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Full-Text Articles in International Relations
Communication, Class And Concentric Media Practices: Developing A Contemporary Rubric, Todd Wolfson, Peter N. Funke
Communication, Class And Concentric Media Practices: Developing A Contemporary Rubric, Todd Wolfson, Peter N. Funke
Government and International Affairs Faculty Publications
Understanding class as a process of self-making in relation to a particular, historical form of capitalism, in this article we argue that media and communication (from face-to-face and old mediums such as radio to internet-powered tools) must be conceptualized as an emerging structural dimension for class formation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia, a community-based media and communications infrastructure and a network of organizations across the region, we develop a conceptual approach we call concentric practices, which provides us with a framework of how contemporary class formation is occurring through the use of media and …
Building Rhizomatic Social Movements? Movement-Building Relays During The Current Epoch Of Contention, Peter N. Funke
Building Rhizomatic Social Movements? Movement-Building Relays During The Current Epoch Of Contention, Peter N. Funke
Government and International Affairs Faculty Publications
This article investigates the movement building dynamics of contemporary social movement milieus (such as particular protests, social forums or occupations). It develops the concept of the “relay” to introduce four ideal-type movement building relays understood as distinct movement milieus: clustering relay, networking relay, organizing relay, and transforming relay. Each ideal-type captures different points on a continuum of increasing movement building and thus for generating commonalities, shared understandings and identities, mobilizations and strategies. Focusing on what I call the current “rhizomatic movement epoch,” which ranges from roughly the Zapatistas to the recent occupy-type protests, the relay framework can provide a larger …
The Global Social Forum Rhizome: A Theoretical Framework, Peter N. Funke
The Global Social Forum Rhizome: A Theoretical Framework, Peter N. Funke
Government and International Affairs Faculty Publications
This work draws on Deleuze and Guattari's image of the ‘rhizome’ to develop a framework for mapping and understanding the global social forum process and its implications for the broader global left. The image of the rhizome is insightful for analytically accentuating the nature and workings, as well as the challenges and contemporary shortcomings, of the social forum process and more generally the broader global movement(s). Thriving on multiplicity and thus lacking a dominant core or main axis, the social forum-as-rhizome emphasizes the multi-connectivity and heterogeneity of this process, which has no central actor, issue, strategy, or ideology, beyond the …