Creators4Change

A one-day International Communication Association (ICA) pre-conference in affiliation with the Media Industry Studies Interest Group and Popular Media & Culture Division. Featuring a keynote by Brooke Erin Duffy (“Creators, Platforms, and the New Politics of Visibility”) and panel sessions with platform cultural producer researchers and creative practitioners.

The term “creators for change” (C4C) refers broadly to all the individuals, groups, and movements concerned with social justice that harness platforms to creatively agitate and advocate for social change. With C4C, we foreground Michel de Certeau’s (1980) distinction between “strategies” and “tactics” when exploring the opportunities and costs of using platforms owned by the largest corporations in the world for the pursuit of social change. When probing how creators are making media with the goal of making history, pre-conference participants will intervene in the space between corporate structure and creative agency; between platform infrastructures, business models, and algorithms; between performance and box-ticking, and meaningful representation and the advancement of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access, that extends on and off camera, throughout corridors of corporate and legacy media power, and also within narratives in streaming and community formations across social media platforms. C4C brings together the research agendas of critical media industries, alternative and activist media, and platformization.

Check out some relevant readings (here).