civic engagement – Page 3

Strike Debt and the Rolling Jubilee

1 June 2016Erhardt Graeff

Online Version

http://civicmediaproject.org/works/civic-media-project/strike-debt-and-the-rolling-jubilee-building-a-debt-resistance-movement-1

Book Page

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/civic-media

Presented Summary

Excerpt

“Growing out of Occupy Wall Street, Strike Debt has been working since May 2012 to build a social movement through various forms of media and market-based activism under the banner of “debt resistance.” They cite the history of Biblical jubilees that canceled debt to normalize society (Graeber 2011), the debtor movement like El Barzon in Mexico (Caffentzis 2013), and “mortgage strikes” by Empowering and Strengthening Ohio’s Peoples (Strike Debt 2014, 93), to make an intellectual and moral argument for debt resistance against the contemporary system of debt, which in their analysis causes dehumanizing shame and suffering. They describe debt as a weapon and a web that catches you—as soon as you pay off one loan you are indebted for another reason (Graeff and Bhargava 2014).”

Youth Digital Activism

11 April 2016Erhardt Graeff

Presentation Recording

Slides

http://web.media.mit.edu/~erhardt/slides/LWV-SocialMediaYouthActivism.pdf

Symposium Description

47th Symposium on International Relations
Social Media: Global Impact on Political Engagement, Youth & Privacy

Sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Connecticut Education Fund, Inc.

Co-sponsored in cooperation with PIER and the Councils of African and Middle East Studies at The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Overview

Pat Sabosik, President, Elm City Consulting—advises companies on new digital strategies

Panelists

Carolyn A. Lin,Professor, University of Connecticut Dept. of Communication (Impact on Political Engagement)

Erhardt Graeff, Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard (Impact on Youth)

Lauren Henry Scholz, Postdoctoral Associate in Law, Information Society Project, Yale Law School (Impact on Privacy)

Moderator

Nancy Ruther, Visiting Fellow, the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies

PhD General Exams

1 January 2016Erhardt Graeff

Designing and Evaluating Technologies for Civic Learning

This general exam proposal is designed to prepare me for my larger PhD goal: to design future civic technologies optimized for the development of effective citizens using definitions and measurements of civic and political learning in a way that captures the complexity and needs of contemporary, digitally-mediated democracy.

Last January, I attended a Civics Research Workshop at Google in New York. The leaders of the field of civic technology in attendance, from industry representatives, practitioners, scholars, and funders, all agreed we severely lack ways of measuring impact or even defining it. And yet, there is a rush into this field attracting vast amounts of funding and media attention. With lots of technology being built, claiming to extend citizen voice and efficacy, this is the moment to be working on measures for evaluating and improving civic technology design.

First, there is a need to define this space more clearly by analyzing the design of civic technologies, in terms of their embodiment of certain goals, values, and definitions of democracy and civic participation; how they conceive of good or effective citizenship and of the development of users into those kinds of citizens; and the ways these platforms and their designers measure success. Second, focusing on the potential of technologies to empower citizens to grow into more effective civic actors, it’s important to understand the way Western civilizations have looked at the development of citizens in offline and now digitally-mediated contexts, and how we might assess new forms of civic learning. Thus, my general exam areas cover:

Primary Area: Designing Technologies for Civic Engagement, surveying the range of platforms, technologies, and uses of those tools to promote civic activities.
Contextual Area: History and Philosophy of Civic Education, surveying the most prominent political and educational philosophers and trends in civic education since the birth of modern democracy.
Technical Area: Statistical and Psychometric Validation of Measures of Civic and Political Learning, covering recent approaches to valid assessments of learning in digital contexts.

Reading List

https://erhardtgraeff.com/portfolio/file_download/18/ErhardtGraeff-GeneralExamProposal-final.pdf

Committee

Ethan Zuckerman, PhD Advisor at MIT Media Lab
Peter Levine, Associate Dean for Research and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service
Andrew Ho, Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Binders Full of Election Memes

1 May 2015Erhardt Graeff

Link

http://civicmediaproject.org/works/civic-media-project/binders-full-of-election-memes-participatory-culture-invades-the-2012-us-election

Excerpt

“Participatory culture handed the 2012 U.S. presidential election season a bumper crop of political memes. These “election memes,” largely in the form of image macros, took sound bites from the candidates’ debates and speeches and turned them into “digital content units” of political satire “circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users,” to paraphrase Limor Schifman’s definition of “internet meme” (2013, 177).

“Image macros like the lolcat, feature bold text on top of an image, often a “stock character,” and like all Internet memes are “multi-participant creative expressions through which cultural and political identities are communicated and negotiated” (Ibid.). This case study focuses on three popular image macro-based election memes that came out of the 2012 US presidential election cycle: “Fired Big Bird,” “Binders Full of Women,” and “You Didn’t Build That,” and argues that sharing such memes is a valid form of political participation in the style of what Tommie Shelby calls “impure dissent” (forthcoming).”

Crowdsourcing as Reflective Political Practice

26 September 2014Erhardt Graeff

Link

http://ipp.oii.ox.ac.uk/2014/programme-2014/track-c-political-engagement/building-community/erhardt-graeff-crowdsourcing-as

Abstract

Many platforms for civic engagement, whether online or offline, are inconvenient and disconnected from the source of issues they are meant to address. They require that citizens leave the places they normally inhabit physically or virtually and commit to a separate space and set of processes. Town hall meetings are still a key point of engagement, occurring during specific times and in specific places. Online forums function similarly, in that deliberation occurs within profile-based websites for which you need to sign up and regularly return. This paper responds to the design challenge and research question: How do you address barriers to “minimum effective engagement” in community projects, and ensure that all citizens can have their voice heard on how to improve their local communities?

In order to raise levels of participation in community projects and expand the range of voices heard in governmental decision-making, there is a need for civic technology that is lightweight and compelling enough to enjoy continued use and to promote civic learning. In this paper, I develop a theoretical basis for effective citizenship through crowdsourcing monitorial activity by finding connections between several theories of citizenship and learning, which point to this activity fostering civic learning through reflective political practice.

Using a needs assessment of Boston-area municipalities, I reinforce my argument and concretize a set of design goals for a new socio-technical system to foster local civic learning and engagement around issues like urban planning. In the end, I respond to the research challenge and design goals by introducing a prototype for a location-based survey platform for Android smartphones called Action Path, and discuss early-stage user feedback and future work.

Online Version

Book Page

Presented Summary

Excerpt

Presentation Recording

Slides

Symposium Description

47th Symposium on International Relations Social Media: Global Impact on Political Engagement, Youth & Privacy

Overview

Panelists

Moderator

Designing and Evaluating Technologies for Civic Learning

Reading List

Committee

Link

Excerpt

Link

Abstract

47th Symposium on International Relations
Social Media: Global Impact on Political Engagement, Youth & Privacy