Visual Media and the Fate of Nonviolent Social Movement Activism
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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2012 From Print to Pixel: Visual Media and The Fate of Nonviolent Social Movement Activism Ksenia O. Gorbenko University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Gorbenko, Ksenia O., "From Print to Pixel: Visual Media and The Fate of Nonviolent Social Movement Activism" (2012). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 636. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/636 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/636 For more information, please contact [email protected]. From Print to Pixel: Visual Media and The Fate of Nonviolent Social Movement Activism Abstract In order to be heard or seen, nonviolent social movements (NVSMs) require an audience. News images of nonviolent protests become the means through which awareness of social movements is created. Comparative historical and semiotic analysis of journalistic images demonstrates that violence is a prominent theme within news coverage of nonviolent struggles. Four types of violence within nonviolence are identified: state violence, third-party violence, self-inflicted violence and symbolic violence. The examination of news images of these four types of violence showed the different ways in which challengers and the state contest power in the public domain through the media, in both text and images. Various actors (the state, social movements, journalists, the audience) use news images to historicize and construct their narratives of unfolding events, as well as make transhistorical claims. In this process, they deliberately employ news images to advocate for their causes, align themselves with previous heroes of civil disobedience and play on the popular understandings of good and evil. While this project focuses on different types of media, they have affected their audiences in similar ways, providing the space not only to the state within which they emerged, but also to those who seek to reform the state, like all of the movements in this study did. The media are the environment within which images circulate and as such they influence who images eachr and, to a lesser extent, what effect they may have on the viewers. The power of images lies in both their universality that connects them with their genealogical predecessors and their singularity that underscores the specific conditions in which they emerge, making the ultimate outcome of the protests uncertain. The dissertation contributes to the research on social movements, mass communication, conflict and social change. It also aisesr the question of how images can be analyzed and incorporated into sociological research. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Sociology First Advisor Tukufu Zuberi Keywords comparative historical sociology, news image, nonviolence, political semiosis, social movements, visual sociology Subject Categories Sociology This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/636 FROM PRINT TO PIXEL: VISUAL MEDIA AND THE FATE OF NONVIOLENT SOCIAL MOVEMENT ACTIVISM Ksenia O. Gorbenko A DISSERTATION in Sociology Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2012 Supervisor of Dissertation ________________________ Tukufu Zuberi Professor of Sociology Graduate Group Chairperson _________________________ Emily Hannum, Associate Professor of Sociology and Education Chair, Graduate Group in Sociology Dissertation Committee Charles Bosk Professor of Sociology, Medical Ethics and Anesthesia Randall Collins Professor of Sociology Robin Wagner-Pacifici Professor of Sociology FROM PRINT TO PIXEL: VISUAL MEDIA AND THE FATE OF NONVIOLENT SOCIAL MOVEMENT ACTIVISM COPYRIGHT 2012 Ksenia O. Gorbenko This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ny-sa/2.0/ iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS All sociological research is a product of collective effort. This is probably even more so with doctoral dissertations as they come to represent the process thereby a graduate student is “molded” into a sociologist. I was lucky to have a lot of supportive people in my life who helped me through my PhD program and whose influences on this project, as well as my personal and academic growth, are too numerous to list. Professor Tukufu Zuberi was a great mentor and dissertation advisor throughout my graduate school experience. His enthusiasm for the project of visual sociology was contagious, and his keen sense of the “big picture” helped me remember the contribution of my research when I got mired in the details. The conversations with Dr. Zuberi in between his trips and over meals, at conferences and over Skype, helped me in ways that go far beyond feedback on my dissertation. These were lessons in professional ethics, the responsibility of public intellectuals, and the role of sociological imagination. I could not have wished for a better mentor. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Randall Collins, who was an inspired advisor from the very first days of my time at Penn. Looking back, I realize now that my project was shaped in no small degree by Dr. Collins’ erudition and ability to connect events and phenomena across vast geographical and temporal spaces, as he pointed out interesting comparisons that would elucidate my study in new and exciting ways. His suggestion to look at press photography of the British women’s suffrage movement led me to discover the literature on sociology of gender, and shaped the further development of my project in all kinds of ways. iv Conversations with Professor Charles Bosk helped me grow as a sociologist and made me a little more American. While sending me off on tangents on occasion, Dr. Bosk helped me realize how important it was to make connections with issues of interest to general sociological audiences beyond regional studies circles. His careful reading of my chapters and attention to the extra the’s was greatly appreciated. I am also grateful to Dr. Bosk for his sense of humor and friendly sarcasm that always lightened my perspective when I approached him with my “general life questions.” It helped make light of what otherwise could have been a truly arduous process. Professor Robin Wagner-Pacifici has been a supporter and a wonderful teacher. Her work has been a great inspiration for this project, and her encouragement, patience and generosity in providing feedback on my multiple drafts is a gift I will only be able to pay forward to my own students. I came to greatly appreciate her constructive criticism in her editorial remarks and during our conversations over coffee that added clarity to my arguments and were a tremendous help in structuring my dissertation. This project benefitted from conversations with Penn faculty, colleagues and friends: Emily Hannum, Jerry Jacobs, Rogers Smith, Greg Urban, Robin Leidner, David Gibson, Grace Kao, Stefan Klusemann, Meredith Rossner, Liz Lee, Jacob Avery, Liz Raleigh, Bridget Nolan, Cathy van de Ruit, Tugce Ellialti, Alexander Jerneck, Carolyn Chernoff, Ryan Burg, Kathleen Riley, Junhow Wei, Vitor Miranda, Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, Ruth Hunt Burke, Ning Hsieh, Doga Kerestecioglu, Radha Modi. I also benefitted from teaching and writing of Barbie Zelizer, whose classes I took in my first year and whose work has influenced mine ever since. Carolanne Saunders, Audra Rodgers, Aline Rowens, Nancy Bolinski and Marcus Wright have been most amazing in v helping me navigate the world of Penn. I could never finish this project without their assistance. This work would not have been completed without the generous support of the Sociology Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Gertrude and Otto Pollak Summer Research Fellowship. My gratitude also goes to the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism both for financial support and for providing a venue to present my work in a stimulating interdisciplinary environment. In the final stages, the write-up was supported by the Global Supplementary Grant of the Open Society Institute and funds provided by my advisors, Dr. Collins and Dr. Bosk. My dear friends, Arjun, Amruta, Alyona, Zain, David, Dana, Sveta, Anya, have all been there for me through my dissertating and also at times when “life was happening to me.” They were kind enough to provide multiple distractions and the good times, making the whole process so much more enjoyable. Margaret Hagan and the rest of the Hagans and the Darins who welcomed me in their home throughout the years deserve a special mention. I am lucky to have adopted the best family in America. I am also grateful to Ali and Jenn, who each contributed to my personal growth in their own ways, making me a better person in the end. This list would have been incomplete if I did not mention my favorite niece Sasha. She was a baby when I first left Russia, and managed to grow up into a teenager in the time it took me to write this dissertation. Our long Skype conversations helped me keep my academic work in perspective. I also want to thank my sister Olga. She happily listened to the stories of my dissertation trials and tribulations and never failed to inquire how soon I was going to be done. vi Lastly, I want to thank my parents, Evgenia Nikolaevna and Oleg Alekseevich Gorbenko, for believing in me and supporting me in my ambitions and life decisions, even when some of them led me away from home. vii ABSTRACT FROM PRINT TO PIXEL: VISUAL MEDIA AND THE FATE OF NONVIOLENT SOCIAL MOVEMENT ACTIVISM Ksenia O. Gorbenko Tukufu Zuberi In order to be heard or seen, nonviolent social movements (NVSMs) require an audience. News images of nonviolent protests become the means through which awareness of social movements is created. Comparative historical and semiotic analysis of journalistic images demonstrates that violence is a prominent theme within news coverage of nonviolent struggles.