Internet Activism Course in Honors
Honors will offer a hybrid course called Hon301B Internet Activism this spring. Half of the class will meet online and the other half will meet in person once a week. The class will be co-taught by Professor Dusan Bjelic and USM alumnus Alex Steed.
What is the class about?
The virtual activism field study will take students through the history of activism as aided by emerging communication strategies. Focusing on the earliest days of hacking/cracking culture in the United States and taking the class through more-contemporary examples of digital, grassroots activism as organized and expressed today, we will first focus on case studies through the lens of the theoretical examination offered in the previous semester. We will then turn our energies to a half-semester field study, in which we will participate in engaging in causes of our own interests, employing tactics we have learned about (and others, hopefully, that are learned about in independent research), and document this process in an electronic collaborative working document.
The individual elements of the final project will require the student to give background about their selected issue, an explanation of the activist’s approach(s) in the context of on-the-ground operation as well as theoretical contextualization. Students will then be required, after presenting their cause, to work together on this collaborative document in order to create a resource that can be used by and added onto by classes to come.
The in-class option is open to all USM students (Thursdays 4-6:30pm) and the online option is also open to students from outside USM. For more information please look up Class # 28407 on Mainestreet and/or contact Prof. Bjelic: bjelic@maine.edu.
