Recognizing the current conjuncture, this article explores the changing role of media and communications in the cohering of social struggles by antisystemic social movements. Transforming structural relations of media and their tactical uses, the authors argue, are key components to shifting the terrain upon which such movements build. In response to a deepening organic crisis, the authors argue for the importance of organizing against and beyond the existing political economy of platform media by building new narrative blocs as bases of power that can serve as one of several determining factors for the direction of popular movements and the generalization of new notions and political programs around which a counterhegemonic consensus may emerge for society. Transformative resistance and collective power will depend on the ability to develop movement‐based media infrastructures to deepen international communication processes with and relationships to an ongoing global mass movement against the rise of antidemocratic politics, popular authoritarianism, and other morbid symptoms of a declining order.
Narrative Power in an Era of Crisis and Convergence
Peter Funke is associate professor of politics at the University of South Florida. He is coeditor of Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements (2017) and The New Global Politics: Global Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century (2017).
Todd Wolfson is associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University and co-director of the Media, Inequality, and Change Center. He is author of Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left (2014) and coeditor of Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements (2017).
Malav Kanuga, Peter Funke, Todd Wolfson; Narrative Power in an Era of Crisis and Convergence. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 October 2023; 122 (4): 681–696. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10779406
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