Megan Boler, Occupy 2012 and Beyond
http://www.themarknews.com/articles/7934-occupy-2012-and-beyond

Stick It to the Man: How the Web Spurs Political Change
Here are 10 instances where people combined activism and social networking to spark change
By Ian Paul | PC World | 25 January 12
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/photo-video/3332679/stick-it-man-how-web-spurs-political-change/

January 20, live interview “Occupy Protests,” KCBS News, San Francisco
CBS Radio News Desk KCBS AM & FM Radio

Costa Concordia: Italian cruise disaster satire speaks to rapid pace of comedy about tragedy, Vinay Menon
January 27, 2012
http://www.thestar.com/living/article/1122007–costa-concordia-italian-cruise-disaster-satire-speaks-to-rapid-pace-of-comedy-about-tragedy

Megan Boler
Year in Ideas: Twelve months of protest and a new lexicon
National Post, December 29, 2011

Megan Boler
‘Occupy’ instigator laments lack of spirit in Canada
CTV News, November 26, 2011

Megan Boler
Occupy’s alternative social, political model not ‘self-sustainable’
National Post, November 25, 2011

Megan Boler
Can protest survive un-Occupied?
London Free Press, November 15, 2011

Megan Boler
Interview: Anonymous hacker group threat to launch cyber-attack against City of Toronto
Global News, November 13, 2011

January 31, 2012
Bridging the Gender Gap in the News: Public Talk & Panel Discussion Panelists: Shari Graydon, Informed Opinions; Megan Boler, Professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education; Kathy English, Public Editor, Toronto Star; Esme Fuller-Thompson, Professor, Sandra Rotman Chair in Social Work

February 9, Teacher’s College, Columbia, New York, invited talk

April 13, Invited Panelist, Arts and Activism Conference, SUNY Buffalo http://genderin.buffalo.edu/GAB.shtml

Keynote, “Fostering Civic Engagement: Revisiting the Role of the University and Aesthetics as a Language of Possibility,”  May 20-21,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, hosted by Saint Joseph’s University and Barnes Foundation.

Here’s some of the media appearances, and below, an intro to those who will also be updating our research on Youth Engaging Social Media & Social Movements (funded by SSHRC for 2010-2013).

Megan Boler
Occupy Canada protests: Media braces for the worst, while protesters show kinder, gentler, Canadian version
Huffington Post, October 18, 2011
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/10/18/occupy-canada-protests-media_n_1016908.htmlMegan Boler

‘Wall Street is ook onze straat’
De Standaard, October 17, 2011 http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=UG3H5F2TMegan Boler

Interview as protesters arrested in Liberty Park at Occupy Wall Street protests
CTV Sunday October 16  http://watch.ctv.ca/news/latest/wall-st-protest/#clip550605Megan Boler

CTV BNN October 14, Interview on Occupy Wall Street movement
http://en.video.sympatico.ca/index.php/en/video/home/1/featured-content/1/celeb-gossip/1/occupy-bay-street-10-14-11-1035-am/1218722289001

…and the research teamwill commence posting here the notes we’ve been sending via various communications as our new team assembled this Fall 2011 and events unfolded over the last month.  Welcome Brad Evoy, Rhon Teruelle, and Jamila Park!

• “Children, youth and media”. Panel Discussion with Bronwen Low, Krys Verrall, and Sara Grimes, and Megan Boler, Center for Media and Culture in Education, OISE/UT.   Friday September 30, 4 to 6 pm
• Mobility Shifts Conference, New School University, New York, October 15, 2011

Boler in the Media:
Megan Boler
Media displays social media double standard (Audio Interview)
CBC Radio – Airplay, August 17, 2011

Megan Boler
UK Social Networks boomerang
All Africa, August 13, 2011

Megan Boler
U.K. riots reveal social media double standard
CBC News, August 10, 2011

Research and Publications: This summer we have been making headway designing our survey to commence my 3-year funded SSHRC Research Project, “Social Media in the Hands of Young Citizens: evolving forms of participatory democracy.”  Dr. Ian Reilly and I are just finishing an essay for publication titled “Satire and Social Change: The Rally to Restore Sanity and the Future of Politics”, and Kelly Ladd and I are finishing up a paper intended for First Monday on “Women Make Vlogs”, summarizing our research into the gender politics and experience of women vloggers on YouTube.

The Summer Institute in Film: Megan Boler – Networking Dissent

May 17, 2011, 2pm-4pm

Megan Boler presents a talk on  “Networking Dissent: Digital Publics Taking the Streets” as part of Digital Activism & The Environment: York University’s Summer Institute in Film.

Admission is free and all are welcome.

An affiliate faculty member in the Knowledge Media Design Institute, Department of Theory & Policy Studies at the OISE, University of Toronto, Boler is editor of Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times and author of Democratic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, Disturbing Silences.

The 2011 Summer Institute in Film: Digital Activism and the Environment focuses on the theory and practice of digital activism in relation to issues of environmental sustainability. Through lectures, seminars, hands-on workshops and collective projects, the institute will investigate contemporary practices of environmental media activism within a broader historical and critical context of social-change cinema.

In February, joined a non-profit Media Delegation to Havana, Cuba–met with dozens of people working in media, technology, culture and film throughout Havana–amazing, learned *so* much about Cuba on the brink of much change. My “Report on Havana” almost complete!

Now headed to American Ed Research Assoc. in New Orleans where I will participate in 5 sessions, including The John Dewey Symposium;  Reimagining Critical Hope: Situated Perspectives Across North-South Contexts (a panel that will include lovely South African colleagues and my former colleague Graham Smith now CEO Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi in New Zealand); Reverence, Listening, and Humor in Education and Informal Learning and Sociable Media in Children’s Culture.

End of April, to UC Santa Cruz for first interview for HistCon book project, with Hayden White, renowned historiographer and semiotician, and key founder of HistCon in late 1970s.

Last major research trip will be again to UC Santa Cruz in June, to attend Donna Haraway’s retirement party and for our book team to conduct interviews with HOC professors including Donna Haraway and Jim Clifford.

Tomorrow–a small keynote at the Worldviews Pre-Conference, an event dedicated to building bridges between journalists and academics!

Finally, great news this week–was awarded a SSHRC 3-year grant to study Youth Civic Engagement through Social Media!

Nov 11 Opening Event: Henry Jenkins and Corynne McSherry, “Supporting the DIY Citizen”
http://epresence.kmdi.utoronto.ca/1/watch/859.aspx

DIY Citizenship Conference: Sessions held in CCF (all plenaries, and one panel during each concurrent session)

Nov 12: http://hosting.epresence.tv/MUNK/1/watch/198.aspx

Nov 13: http://hosting.epresence.tv/MUNK/1/watch/200.aspx

Nov 14: http://hosting.epresence.tv/MUNK/1/watch/199.aspx

Other Concurrent Sessions:
http://itube.ischool.utoronto.ca/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#folder={%22ID%22%3A%2283e5a623-06d6-4172-bc14-23469bbba492%22%2C%22Name%22%3A%22DIY%20Citizenship%22%2C%22Role%22%3Anull}

Twitter Archive: http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/diy10

Western Tech High School Student Videos and blogposts:

1. Hack space DIY conference
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ9IkvYHBhw

2. What is DIY citizenship to you?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XexymRaMKlw

3. Women’s representations online
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zl_CGr9VU

blog Youth Journalists @DIY http://diycitizenship.com/youthjournalists

Finally, here is the concluding text from my Plenary talk at DIY which I had to cut for time: “Despite Stewart and Colbert denying the Internet’s role in mobilizing 400,000 people to travel to D.C. to rally for Sanity, Malcolm Gladwell’s critique is relevant to the rally’s outcome.  As he writes, “Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?”

Gladwell is talking specifically about the weak ties of online social networks. However, from the extensive evidence of ongoing counterpublics engaged in follow-up political engagement to the Rally—such as the Facebook site one finds postings to date every few minutes with ongoing political debates, countless other online sites and blogs and within TV and news culture such as Jon Stewart’s interview by Rachel Maddow on November 11–it is clear to me that Gladwell makes again the error of too strong a distinction between on- and offline activism which my own and others’ research confirms to be increasingly inaccurate.

So I leave you with these questions, and one final clip intended to reflect the creative diversity of “ironic citizens,” which might be promising save their embrace of “moderation” which raises many political concerns in the current climate, and the fact that rally-goers by and large refuse an identification as “political” or activist—despite the fact that they traveled in many cases thousands of miles to express criticism of news media such as FOX.

• What sense do we make of [thus far leaderless](DIY?) massive civic engagement catalyzed by political satire?
• What kind of citizens/subjects are we, “made” through the confluence of popularized target audience in combination with net/grassroots bodies taking to the streets?
• What is the significance of a populist public desire for a new, creative politics under a pluralist banner of ‘moderation’?

The last clips I share reflect the spectrum of what seems possible through this paradoxical form of coming together within the empty square of irony that is neither about fixed meaning nor apathy, but a plurality that defies summary: [final clip—btw, some of the clips now up on YouTube Never been to Rally Before; Why Did you Come to Rally?]

Invited Plenary Speakers

#DIY10

http://www.utoronto.ca/csus/Conferences.html

A watershed moment! Political satire catalyzes fans to mobilize in the nation’s Capitol and demand Sanity in Politics.

Through our interviews we hope to document counter-evidence to those who claim watching The Daily Show causes cynicism and produces slacktivists–see my column on this topic:

Changing the World, One Laugh at a Time: The Daily Show and Political Activism

Stay tuned!

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