Open mic poetry events are representative examples of a widespread and socially significant performance phenomenon--the relational and dialogic art and activism of the sustained encounter as a demonstration of the possibility for new social relations. Open mic performances center the pleasure of creating and sharing art and relationships in a manner that works against the value systems of capitalistic exchange and enterprise. I conduct an autoethnographic study of the Transpoetic Playground--a reoccurring open mic poetry event in Carbondale, Illinois. This study mixes performative writing, poetry, and personal narrative with the ethnographic methods of participation observation and interviewing in order to tell a story of an amateur performance poetry community and what it can teach about how to resist the constraints of contemporary socio-communicative relations.

In 2011, Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) was thrust into the Western media spotlight through the murder of LGBTIQ activist, David Kato Kasule, and the now-infamous “Kill the Gays Bill.” During the last six years, SMUG and its members have continued to fight oppressive Ugandan governmental systems and conservative leaders that have been instigated by U.S. evangelical fundamentalists, most notably Scott Lively. And while SMUG and its members have fallen out of the Western media spotlight since 2012, SMUG continues its social justice activism with and for LGBTIQ Ugandans on the ground, while also building transnational coalitions with other LGBTIQ organizations both within and beyond the borders of Uganda. In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which SMUG utilizes its website (sexualminoritiesuganda.com) as a site for transnational and translocal coalition-building for the sake of social justice activism. To understand the ways in which SMUG is engaging in LGBTIQ activism with nuance, I build a conceptual framework for my analysis through five constructs of critical intercultural communication: critical cosmopolitanism, transnational activism, the global-local dialectic, power, and identity. Critical cosmopolitanism, as conceptualized in Communication Studies by Miriam Sobré-Denton and Nilanjana Bardhan (2013), “is a world- and Other-oriented practice of engaging in deliberate, dialogic, critical, non-coercive and ethical communication. Through the play of context-specific dialectics, cosmopolitan communication works with and through cultural differences and historical and emerging power inequalities to achieve ongoing understanding, intercultural growth, mutuality, collaboration and social and global justice goals through critical self-transformation” (p. 50, emphasis in original). Through this definition, I also work with critical cosmopolitanism as conceptualized by Walter Mignolo (2000, 2010, 2012) and Gerard Delanty (2006, 2009). For Mignolo (2000), critical cosmopolitanism “comprises projects located in the exteriority and issuing forth from the colonial difference” (p. 724) as “an argument for globalization from below” (p. 745) that works to dislodge West-centric modes of thinking. Delanty (2006) extends this definition, as critical cosmopolitanism “seeks to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities” (p. 25). In this, critical cosmopolitanism is a project that asks us to consider the ways in which “diversality,” or “diversity as a universal project” (Mignolo, 2000, p. 743), can dislodge Western modernity, colonialism, imperialism, and globalization from above. To understand the ways in which SMUG is engaging in a critical cosmopolitan vision through its website, I examine for clues of transnational activism as a way of performing and engaging in critical cosmopolitanism through Bardhan (2011), Burgmann (2013), and Gledhill (2010). To complicate our understanding of transnational activism, I turn to the global-local dialectic, as conceptualized by Stuart Hall (1997). The global-local dialectic helps me to observe the ways in which SMUG is dislodging all-encompassing narratives that center globalization as a top-down-only mechanism that ceases all local particularities of culture from existing. Kraidy (1999, 2005) also helps me to investigate the ways in which the global and the local are always already present and in a dialectical tension in our postmodern and postcolonial world. To understand more about how these tensions function, I investigate the construct of power through sociologist Jonathan Hearn’s (2012), Theorizing Power. In it, he seeks to shift theorizing of power away from questions regarding what “we mean by power” to questions of “what do we have to bear in mind when studying power?” (p. 4). Through theorizing five oppositions associated with power—“(1) physical versus social power, (2) power ‘to’ versus power ‘over’, (3) asymmetrical versus balanced power, (4) power as structures versus agents, and (5) actual versus potential power” (p. 4)—Hearn helps me to complicate the ways in which power is observed and discussed in relation to SMUG, LGBTIQ Ugandans, Ugandan leadership, U.S. evangelism, and Western political involvement. Finally, I offer a conceptual framework for identity in critical intercultural communication research, including questions on how we theorize difference differently through John T. Warren’s (2008), “Performing Difference,” as well as offering a framework to understand cosmopolitan identity as constructed by Sobré-Denton and Bardhan (2013) and a framing for African queer sexualities through the works of Ugandan feminist scholars, Sylvia Tamale (2003) and Stella Nyanzi (2013). To address my research questions, I engaged in an ideological criticism (Foss, 2003, Hart & Daughton, 2005, Wander, 1983) of SMUG’s website to more fully understand the ideologies driving SMUG’s rhetorical choices. I chose to use ideological criticism as a methodological framework as it allowed me, the critic, to construct a critical framework with which to analyze a text. Ideological criticism also offered me the opportunity to bring critical rhetorical methods into conversation with critical intercultural communication constructs. Through this conceptual and methodological framework, I analyzed 110 screen shots of their website and all 54 articles included as content on their page over the course of 13 months. Through this process, I argue that SMUG is showing signs of a critical cosmopolitan vision in their website through their participation in peripheral partnerships and activism that speaks back to oppressive systems in ways that highlight globalization-from-below, as conceptualized by Walter Mignolo (2000, 2010, 2012). I also trouble the ways in which SMUG represents LGBTIQ Ugandans on the ground as I call for more intersectional representation that speaks more broadly to LGBTIQ Ugandan experiences in the everyday than SMUG is currently offering visitors. This dissertation research also highlights the difficulties of reading critical cosmopolitanism in one online mediated space, and that centering people and the relationships among people is critical when engaging in critical cosmopolitan research. I end this project with a call to critical intercultural communication scholars to offer more nuance around the representations of LGBTIQ people around the world that takes us beyond sensationalized subjects while also not erasing the devastating impacts of LGBTIQ hatred locally and globally.

The main purpose of this study is to understand the historicity of the dynamics of socio-economic changes and the characteristics of social and political mobilization in the case of progressive activists' ongoing search for new strategies of progressive urban community politics in Seoul, South Korea, after the historical conjuncture of democratization and neo-liberal globalization. This study is conducted through participant observation, interviews, and post-fieldwork historical research. By adopting the concept of "multiple-layeredness" as the underlying perspective, this study aims to capture the complexity and hybridity of past and recent socio-economic transformations. The progressive community activists are products of historically specific circumstances of state repression and radical social movements in the 1980s and the 1990s, and the influences of their past activist experiences are visible in their community activism. Historically, the state has been implicated in popular mobilizations for the national goals of economic development and democratization, which resulted in two-party domination in local politics. Under this unfavorable political condition, the community activists seek to acquire their places in public institutions through local elections and to organize grassroots resistance against local "growth machines" by mobilizing various social ties.

This thesis explores how the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon event impacts the people who coordinate and participate in it. I review museum catalogs to determine institutional representation of women artists, and then examine the Edit-a-thon as a vernacular event on two levels: national and local. The founders have a shared vision of combating perceived barriers to participation in editing Wikipedia, but their larger goal is to address the biases in Wikipedia’s content. My interviews with organizers of the local Eugene, Oregon, edit-a-thon revealed that the network connections possible via the Internet platform of the event did not supersede the importance of face-to-face interaction and vernacular expression during the editing process. The results of my fieldwork found a clear ideological connection to the national event through the more localized satellite edit-a-thons. Both events pursue the consciousness-raising goal of information activism and the construction of a community that advocates for women’s visibility online.

This thesis addresses the campaign of militant activism which Wales witnessed between 1963 and 1969. It demonstrates that the unprecedented period of violence was fuelled by both the contentious flooding of Cwm Tryweryn and crucially, the failure of Plaid Cymru to prevent the valley's drowning through constitutional means. By not taking passive and timely protest action, Plaid Cymru ensured that militancy, as predominately undertaken by Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru, became a feature of the Welsh geo-political landscape. Moreover, had the party taken a more sharpened approach during the earlier stages of the proposal, it is likely that the emergence of the so-called Free Wales Army, which campaigned along the lines of using 'propaganda against the Establishment', may well have been avoided. However, this is a view which is challenged by, among others, former members of the displaced community, who maintain that Plaid Cymru - and most notably its president - did all they could to prevent the Tryweryn Reservoir Bill becoming law. Nonetheless, the escalation in militant strategy came in response to the impending Royal Investiture of Charles Windsor as Prince of Wales. In retaliation, the authorities established the so-called Shrewsbury Unit. This was borne of an increasingly desperate attempt to apprehend those responsible, in order to ensure the safety of the Royal Party and the success of the ceremony. By considering the publicity conscious Free Wales Army, the thesis demonstrates that the group undertook one failed militant strike. It also establishes that the militant offensive undertaken by MAC comprised two distinct phases. The first in 1963 was predominately marshalled by Emyr Llywelyn Jones. The second period of hostilities, between 1966 and 1969, was orchestrated by John Jenkins; who critically, was a Sergeant in the British Army Dental Corps. This thesis seeks to reinstate the importance of the militant campaign in Welsh history, neither by judging it nor dismissing it, but by establishing the importance of these protests to both the nation's history and its cultural and political advance. It also establishes the detail of what happened, while seeking to tell the story in a balanced way, paying full attention to the perspective of the perpetrators and those actively engaged in their detection.

abstract: This dissertation discusses how Twitter may function not only as a tool for planning public protest, but also as a discursive site, albeit a virtual one, for staging protest itself. Much debate exists on the value and extent that Twitter (and other social media or social networking sites) can contribute to successful activism for social justice. Previously, scholars' assessments of online activism have tended to turn on a simple binary: either the activity enjoyed complete success for a social movement (for instance, during the Arab Spring an overthrow of a regime) or else the campaign was designated as a failure. In my dissertation, I examine a Twitter public-relations campaign organized by the New York Police Department using the hashtag #MyNYPD. The campaign asked citizens to tweet pictures of themselves with police officers, and the public did, just not in the way the police department envisioned. Instead of positive photos with the police, the public organized online to share pictures of police brutality and harassment. I collected six months of tweets using #MyNYPD, and then analyzed protestors' rhetorical work through three lenses: rhetorical analysis, analysis of literacy practices, and social network analysis. These analyses show, first, the complex rhetorical work required to appropriate the police department's public-service campaign for purposes that subverted its original intent; second, the wide range of literacy practices required to mobilize and to sustain public attention on data exposing police abuse; and third, the networked activity constituting the protest online. Together, these analyses show the important work achieved within this social justice campaign beyond the binary definition of successful activism. This project shows that by increasing our analytical repertoires for studying digital rhetoric and writing, scholars can more accurately acknowledge what it takes for participants to share experiential knowledge, to construct new knowledge, and to mobilize connections when engaging online in public protest. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

In Georgia, a country with a post-soviet past and a long path of geopolitical struggles that is transitioning into a liberal democracy, queer people remain as one of the most oppressed groups of the society. Despite the hostile environment, there are several openly queer activists who fight against the oppression on a daily basis. One of the battlegrounds for those fights has become Facebook, the social networking site that created another space for informational exchange and meaning construction during the interaction. The purpose of this research is to explore the use of Facebook by Georgian queer activists for their individual and community empowerment. The study deals with the concept of empowerment as the primary theoretical framework from the perspective of community phycology. With the help of a one-month netnographic observation of 10 queer activists on Facebook and interviews conducted with them, the study demonstrates the sense of empowerment that queer activists obtain through their use of Facebook. According to the activists’ accounts, Facebook increased possibilities for them to receive more information more easily and quickly, to express their opinions, negotiate their identities, engage in acts of resistance, organize the community and mobilize community members and their supporters. However, the use of Facebook is not a singlehanded process, as it has created new challenges that activists have to deal with, along with the fellow community members. Some of those challenges include increased cyberbullying, “slacktivism” (Morozov, 2011), issues of digital security and better-organized hate groups. The research adopts a phenomenological approach to explore the self-perceptions of the queer activists’ experiences, and it creates a basis for further research about studying the actual effects of Facebook on queer resistance in Georgia.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:29:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2008-10-16Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:37:49Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 carvalhaes_ff_me_assis.pdf: 566396 bytes, checksum: 17bc6337c019ec5ab6aef4d18c255da0 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / As questões relacionadas à aids têm sido problematizadas por pesquisadores de diferentes campos, linhas e áreas de atuação devido à complexidade de perspectivas históricas, sociais, biológicas e psicológicas da epidemia. Nestes anos de seu reconhecimento, a aids tem obrigado a desnaturalizar questões sociais e culturais construídas historicamente e que são parte dos signos, normas e códigos que balizam a estrutura e a organização da sociedade, impondo outros olhares e novas perspectivas para a complexidade de questões relacionadas aos gêneros, aos corpos e à cultura. Considerando essa conjuntura, esta pesquisa foi realizada com quatro mulheres HIV+ ativistas no movimento de aids com o objetivo de apreender suas concepções sobre aids; os contextos de vulnerabilidade que possibilitaram sua infecção; suas vulnerabilidades à reinfecção; e mudanças e permanências nos campos afetivo-conjugal e da maternidade a partir da experiência da doença e da militância. Para mapear suas experiências pessoais utilizei o método das histórias de vida, e, para a coleta de dados, entrevistas semiestruturadas.. As categorias de análise estão articuladas à perspectiva teórica de autores que problematizam as construções sócio-históricas relacionadas às questões de gênero e da aids. O discurso militante revelou-se importante na construção de experiências singulares e coletivas que são fundamentais para a reconfiguração de trajetórias individuais e disparadoras de rupturas na cultura ocidental. Contudo, as histórias demonstram, também, que valores como a família e o reconhecimento próprio através da maternidade e de relações de conjugalidade não foram completamente subvertidos pelas particularidades da relação doença/política. / The questions related to AIDS have been problematized by researchers from different fields, lines and areas of acting due to the historical, social, biological and psychological perspectives complexity of the epidemic. In these acknowledgment years, the AIDS has obliged us to denaturalize social cultural questions historically built, and that are part of the signs, rules and codes that mark out the society structure and organization, imposing other views and new perspectives towards the questions complexity related to gender, the bodies and the culture. Taking this conjuncture into consideration, this research was carried out with four HIV+ women activists in the AIDS movement with the objective of apprehending their conceptions about AIDS, the vulnerability contexts that made their infection possible, their vulnerabilities towards the reinfection, and changes and permanency in the affective-conjugal and motherhood fields, from the disease and activism experience. Aiming to map their personal experiences, I used the life’s histories method, and for the data collection, semistructured interviews. The analysis categories are articulated to authors’ theoretical perspectives that problematize the social-historical constructions towards AIDS and gender issues. The activism speech develop a construction of a personal and plural’s experiences that are important to rebuilding of individual’s trajectory and discharge a disruption on the ocidental culture. Whenever, the histories shows too that values like the family and the own recognize true the maternity and the relationship were not completely subversive on the particularity of the relation disease/politics.

Neste trabalho discutimos sobre internet e verdade. Especificamente, tentamos defender que há modos singulares de produção do discurso verdadeiro, e a internet implica configurações particulares destes modos. Entendemos que as formas por meio das quais podemos lidar com a verdade são reconfiguradas por elementos que a rede faz funcionar, tais como o acesso generalizado à produção de texto, a reprodução massiva de informação, a imensa capacidade de acúmulo e distribuição de conteúdos. Por isso, afirmamos que a internet não é um meio pelo qual é transmitida uma verdade incondicional; tampouco é o meio pelo qual se perverte o verdadeiro na forma do erro. Entendemos que há diferentes modulações de discursos pretendidos como verdadeiros, cada um dos quais relativo a possibilidades inerentes às diversas plataformas na rede. Para levar a efeito tal discussão, primeiramente consideramos alguns problemas teóricos selecionados da tradição acadêmica que investigou os meios de comunicação. Posteriormente, debatemos acerca de uma noção de verdade mais adequada a nosso âmbito de problemas, de onde é derivada uma discussão a partir de textos de Friedrich Nietzsche e Michel Foucault. Advém daí o entendimento de que a verdade é um efeito de disputas, o que a inscreve no problema geral do poder. Uma vez que o ativismo em rede se apresenta como modo de produção de discurso com pretensão de verdade, propomos a discussão acerca de casos específicos em que ocorre. Sendo a educação ambiente sensível aos problemas que tocam a verdade, a política e o uso de tecnologias de informação e comunicação, a pesquisa almeja contribuir com o debate atual concernente a esta área de estudos. / In this work we discuss about the internet and truth. Specifically, we try to argue that there are singular modes of producing true discourse, and the internet implies unique configurations of these modes. We understand that the ways in which we can deal with truth are reconfigured by elements that the network makes work, such as generalized access to the word, massive reproduction of content, immense capacity for accumulation and distribution of information. Therefore, we affirm that the internet is not a means by which an unconditional truth is transmitted; nor is it the means by which the true is perverted in the form of error. We understand that there are different modulations of speeches intended as true, each of which related to possibilities inherent to the various platforms on the network. To carry out such a discussion, we first consider some theoretical problems selected from the academic tradition that investigated the media. Later, we debate about a notion of truth more adequate to our scope of problems, for this we derive a discussion from the texts of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. There emerges the understanding that truth is an effect of disputes, which inscribes it in the general problem of power. Since network activism presents itself as a mode of discourse production with a pretension of truth, we propose to discuss specific cases in which it occurs. Since education is sensitive to problems that touch on truth, politics and the use of information and communication technologies, the research aims to contribute to the current debate concerning this area of study.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The purpose of this study is to analyze the jurisprudence formed by the Court of Justice of the State of Sergipe regarding civil homoeffective judgments within the family between 2005 and 2015, seeking to draw a profile of the local judiciary in refers to the grounds of decisions rendered in the second degree of jurisdiction. As a starting point will be made a preliminary study on the theory of the State and how the judiciary gained strength in post-liberalism, which came to settle with the establishment of Constitutional States, with Brazil included in this. Subsequently, on the stabilization of the judiciary power, the concepts and theories on judicialization of judicial politics and activism will be analyzed, and how the aforementioned phenomena have contributed to the formation of a new right of Brazilian families, especially those formed by same sex. In the end, the research will present whether the Sergipe judiciary, in the grounds of its decisions to recognize the rights of this new family formation, has been activist or not. / O presente trabalho tem por objetivo fazer uma análise da jurisprudência formada pelo Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de Sergipe no que concerne às decisões cíveis homoafetivas dentro do âmbito familiar, entre os anos de 2005 a 2015, buscando traçar um perfil do judiciário local no que se refere as fundamentações das decisões prolatadas em sede de segundo grau de jurisdição. Como ponto de partida será feito um estudo preliminar sobre a teoria do Estado e como o judiciário ganhou força no pós-liberalismo, o que veio a estabelecer-se com o assentamento dos Estados Constitucionais, estando o Brasil incluído neste seio. Posteriormente, acerca da estabilização da força do poder judiciário, serão analisados os conceitos e teorias sobre judicialização da política e ativismo judicial e de que forma os referidos fenômenos contribuíram para a formatação de um novo direito das famílias brasileiras, em especial aquelas formadas por pessoas do mesmo sexo. Ao final, a pesquisa apresentará se o judiciário sergipano, na fundamentação de suas decisões de reconhecimento dos direitos dessa nova formação familiar, vem sendo um tribunal voltado a uma concepção ativista ou não. / São Cristóvão, SE