What is social change? In simplest terms, in signals an alteration to some pre-existing social order, not necessarily for a progressive cause. Last week, the students of Introduction to Civic Media were instructed to break into groups and develop their own model that would outline some theory of social change. […]
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In class last week, my group proffered a somewhat poetic vision of social change. We called it “The Floods of Change.” Change is natural, inevitable, ongoing. In our model, the “mountain” of society constantly interacts with the “river” of ideas flowing down it. This river shifts over time, with some […]
In coming up with theories for change in Intro to Civic Media last week, many of us started or ended with the goal of policy change at the highest levels of government. My final project for the class, collecting and interpreting marketplace stories of origin, does not have a specific […]
In August 2009, I helped create a map of banned and challenged books in the United States, using data from the Kid’s Right to Read Project. In a blog post for Barnes & Noble I described the idea behind the map: The Brazilian state capital of Fortaleza sits snug along […]
Last week in Intro to Civic Media we addressed political economy and propaganda in relation to the media. We began with Marxist and post-Marxist ideas of “base” (those people and things that gird the system in the form of physical labor and natural resources) and “superstructure” (those people and things […]