Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University
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Browsing Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University by Subject "Activism"
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Item Open Access Feminist Information Activism: Newsletters, Index Cards and the 21st Century Archive(2016-09-20) McKinney, Caitlin J.; Driver, Susan D.Feminist Information Activism: Newsletters, Index Cards and the 21st-century Archive develops an original approach to studying feminisms media infrastructures, focusing on U.S. lesbian feminism from the early 1970s to the present. The dissertation proposes the concept of feminist information activism, in which engagements with commonplace media facilitate access to marginalized information and networks through purposefully designed interfaces. Newsletter print culture and other activist-oriented information contexts such as bibliographic and indexing projects, and community archives, sought to unite feminist publics with difficult-to-find published materials. In each of these cases, activists worked to collect and parse large amounts of information that would make marginal lesbian lives visible, adopting various information management and compression techniques to do so. These tactics often created anxieties over the effects rationalization procedures might have on information that ultimately attempted to represent messy and politically complex feminist lives. To address these tensions, activists re-worked existing standards in information management through the use of new networks, the design of unique subject-classification schemes, and the appropriation of tools such as index cards and early computer databases. Chapter one investigates 1970s newsletter culture, drawing on a select print archive to argue that these documents imagined a mode of network thinking critical to feminist social movements prior to the web. Chapter two examines indexing and bibliography projects of the 1980s, tracing their critical appropriations of early database computing through interviews, archival research in these projects papers, and historical research on indexing standards gathered from late 20th-century instructional manuals. Chapters three and four draw out connections between these print forms and todays digital feminisms through a study of ongoing digitization practices at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Through interviews and observation with archives staff, and documentary research in organizational records, these chapters examine feminisms influence on the design and implementation of accessible digitization projects that counter accepted archival standards. Framed by the historical chapters on feminist print activism; this study of feminist digitization re-casts indexing and bibliographic projects of the 1980s, and newsletters of the 1970s as media histories that situate todays digital feminisms in a longer genealogy.Item Open Access This Project can be Upcycled where Facilities are Available: An Adventure Through Toronto's Food/Waste Scape(2015-08-28) Coyne, Michelle M.; Moore, PaulAt the intersection of food, regulations, and subjective experiences is a new way of understanding the intersection of wasted food—a new category of edibility. This project investigates the reasons for, and impacts of, politically-motivated dumpster diving and food reclamation activism in Toronto, Canada. The research incorporates ethnographic participant-observation and interviews with politically-motivated dumpster divers in Toronto, as well as that city’s chapter of Food Not Bombs. The project primarily asks how so much quality food/waste is thrown away and becomes, at times, available to be recovered, reworked, and eaten. My research constitutes a living critique of the hybrid experience of food and waste where the divisions between the two categories are not found in locations (the grocery store or dumpster), but rather in the circulations of actions and meanings that dumpster divers themselves re-invest in discarded edible food products. My research objectives are: (1) to document the experience of dumpster divers in Toronto as connected to a broader movement of food/waste activism around the world; (2) to connect this activism to discussions of food safety and food regulations as structuring factors ensuring that edible food is frequently thrown away; (3) to contextualize contemporary food/waste activism within a history of gleaning, and in relation to enclosure acts that have left Canada with no legal protections for gleaners nor recognition of the mutually beneficial social relation between gleaners and farmers; (4) to explore dumpster divers’ work as part of the circulation of urban culture within media networks. Ultimately, I isolate alternative gift economies as central to dumpster divers’ critique of industrial food distribution within the commodity systems of global capitalism. This gifting relation proves to be, in part, a nostalgic view of an idealized past. Nonetheless, the gifting relation becomes an ideal linked to broader anarchist communities that allows divers to create communal subject identities that exist outside of market relations, made global through communication networks of independent and self-published media. By connecting globally, the small-scale, local actions of Food Not Bombs chapters around the world allow surprisingly few individuals to spread a politic with the potential to impact beyond their limited political circles. This project is theoretically situated at the junction of studies of material culture, food and food waste, and new social movements; I connect political experience in local communities to the circulation of food and waste through urban environments and media networks. For the dumpster diver, edibility is delinked from purchase price and is instead imbedded in systems of power and active resistance.