Walkout Warriors:
Walkout Warriors:
Transmedia Organizing
This chapter is an in-depth study of the media practices of the college, high school, and middle school students who organized the largest wave of student walkouts since the Chican@ Blowouts in the 1970s. Student organizers combined face-to-face organizing, especially through long-established student groups, and the abundant use of new media tools and platforms, in particular text messaging and MySpace. They also leveraged culturally relevant protest tactics. School walkouts, already part of what social movement scholars call the ‘repertoire of contention’ of Chican@ student activism, were made especially salient by the community-based production process of the HBO film Walkout, released in 2006. The film mediated and promoted specific movement tactics. At the same time, walkout participants produced and circulated their own media across multiple platforms, linked media directly to action, and did so in ways accountable to the social base of their movement. The chapter defines this set of tactics as transmedia organizing, further develops the term, and argues that transmedia organizing is the key emergent social movement media practice in a converged media ecology shaped by the broader political economy of communication.
Keywords: transmedia organizing, student activism, Chican@ Blowout, walkouts, convergence, MySpace
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