Robé, Christopher

The shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 paved the way for activism controlled by youth led by key students banding together following the incident. Student activists from the school emerged particularly via social media and organized large-scale efforts in order to create discourse surrounding gun control through their March For Our Lives movement. Studying the overlap between youth activism, the response to trauma, the systems at play within social media, and the role of commercialization, this paper dives into the complexities of activist based discourse as it evolves and the forces at play within youth activism in general. Looking at these existing efforts aids in exposing both the pros and cons of activism mediated by social media and the role that larger systems play in an activist’s mission.

This study seeks to analyze the performative activism and political performance that took place during the Black Lives Matter protests between May and November of the year 2020. Various points of view perceive such acts as merely reductive or otherwise worthy of disdain, however, this study seeks to analyze these acts to identify different components within each performance. The primary focus is to further understand the advantages and disadvantages of performative activism and political performance. This research concentrates on examining the significant social and political impacts of these performances and their symbolic nature. This study also evaluates how discourse related to marginalized communities enters the public sphere and influences it. This study will include the analysis of performance via social media platforms, such as Instagram and Twitter during the 2020 resurgence of Black Lives Matter, including performances carried out by political leaders along the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign trail.

This study investigates the use of film and video as political tools for women to promote collectivity, raise consciousness, and incite both social and political change. Through textual analysis of seven experimental films and videos, from the years 1965-1975, it is apparent that women used techniques of reclamation of three major aspects of identity formation—namely, body, pleasure, and physical space—to individually take steps toward liberation, while adding to the social phenomenon of second-wave feminism. Through this analysis the following question is addressed: how, and why, did the female media makers of the women’s liberation movement and sexual revolution implement both film and video to challenge social constructions and ideas regarding femininity, domesticity, and sexuality? The textual analysis performed in relation to this research question is rooted in cultural materialism and takes historical, economic, and cultural factors into account.