Category: Discussion Board

Below you will find an article that analyzes the Black Lives Matter Movement. The authors seek to understand how a movement conducted via social media and other online technologies works. Read the article and answer the following questions:

1.  How did the hashtag “Black Lives Matter” evolve? How does the movement transition from an online presence to action “on the ground”?
2. What is the upside to a movement evolving in this way? What is the downside?
3. What is the future of such a movement?

Feel free to add any other comments you wish.

Beyond the Hashtags

We are reading an account of the trajectory of social movements that advocate for the poor and working classes. They point out a fatal flaw in all such movements: they are doomed to be absorbed by the existing systems. Is that what happened to the “Occupy” movement? What was this movement about? Why did it fail? (Or, did it fail?)

In reading Gaventa’s work on how power works, what other groups can you think of in the United States that do not challenge obvious and egregious inequalities?

In the documentary “Freedom on My Mind”, what surprised, shocked, or inspired you the most? What did you learn that you did not know?