Available From UC Press

Activists use digital technologies to communicate, coordinate, and organize for social change. But these big corporate digital platforms are also used to spread disinformation, racism, and abuse. Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge investigates the relationship between activism and technology, focusing on how activists think and talk about technology’s role in social change and what this tells us about the politics of digital technologies.
 
Researching movements in Italy, Hungary, and the United States, Elisabetta Ferrari examines how leftist activists construct technological imaginaries that appropriate, negotiate, and challenge Silicon Valley’s vision of technology. She argues that these imaginaries reflect and shape the politics of social movements: they matter for how activists think about their political possibilities. Ultimately, Ferrari centers the political and imaginative work that activists need to perform in order to navigate the politics of mainstream digital technologies.

Elisabetta Ferrari is an AIAS-AUFF Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark.

"A fresh and innovative approach to connecting technological imaginaries with social movements. Elisabetta Ferrari uses canonical influences to reinvent how we approach the question of mobilization. This book is a compelling and inspiring take on how mobilization becomes digitally remediated."—Zizi Papacharissi, author of After Democracy: Imagining Our Political Future

"A timely book that renews and deepens discussions on digital technologies and social justice activism. Moving beyond hype around social media, Ferrari skillfully offers empirically rich and conceptually rigorous insights on activists' imaginaries as well as the value of media technologies for activism and possibilities for creating change. A must-read for everyone interested in media and social movements."—Tina Askanius, Professor in Media and Communication Studies, Malmö University

"Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge is bold and imaginative scholarship. Ferrari provides fresh perspectives and rich data, illustrating how activist movements grapple with and ultimately make sense of the digital technologies they deploy. You will learn a lot from this book."—David Karpf, author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy