Online Activism In Latin America

This book brings together academic and activist work on community media, feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous perspectives to digital activism, including Free and Open Communication in Latin America. The essays in this collection speak to major changes over the past decade that are reshaping digital media uses and practices. The case studies presented here question many commonly held assumptions around global media ownership, sustainability, and access relevant to countries beyond Latin American contexts.

Online Activism in Latin America examines the innovative ways in which Latin American citizens, and Latin@s in the U.S., use the Internet to advocate for causes that they consider just. The contributions to the volume analyze citizen-launched websites, interactive platforms, postings, and group initiatives that support a wide variety of causes, ranging from human rights to disability issues, indigenous groups’ struggles, environmental protection, art, poetry and activism, migrancy, and citizen participation in electoral and political processes. This collection bears witness to the early stages of a very unique and groundbreaking form of civil activism culture now growing in Latin America.

Demonstrates the power of embodied and digital networks in confronting neoliberal sociopolitical regimes in the Americas

To understand the creative fabric of digital networks, scholars of literary and cultural studies must turn their attention to crowdsourced forms of production, discussion, and distribution. Digital Encounters explores the influence of an increasingly networked world on contemporary Latin American cultural production. Drawing on a spectrum of case studies, the contributors to this volume examine literature, art, and political activism as they dialogue with programming languages, social media platforms, online publishing, and geospatial metadata. Implicit within these connections are questions of power, privilege, and stratification. The book critically examines issues of inequitable access and data privacy, technology’s capacity to divide people from one another, and the digital space as a site of racialized and gendered violence. Through an expansive approach to the study of connectivity, Digital Encounters illustrates how new connections – between analog and digital, human and machine, print text and pixel – alter representations of self, Other, and world.

This edited collection presents original and compelling research about contemporary experiences of Latin American movements and politics in several countries. The book proposes a theoretical framework that conceptualises different mediation processes that emerge between cyberdemocracy and the emancipation practices of new social movements. Additionally, this volume presents some Latin American practices and experiences that are autonomously and by using self-management–creating other identities and social spaces on the margins of and against the neoliberal system through the use of digital technology. This book will be of great interest to scholars of media and social movements studies as well as of contemporary politics.

These are uncertain times in Latin America. Popular faith in democracy has been shaken; traditional political parties and institutions are stagnating, and there is a growing right-wing extremism overtaking some governments. Yet, in recent years, autonomous social movements have multiplied and thrived. This book presents voices of these movement protagonists themselves, as they describe the major issues, conflicts, and campaigns for social justice in Latin America today. Latin America Bureau, a London-based, independent organization providing news and analysis on the region, spoke to people from fourteen countries, from Mexico to the Southern Cone. The book captures the voices indigenous activists, fighting oil drilling in their homelands; mothers from favelas seeking justice for their children killed by police; opponents of large-scale mining projects; independent journalists working, at great personal risk, to expose corruption and human rights violations; women and LGBT people confronting violence and discrimination; and students demanding their right to a free, universal and high-quality education system. Though their locations and causes are disparate, these people and their movements share learning and activism, and their cooperation helps to link the movements across national borders. Voices of Latin America is essential reading for students, travelers, journalists—anyone with an interest in social justice movements in Latin America.

Performance Constellations maps transnational protest movements and the dynamics of networked expressive behavior in the streets and online, as people struggle to be heard and effect long-term social justice. Its case studies explore collective political action in Latin America, including the Zapatistas in the mid-’90s, protests during the 2001 Argentine economic crisis, the 2011 Chilean student movement, the 2014–2015 mobilizations for the disappeared Ayotzinapa students, and the 2018 transnational reproductive rights movement. The book analyzes uses of space, time, media communication, and corporeality in protests such as virtual sit-ins, flash mobs, scarfazos, and hashtag campaigns, arguing that these protests not only challenge hegemonic power but are also socially transformative. While other studies have focused either on digital activism or on street protests, Performance Constellations shows that they are in fact integrally entwined. Zooming in on protest movements and art-activism in Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, and putting contemporary insurgent actions in dialogue with their historical precedents, the book demonstrates how, even in moments of extreme duress, social actors in Latin America have taken up public and virtual space to intervene politically and to contest dominant powers.

This book is the first to comprehensively analyse the political and societal impacts of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in a region of the Global South. It evaluates under what conditions some Latin American governments and people have succeeded in taking up the opportunities related to the spread of ICTs, while others are confronted with the pessimist scenario of increased, digitally induced social and democratic cleavages. Specifically, the book examines if and how far the spread and use of new ICT affected central aims of democratic governance such as reducing socio-economic and gender inequality; strengthening citizen participation in political decision making; increasing the transparency of legislative processes; improving administrative processes; providing free access to government data and information; and expanding independent spaces of citizen communication. The country case and cross-country explore a range of bottom-up driven initiatives to reinforce democracy in the region. The book offers researchers and students an interdisciplinary approach to these issues by linking it to established theories of media and politics, political communication, political participation, and governance. Giving voice to researchers native to the region and with direct experience of the region, it uniquely brings together contributions from political scientists, researchers in communication studies and area studies specialists who have a solid record in political activism and international development co-operation.