Call for Action!

Call for Action (CfA) is an intensive studio seminar on contemporary technologies and activism. How can mobile networked devices be used for social change, politics, and expression? Can Web2.0 techniques be applied to help to organize people, gather information, and enable collective action to stop global warming? organize labor? end a war?

Each week we will review existing tools for social change, cover techniques for mobile hacking, and piece together new experiments. International speakers ranging from Zimbabwean activists to telecommunication experts will discuss the problems with existing ICTs, and suggest parameters for new systems. We will explore protocols and packages like VOIP, SMS, and Asterisk to look at how they may be reused or reconfigured. And we will do a variety of hacking and technical exercises that can demystify the field and act as springboards for future work.

The IAP version of the class included the following speakers:

* Katrin Verclas, organizer of MobileActive, the largest conference in the field
* Ethan Zuckerman, gadfly and cofounder of GlobalVoices, a news service that includes activist writers from around the world.
* David Reed, developer of the world's first electronic spreadsheet and co-inventor of the end-to-end argument, often called the fundamental architectural principle of the Internet.
* Huma Yusuf, Karachi CNN producer and civic media researcher
* Sara Wylie, anthropologist of social movements, citizen and elite science, and environmentalism.

Future speakers may include: Tactical Tech Collective / Yes Men / Indy Media / Witness / UNICEF / Catherine Lutz / Noam Chomsky / Rich Pell / Ricardo Dominguez

Class Scope
By the end of the class, we hope to collaboratively create new sociotechnical repertoires for social change and technical activism. In order to foster this creation, we aim to provide participants with overviews of the conceptual, technical, and historical space for mobile technologies in social change.

We will provide an overview of contemporary mobile and participatory technology and techniques, and cross-fertilize that with theory and best practices around social movements.

The goal of the class's technical component will be to expose participants to a variety of models for mobile and participatory systems. We will constrain the scope of our in-class demonstrations (for instance, using only the Python programming language) for the sake of continuity. Participants will not learn everything about programming X phone handset using Y operating system in Z language, but rather that these are the possible approaches, and this is what an X, Y, and Z looks like and how to approach finding out more. Likewise, we will introduce some key concepts, scholars, and practitioners of social change, but will not aspire towards a comprehensive overview of their work or their fields.

The class will meet weekly. There will be regular small problem sets, readings and short responses, and three studio projects will be assigned over the course of the semester. Attendance is required, students must not miss more than 3 classes in total.

Readings

Bandy, Joe. “Paradoxes of Transnational Civil Societies under Neoliberalism: The Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras.” Social Problems 51, no. 3 (August 2004): 410-431.
Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999.
Castells, Manuel, Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, Jack Linchuan Qiu, and Araba Sey. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective. 1st ed. The MIT Press, 2006.
Castells, Manuel, and James E. Katz. Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies. The MIT Press, 2008.
Charles Tilly. “Nineteenth-Century Origins of Our Twentieth-Century Collective-Action Repertoire : Deep Blue at the University of Michigan.” http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/51016.
Conley, Verena Andermatt. Rethinking Technologies. Miami Theory Collective. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Ellis, John. Social History of the Machine Gun. New York (Pantheon): Johns Hopkins Pantheon Books, 1975.
Fortun, Kim. “From Bhopal to the Informating of Environmentalism: Risk Communication in Historical Perspective.” Osiris 19. 2nd Series (2004): 283-296.
Fuller, Mathew. “It looks like you're writing a letter: Microsoft Word.” Nettime, no. 9.5.00 (2000): 21.
Kolb, Felix. Protest and Opportunities: The Political Outcomes of Social Movements. Campus Verlag, 2007.
McAdam, Doug, and Sidney Tarrow. “Nonviolence as Contentious Interaction.” PS: Political Science and Politics 33, no. 2 (June 2000): 149-154.
Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press, 1992.
---. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1999.
---. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press, 1987.
Staples, William G. The Culture of Surveillance: Discipline and Social Control in the United States. St. Martin's Press, 1997.
Stills, David L. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Crowell Collier and Macmillan, 1968.
Tarrow, Sidney. “The Urban-Rural Cleavage in Political Involvement: The Case of France.” The American Political Science Review 65, no. 2 (June 1971): 341-357.
Tarrow, Sidney G. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 2nd ed. Cambridge studies in comparative politics. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Tilly, Charles. “Event Catalogs as Theories.” Sociological Theory 20, no. 2 (July 2002): 248-254.
---. “Social Movements and (All Sorts of) Other Political Interactions - Local, National, and International - Including Identities.” Theory and Society 27, no. 4 (August 1998): 453-480.
Verclas, Katrin, and Patricia Mellencamp. “A Mobile Voice: The Use of Mobile Phones in Citizen Media,” November, 2008. http://mobileactive.org/mobile-voice-use-mobile-phones-citizen-media.