Book Launch | Movement Media: In Pursuit of Solidarity

Media, Culture, and Communication alum Rachel Kuo will introduce her book, Movement Media: In Pursuit of Solidarity, followed by comments from scholars Karma Chávez, Yuchen Chen, and Victoria Netanus Xaka.

From newsletters and zines to hashtags and social media posts, social movements frequently generate and circulate media to define political goals, build solidarity, and articulate theories of change. These acts of media-making play a crucial role in developing relationships rooted in collective political visions across racial differences. Yet, in past and present movements, building solidarity across uneven race, class, and gender differences has often been a tenuous pursuit. How do social movements use media to create and sustain solidarity?

In Movement Media, Rachel Kuo assesses the possibilities and limitations of crafting solidarities across racialized differences through media-making processes and communications practices. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and ethnographic fieldwork, Kuo revisits key movements--Third World feminism, environmental justice, migrant justice, and police and prison abolition--to assess the mundane and less visible forms of movement building that help various groups navigate the politics of difference in theory and in practice. 

Rachel Kuo writes, teaches, and researches on race, social movements, and digital technology. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Social Science Research Council. She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and also a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective. She was a 2020-22 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 2021-22 Visiting Scholar at Duke University’s Asian American and Diasporic Studies program, and 2021-23 Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology. She has a PhD and MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, and BA in Journalism from the University of Missouri. 

Karma R. Chávez is Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas - Austin. She is author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013); Palestine on the Air (University of Illinois Press, 2019); and The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2021). Chávez edits the Intersectional Rhetorics series at the Ohio State University Press. She is a co-founder of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at UT Austin and president of the AAUP Chapter at UT Austin.

Yuchen Chen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Media from the University of Michigan. She received her M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, an M.Sc. in Specialized Translation from University College London (UCL), and a B.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of International Relations in Beijing, China. Yuchen is a critical media and technology scholar and ethnographer whose research lies at the intersection of digital studies, urban studies, the anthropology of the global, and contemporary China. Her work examines two main themes: China’s data-driven governance and China's global outreach via digital platforms. 

Victoria Netanus Xaka is a black feminist sound theorist, abolitionist educator, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Cornell University. She is the founder of the recording studio and label GMC Records Rwanda, and has been making music in community with Rwandan artists since 2012. Her academic and creative work center the Black Radical Tradition and black feminist dreamspace. Victoria was a Black Studies Collaboratory Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her PhD in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in May 2021. She also holds an M.Ed. in Sociology and Education from Columbia University Teachers College and a B.A. in Ethnomusicology and Music Education from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands.

Cosponsored with generous support from the NYU Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.