DIY Dying: Video Activism as Archive, Commemoration and Evidence

Askanius, TinaLund University,Lunds universitet,Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap,Institutionen för kommunikation och medier,Samhällsvetenskapliga institutioner och centrumbildningar,Samhällsvetenskapliga fakulteten,Media and Communication Studies,Department of Communication and Media,Departments of Administrative, Economic and Social Sciences,Faculty of Social Sciences (author)

Abstract in UndeterminedThis article examines video activism in a context where ubiquitous camera technologies and online video sharing platforms are radically changing the media landscape in which demonstrations and political activism operates. The author discusses a number of YouTube videos documenting and narrating the recurring, anti-capitalist demonstrations in Europe in the past decade. With the death of Ian Tomlinson in London during the 2009 G20 protests as an empirical starting point, the author raises questions of how video documentation of this event links up with previous protest events by juxtaposing representations of ‘the moment of death’ (Zelizer, 2004, 2010) of protesters in the past. In a three-legged typology of the modes of appropriation of these commemoration videos, this article suggests that these videos work as (1) an archive of action and activist memory, (2) a site of commemoration in a online shrine for grieving, and (3) a space to provide and negotiate visual evidence of police violence and state repression. The author offers a re-articulation of the longstanding debate on visual evidence, action, and testimony in video activism. The results are suggestive of how vernacular commemorative genres of mourning and paying tribute to victims of police violence are fused with the online practices of bearing witness and producing visual evidence in new creative modes of using video for change.

Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskapInstitutionen för kommunikation och medier (creator_code:org_t)

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