In this book, NPR social media chief Andy Carvin - hailed by The Guardian as 'the man who tweets revolutions' - offers a first hand recap of the Arab Spring. Part memoir, part history, the book includes intimate stories of the revolutionaries who fought for freedom on the streets and across the internet - stories that might have never been told before the days of social media.

Bearing Witness While Black tells the story of this century's most powerful Black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists who documented it. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters in dozens of US cities--using little more than the device in their pockets. Their urgent dispatches from the frontlines spurred a global debate on excessive police force, which claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children at disproportionate rates. This groundbreaking book reveals how the perfect storm of smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered Black activists to create their own news outlets, which continued a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism. Bearing Witness While Black is the first book of its kind to identify three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people--slavery, lynching, and police brutality--and explain how storytellers during each period documented its atrocities through journalism. What results is a stunning genealogy--of how the slave narratives of the 1700s inspired the Abolitionist movement; how the black newspapers of the 1800s galvanized the anti-lynching and Civil Rights movements; and how the smartphones of today have powered the anti-police brutality movement. This lineage of black witnessing, Allissa V. Richardson argues, is formidable and forever evolving. Richardson's own activism, as an award-winning pioneer of smartphone journalism, informs this text. Weaving in personal accounts of her teaching in the US and Africa, and of her own brushes with police brutality, Richardson shares how she has inspired black youth to use mobile devices, to speak up from the margins. It is from this vantage point, as participant-observer, that she urges us not to become numb to the tragic imagery that African Americans have documented. Instead, Bearing Witness While Black conveys a crucial need to protect our right to look into the forbidden space of violence against black bodies, and to continue to regard the smartphone as an instrument of moral suasion and social change.

Still and moving images are crucial factors in contemporary political conflicts. They not only have representational, expressive or illustrative functions, but also augment and create significant events. Beyond altering states of mind, they affect bodies and often life or death is at stake. Various forms of image operations are currently performed in the contexts of war, insurgency and activism. Photographs, videos, interactive simulations and other kinds of images steer drones to their targets, train soldiers, terrorise the public, celebrate protest icons, uncover injustices, or call for help. They are often parts of complex agential networks and move across different media and cultural environments. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the role and function of images in political life. Balancing theoretical reflections with in-depth case studies, it brings together renowned scholars and activists from different fields to offer a multifaceted critical perspective on a crucial aspect of contemporary visual culture.

Explores the urban context of post-Katrina New Orleans with which the TV show engages. In Treme, Jaimey Fisher analyzes how the HBO television series Treme (2010–13) treads new ground by engaging with historical events and their traumatic aftermaths, in particular with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and subsequent flooding in New Orleans. Instead of building up to a devastating occurrence, David Simon's much anticipated follow-up to The Wire (2002-08) unfolds with characters coping in the wake of catastrophe, in a mode that Fisher explores as "afterness." Treme charts these changes while also memorializing the number of New Orleans cultures that were immediately endangered. David Simon's and Eric Overmyer's Tremeattempts something unprecedented for a multi-season series. Although the show follows, in some ways, in the celebrated footsteps of The Wire—for example, in its elegiac tracking of the historical struggles of an American city—Fisher investigates how Treme varies from The Wire's work with genre and what replaces it: The Wire is a careful, even baroque variation on the police drama, while Treme dispenses with genre altogether. This poses considerable challenges for popular television, which Simon and Overmyer address in several ways, including by offering a carefully montaged map of New Orleans and foregrounding the distance witnessing of watershed events there. Another way in which Treme sets itself apart is its memorialization of the city's inestimable contributions to American music, especially to jazz, soul, rhythm and blues, rap, rock, and funk. Treme gives such music and its many makers unprecedented attention, both in terms of screen time for music and narrative exposition around musicians. A key element of the volume is its look at the show's themes of race, crime, and civil rights as well as the corporate versus community recovery and remaking of the city. Treme's synthesizing mélange of the arts in their specific geographical context, coupled with political and socio-economic analysis of the city, highlights the show's unique approach. Fans of the works of Simon and Overmyer, as well as television studies students and scholars, will enjoy this keen-eyed approach to a beloved show.