Materializing Cultural Struggle in Film and Media Studies

This essay explores how digital media activism can only be adequately understood within a cultural studies methodology. By using the Brooklyn-based media organization Not An Alternative as a case study, the essay investigates how media production serves as a central activity in not only representing local and global activist struggles, but also in mobilizing and organizing activists. Video production serves not as an endpoint unto itself but as a means to further build coalitions and galvanize collective action. Additionally, the group's organizational practices and tactics manifest themselves in the video's form and content. The type of video produced, in other words, manifests the vision that the material practices of Not An Alternative make possible. Finally, the essay will investigate some of the contradictory tendencies emerging from media-driven, direct action mobilizations that precariously appropriate marketing strategies against neoliberal tendencies.