Intro — Rachel

Hi everyone!

I am Rachel a first-year grad student in the Comparative Media Studies program alongside Libby & Sultan (as Libby pointed out).  I interned and worked at a few media startups and a media conglomerate after college.  I studied history as an undergrad where I focused my research on the post-World War II Afro-Caribbean community in London. At MIT I work as a Research Assistant in the Global Media Technologies & Culture Lab led by Professor Lisa Parks in CMS.

I have experience working in grassroots organizing both from the diverse research I conducted on social movements in Central America, Western Europe, and personal experience.   I thought taking a course that examined social movements through a tech/civic media perspective would push me to explore new tools and strategies for designing media production & distribution systems (television/film) for Afro-Diasporic audiences.

After reading R. Kelly Garrett’s article, ‘Protest in an Information Society: A Review of Literature on Social Movements and New ICTs,’ I realized how I saw many of the tools and recommended strategies Garrett offered in his piece.  Namely when he discussed “opportunity structure” (favorable conditions to enable social movements) and “framing processes” (strategies around how to describe or challenge certain narratives about a movement).  “Opportunity structure” was synonymous with “using your privilege” and “framing processes” connected to assigning certain “spokesperson(s)” that would communicate the goals of the movement to press.

I read Alicia Garza’s piece when it was first published.  After talking with Dasjon during class about how much time passed since Garza wrote this piece, it seemed markedly unique in the way it positioned how three Black Queer women (Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi) founded the Black Lives Matter movement.  It reminded me how in the past Black queer actors often were erased from the official narrative (Bayard Rustin) despite the tremendous contributions they made to social movements (Rustin — Civil Rights Movement & the organizer behind the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom).

I look forward to learning from everyone over the next couple of months.