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April 11, 2006
Immigration Rallies
David Silver has some photographs of last week's march in Dallas, which attracted over half a million people, and follows the march in Los Angeles that also drew 500,000 people marching for human rights. David mentions a sign carried by one participant that said "Today we act. Tomorrow we vote." There are hundreds of other photographs on Flickr that show a social movement coming into visibility (I love the creative signs), and he's right to say that "this is what a social movement looks like." But I think it's important to point out that it's a social movement that has been building for some time, fostered by Spanish-language DJs who have been promoting the rallies for weeks, as well as religious and human rights groups, as reported in the LA Times. I'm not sure I have much to add right now, but David's discussion of the rallies and his students' enthusiasm for talking about them, as well as his planned course on Digital Democracy, has me thinking ahead to the classes I'll be teaching next fall (more details on that a little later).
Posted by chuck at April 11, 2006 10:18 PM
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Comments
hey chuck. great links to flickr for visual (and creative) documentation of these historic events. i'm with you about the role of spanish-speaking radio and am trying to follow that more closely. sometimes us new media scholars forget about old media, eh? i am eager to hear more about your fall classes and hope you'll post the syllabi!
Posted by: david silver at April 12, 2006 1:45 PM
I'm far from fluent in Spanish (now I wish I'd paid more attention in high school), so I haven't been able to follow the story closely. An acquaintance here in DC has been working on immigration reform legislation, and he alerted me to the Spanish-language DJ story. It's certainly an interesting case, though, especially given the tendency to focus on newer media.
It'll take a while to get my syllabi together, but to be honest, I'm thining about borrowing heavily from your dicussion of digital democracies (it'll be a lot like my Rhetoric and Democracy course from Fall 2004).
Posted by: Chuck at April 12, 2006 2:03 PM
Chuck, borrow away from any of my syllabi. likewise, i'm gonna borrow some stuff from your rhetoric and democracy course - great stuff there and great student projects. (also, tama, in his class i-generation, taught at the university of western australia, has some great teaching resources for citizen media, political mash-ups, digital artivism, etc.)
one of these days, we should hook up with kathleen over at planned obsolescence and network our three media studies classes together so that all of us - and all of our students - can work and learn together.
Posted by: david silver at April 13, 2006 2:24 PM
David, that would be very cool, and thanks for the tip on i-generation. My fall classes will be freshman composition classes with a media studies focus, but I'll talk about that in a future entry.
Posted by: Chuck at April 13, 2006 2:37 PM