supplement, or disrupt existing modalities of discrimination and exclusion? I answer these questions through the concept of post-disaster citizenship, which describes how people make use of disasters to reconstruct meanings around social membership and citizenship, in this case, Zainichi Koreans and foreigners. I find that a segment of activists viewed their transition into anti-racist social movements as a natural outgrowth of their political “awakenings” after 3/11. In the absence of adequate responses from the state, these Japanese activists feel an urgent sense of responsibility to advocate for legal protections for vulnerable and/or marginalized people and to construct alternative sites of social inclusion. In attempting to reimagine the politics of obligation and protection, however, these activist communities can also inadvertently reproduce gender-based inequalities. This dissertation also documents the negotiations that arise when post-3/11 activists collaborate with local Zainichi Korean-led community networks. By examining these cases, I show the complexities of activists’ attempts to construct a shared vision of political recuperation amidst longstanding asymmetries of vulnerability and injury.
The Digital Edge S. Craig Watkins; Andres Lombana-Bermudez; Alexander Cho ...
12/2018
eBook
How black and Latino youth learn, create, and collaborate online The Digital Edge examines how the digital and social-media lives of low-income youth, especially youth of color, have evolved amidst ...rapid social and technological change. While notions of the digital divide between the "technology rich" and the "technology poor" have largely focused on access to new media technologies, the contours of the digital divide have grown increasingly complex. Analyzing data from a year‐long ethnographic study at Freeway High School, the authors investigate how the digital media ecologies and practices of black and Latino youth have adapted as a result of the wider diffusion of the internet all around us--in homes, at school, and in the palm of our hands. Their eager adoption of different technologies forge new possibilities for learning and creating that recognize the collective power of youth: peer networks, inventive uses of technology, and impassioned interests that are remaking the digital world. Relying on nearly three hundred in-depth interviews with students, teachers, and parents, and hundreds of hours of observation in technology classes and after school programs, The Digital Edge carefully documents some of the emergent challenges for creating a more equitable digital and educational future. Focusing on the complex interactions between race, class, gender, geography and social inequality, the book explores the educational perils and possibilities of the expansion of digital media into the lives and learning environments of low-income youth. Ultimately, the book addresses how schools can support the ability of students to develop the social, technological, and educational skills required to navigate twenty-first century life.
Activists had been using this hashtag for several days in late November 2016 to raise awareness of poverty and food insecurity throughout Japan. At its peak in 2012, the movement against nuclear ...energy drew crowds of 200,000, with activists occupying the streets and pavement in front of the prime minister's residence and the National Diet, the Japanese parliament, in Tokyo. Many activists turned to Noma as an opinion leader among what they saw as a sea of tepid media coverage and conspiracy theories slandering minorities on Twitter and other social media. Standing up for Koreans and other ethnic minorities In February 2013, Noma put out an appeal on Twitter in response to what he saw as an imminent threat: the nationalist group, Citizens' Association to Oppose Special Rights for Resident Koreans (Zaitokukai), was marching in Shin Okubo, the Koreatown of Tokyo. While capitalising on mounting geopolitical tensions in East Asia, this bellicose rhetoric evoked the social terror sparked by other disasters in Japan's past, such as the aftermath of the 1923 Kanto earthquake wherein rumours of espionage and other criminal mischief led to the massacre of 6,000 Koreans living in the greater Tokyo area. The disaster, the ongoing and unresolved problems of rebuilding in tsunami-affected areas, and nuclear energy more broadly, all sustain a shared sense of uncertainty about the future for many in Japan. Since 3/11, he has "felt a deep sense of remorse.
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