The internet and digital technologies are deployed both as a tool to organize and amplify activists’ resistance efforts, as well as a site of state and corporate control and surveillance. This half-day symposium on digital activism will bring together designers, software developers, community organizers and scholars to discuss the possibilities and limitations of digital activism — past and present — and its relationship to offline grassroots efforts, and will foreground an intersectional approach, recognizing that structures and experiences of oppression are connected, across online and offline spaces. We welcome all perspectives.

Our keynote speaker will be distinguished scholar, activist and media-maker Dr. Sasha Costanza-Chock, Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. They are a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Faculty Affiliate with the MIT Open Documentary Lab and the MIT Center for Civic Media, and creator of the MIT Codesign Studio (codesign.mit.edu). Their work focuses on social movements, media justice, and community-led design. Dr. Costanza-Chock’s book Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement was published by the MIT Press in 2014. They are a board member of Allied Media Projects (alliedmedia.org), and a worker/owner at Research Action Design (RAD.cat), a worker-owned cooperative that uses community-led research, transformative media organizing, technology development, and collaborative design to build the power of grassroots social movements.