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The current period of disruptive social change is inextricably bound up with new means and modes of communication, information, and media streams. The Communication, Information Technologies & Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS) locates these factors at the center of our collective interests, investigating them through a plethora of methods, theories, and empirical cases. Each year, CITAMS runs a special issue in ICS showcasing select works presented at the previous year's American Sociological Association conference and the affiliated Media Sociology preconference. Papers in the 2022 CITAMS Special Issue reflect a social context defined by a prolonged global pandemic and wrought by democratic uncertainty. Across these social circumstances, technology and media loom large. Simultaneously, everyday life continues and classic CITAMS scholarship sustains relevance for the ways people interact, construct identity, consume, and mobilize. All of this and more are contained in the pages of this year's Special Issue, from which readers can get a sense of what CITAMS has to offer and consider how their own work may fit within the broad CITAMS umbrella. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networked information technologies have brought about extensive changes in the production and distribution of creative cultural work. Inspired by the widespread success of Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), many proponents of open access advocate reconceptualisation of existing legal protection frameworks in creative works. This paper traces the attempted appropriation of Creative Commons (CC) licences by filmmakers and the consequent formation of an Open Content Filmmaking (OCF) movement. OCF proponents articulated notions of technology-enabled transformation in content creation and distribution, similar to those that inspire the visions of FLOSS and CC advocates. It examines how these creators attempted to address the relevance of openness to their own activities and develop practical open models for filmmaking. Difficulties experienced in establishing viable livelihoods with OCF (as FLOSS developers had done), created tensions between those with a pragmatic or more ideological orientation. The initial vision of a consistent OCF movement, enabled by CC, thus became fragmented. In contrast to FLOSS, where many actors were able to find ways to develop sustainable careers within the industry while contributing to Open Source Software, such generic strategies have not readily emerged for OCF. Drawing insights from Sørensen's (1996) Social Learning framework (Learning technology, constructing culture. Sociotechnical change as social learning: University of Trondheim, STS working paper 18/96) in this paper we untangle the elaborate but often messy strategies deployed by Open Content Filmmakers (OCFs) and trace the multiple and often partial ways they have worked out to utilise CC elements and tools in producing, monetising and distributing their films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how marginalized youth in Morocco use YouTube to contest hegemonic discourses of state power and institutional practices of social exclusion. The paper analyses a user-generated, YouTube web-series,Tales of Bouzebal, as a performance of marginality and a social critique of state bureaucracies and institutions in the context of post-Arab Spring Morocco. Using a combined method of textual and discourse analyses, the paper argues that the new media practices of producing and consuming user-generated video are best understood as practices of cultural citizenship that contribute to social change through the production of counter-discursive political subjectivities among youth in MENA. The paper posits that the concept of citizenship needs to be expanded to account for citizen participatory media practices that contest the conditions of marginality and inequality sustained by normative definitions of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grievances and an urgent awareness of the need for social change are necessary but insufficient catalysts for the formation of powerful and robust social movements. While this realization has led observers of social movements to attend to a wide variety of structural and subjective factors, in the alchemy of radical social change and the grassroots collective action that fuels it one of the most important yet under considered elements is the radical imagination. In this paper, I map the concept of the radical imagination and the methods necessary to study it in action. A collective activity produced through dialogic encounters rather than an individual possession or faculty, the radical imagination is our capacity to conceive of the world as it might be otherwise, and it animates successful movements for social change. Since the radical imagination is something people do together it is also a profoundly social phenomenon bearing the marks of the activist culture and political context in which it is enmeshed, and the forms used to mediate and circulate it. This, in turn, has profound consequences for the way activists sustain themselves, organize for social change, and connect with others beyond their ranks. Drawing on research conducted since 2010 with radical activists in Halifax, Canada seeking to 'convoke' – collectively summon into being – the radical imagination, I reflect on the relationship between the radical imagination, activist culture and context, and movement building in the age of austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins from the basic premise that in considering digital media and its multifarious relations with forms of protest and political mobilization, we are interested in social change. Yet, too often, the key ingredient of protest and political mobilization – the radical politics itself – is left out of our analyses. How can we begin to tackle the challenges posed to democratic politics if we do not talk about actual politics as part of our research? This problem is both conceptual and practical. A politics requires a practice. We cannot understand the nature of the practice without understanding its politics; we cannot understand the politics without appreciating its processes and organization. Yet, so many studies do just this. This paper argues that a fugitive politics limits our abilities to take progressive thought and action forward. By ignoring the actual politics, we end up depoliticizing counter politics because we offer precious few suggestions as to how we can do democratic politics better. Without an understanding of the conditions under which a Left progressive politics could develop then the politics itself threatens to remain ill defined. What might it mean then to put the development of a counter politics at the heart of our analyses? What are the conditions required (including the communicative conditions) for radical political organizations/collectives to endure, build capacity and effect social change? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The public/private distinction is one of the fundamental categories of modern social life. Historically, the two functioned as a dichotomous pair both theoretically and practically. During the height of the separation of public and private, 'private' was code for the home, personal, and non-professional contexts; 'public', on the other hand, stood for the professional world outside the home. This dichotomous treatment of public and private informed many aspects of social life ranging from gender relations and the division of household labor to the development of suburbs as purely residential (private) areas geographically separate from the public sphere of work. Recently, however, this dichotomous vision of the public/private divide has become outdated. It no longer accurately describes the ways in which public and private operate in contemporary social life; where the two spheres were once separate, there is now significant overlap and interaction. This breakdown in the public and private divide has occurred at many levels and has a strong relationship with the development and ubiquity of information and communications technologies such as mobile telephones and the Internet. This paper describes the ways in which public and private are changing and proposes a new way of theorizing the public/private distinction, as a continuum rather than as a dichotomy. This way of thinking about public and private reflects contemporary social life much more accurately than does the dichotomous conception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased flexibility facilitated by Information and Communication Technologies has enabled anti-war activists to garner great control over representations of their arguments. This paper explores the value of the symbolic dimension of collective action through three cumulative forms of analysis: understanding how the symbolic domain is used; explaining the strategic choices behind this use; and, finally, linking these representational choices to the subjective experience of the individual and their processes of political identity construction. Many groups lacked a coherent online strategy. The reasons for this are threefold. First, use reflects the organizational structure and ideological principles of the groups. Second, by emphasizing diversity and inclusion most groups wanted their online material to be as accessible as possible and as a result censored anything too opinionated or deemed too radical. Third, there was an enduring emphasis upon local place and face-to-face communication. This made groups' online interventions lack coherence because they were often aiming their representations at particular populations. In a study of Muslim anti-war activism the relationship between these representational choices and the processes of identity construction were explored. Muslim activists sought support by asserting a collective religious commonality and by aligning with sympathetic others to counter stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists. This re-ignited a historical tension as to the place of religion within anti-war activism. Consequently, Muslims struggled to articulate their claim to multiple identities, and online representations limited those who attempted to develop overt and complicated new religious political identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are changing the ways in which activists communicate, collaborate and demonstrate. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, among them sociology, political science and communication, are working to understand these changes. The diversity of perspectives represented enriches the literature, providing an abundant repertoire of tools for examining these phenomena, but it is also an obstacle to understanding. Few works are commonly cited across the field, and most are known only within the confines of their discipline. The absence of a common set of organizing theoretical principles can make it difficult to find connections between these disparate works beyond their common subject matter. This paper responds by locating existing scholarship within a common framework for explaining the emergence, development and outcomes of social movement activity. This provides a logical structure that facilitates conversations across the field around common issues of concern, highlighting connections between scholars and research agendas that might otherwise be difficult to discern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]