Activist New York

Activist New York surveys New York City's long history of social activism from the 1650's to the 2010's. Bringing these passionate histories alive, Activist New York is a visual exploration of these movements, serving as a companion book to the highly-praised Museum of the City of New York exhibition of the same name. New York's primacy as a metropolis of commerce, finance, industry, media, and ethnic diversity has given it a unique and powerfully influential role in the history of American and global activism. Steven H. Jaffe explores how New York's evolving identities as an incubator and battleground for activists have made it a "machine for change." In responding to the city as a site of slavery, immigrant entry, labor conflicts, and wealth disparity, New Yorkers have repeatedly challenged the status quo. Activist New York brings to life the characters who make up these vibrant histories, including David Ruggles, an African American shopkeeper who helped enslaved fugitives on the city's Underground Railroad during the 1830s; Clara Lemlich, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who helped spark the 1909 "Uprising of 20,000" that forever changed labor relations in the city's booming garment industry; and Craig Rodwell, Karla Jay, and others who forged a Gay Liberation movement both before and after the Stonewall Riot of June 1969. Permanent exhibition: Puffin Foundation Gallery, Museum of the City of New York, USA.

Only a decade ago, the notion that museums, galleries and heritage organisations might engage in activist practice, with explicit intent to act upon inequalities, injustices and environmental crises, was met with scepticism and often derision. Seeking to purposefully bring about social change was viewed by many within and beyond the museum community as inappropriately political and antithetical to fundamental professional values. Today, although the idea remains controversial, the way we think about the roles and responsibilities of museums as knowledge based, social institutions is changing. Museum Activism examines the increasing significance of this activist trend in thinking and practice. At this crucial time in the evolution of museum thinking and practice, this ground-breaking volume brings together more than fifty contributors working across six continents to explore, analyse and critically reflect upon the museum’s relationship to activism. Including contributions from practitioners, artists, activists and researchers, this wide-ranging examination of new and divergent expressions of the inherent power of museums as forces for good, and as activists in civil society, aims to encourage further experimentation and enrich the debate in this nascent and uncertain field of museum practice. Museum Activism elucidates the largely untapped potential for museums as key intellectual and civic resources to address inequalities, injustice and environmental challenges. This makes the book essential reading for scholars and students of museum and heritage studies, gallery studies, arts and heritage management, and politics. It will be a source of inspiration to museum practitioners and museum leaders around the globe.

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, government cutbacks, stagnating wages, AIDS, and gentrification pushed ever more people into poverty, and hunger reached levels unseen since the Depression. In response, New Yorkers set the stage for a nationwide food justice movement. Whether organizing school lunch campaigns, establishing food co-ops, or lobbying city officials, citizen-activists made food a political issue, uniting communities across lines of difference. The charismatic, usually female leaders of these efforts were often products of earlier movements: American communism, civil rights activism, feminism, even Eastern mysticism. Situating food justice within these rich lineages, Lana Dee Povitz demonstrates how grassroots activism continued to thrive, even as it was transformed by unrelenting erosion of the country's already fragile social safety net. Using dozens of new oral histories and archives, Povitz reveals the colorful characters who worked behind the scenes to build and sustain the movement, and illuminates how people worked together to overturn hierarchies rooted in class and race, reorienting the history of food activism as a community-based response to austerity. The first book-length history of food activism in a major American city, Stirrings highlights the emotional, intimate, and interpersonal aspects of social movement culture.

The Art of Activism is an all-purpose guide to artistic activism, combining the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change. With contemporary case studies and historical examples, chapters on cultural and cognitive theory, sections on what can be learned from unlikely sources like popular culture and marketing techniques, along with investigations into ethics and evaluation, explorations of the creative process and the importance of utopian thinking, and an attached workbook with over fifty exercises to practice, the co-founders of the Center for Artistic Activism take readers step-by-step through the process of becoming, or becoming even better, artistic activists.

Over the last four decades, new modes of communication have redefined people’s engagement with media: media audiences are now also makers, influencers, followers, gamers, trolls, and data subjects. This turbulent social and technological context has created new opportunities for expression and activism around the world. In this fully revised second edition, Leah Lievrouw considers the shift toward algorithmic media for political and cultural activism online – where data capture and big data analytics are not just tools for managing and moving people or information, but are themselves sites of creativity, connection, and contention. The book examines a range of events and developments: anti-facial recognition projects; open-source intelligence in citizen journalism; and new apps based on encryption and DIY local networks that support movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Alternative and Activist New Media charts the theoretical roots of contemporary internet-driven movements and provides a framework for understanding the changing face of protest in the age of algorithmic media. ​This timely new edition will be a useful addition to any course on digital activism and new media and society.​

Analyzing the confluence between coloniality and activist art, Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future argues that there is much to gain from approaching contemporary politically committed art practices from the angle of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial struggles. These struggles inspired a vast yet underexplored set of ideas about art and cultural practices and did so decades before the acceptance of radical artistic practices by mainstream art institutions. Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that art activism has been confined to a limited spatial and temporal framework—that of Western culture and the modernist avant-garde. Assumptions about the individual creator and the belated arrival of derivative avant-garde aesthetics to the periphery have generated a narrow view of “political art” at the expense of our capacity to perceive a truly global alternative praxis. Garrido Castellano then illuminates such a praxis, focusing attention on socially engaged art from the Global South, challenging the supposed universality of Western artistic norms, and demonstrating the role of art in promoting and configuring a collective critical consciousness in postcolonial public spheres. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives. Learn more at the Knowledge Unlatched website at: https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7166.

This study of alternative and activist media provides an introduction to alternative media theories, audiences and practices. It brings diverse voices and concepts from outside the commercial media world to the fore, enriching and challenging mass media. Illustrated with historical and current examples, from both a UK and international perspective, it also includes carefully constructed exercises and discussion topics based on case studies and available texts.Topics include the place of alternative media in a mass-media world; a history of alternative and activist media; media participation and consumption by marginalised audiences; the use of pirate and community radio, video and television by community and minority groups; fanzines and other small publishing ventures by individuals; the use of alternative media for explorations in design; the blurring of boundaries between alternative and mass media; and new technology and its possibilities for alternative media.

Winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary LGBTQ Nonfiction Award and the 2022 NLGJA Excellence in Book Writing Award. Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbriath Award for Nonfiction, the Gotham Book Prize, and the ALA Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award. A 2021 New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Longlisted for the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize. One of NPR, New York, and The Guardian's Best Books of 2021, one of Buzzfeed's Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2021, one of Electric Literature's Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2021, one of NBC's 10 Most Notable LGBTQ Books of 2021, and one of Gay Times' Best LGBTQ Books of 2021. "This is not reverent, definitive history. This is a tactician’s bible." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Twenty years in the making, Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and American AIDS activism In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, it took on the AIDS crisis with an indefatigable, ingenious, and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. They stormed the FDA and NIH in Washington, DC, and started needle exchange programs in New York; they took over Grand Central Terminal and fought to change the legal definition of AIDS to include women; they transformed the American insurance industry, weaponized art and advertising to push their agenda, and battled—and beat—The New York Times, the Catholic Church, and the pharmaceutical industry. Their activism, in its complex and intersectional power, transformed the lives of people with AIDS and the bigoted society that had abandoned them. Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members and rich with lessons for today’s activists, Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration—and long-overdue reassessment—of the coalition’s inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture. Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, explores the how and the why, examining, with her characteristic rigor and bite, how a group of desperate outcasts changed America forever, and in the process created a livable future for generations of people across the world.