This event is taking place as part of the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair, three days of workshops and tabling with queer music performances at night.

A talk based on research conducted for the forthcoming book, Abolishing Surveillance: Digital Media Activism and State Repression (PM Press), which offers an in-depth study of how various communities and activist organizations are resisting such efforts by integrating digital media activism into their actions against state surveillance and repression and for a better world. The book focuses on a wide array of movements within the United States such as Latinx copwatching groups in New York City, Muslim and Arab American communities in Minneapolis, undercover animal rights activists, and counter-summit protesters to explore the ways in which government surveillance and repression impacts them and, more importantly, their different but related online and offline tactics and strategies employed for self-determination and liberation. Digital media production becomes a core element in such organizing as cell phones and other forms of handheld technology become more ubiquitous. Yet such uses of technology can only be successfully employed when built upon strong grassroots organizing that has always been essential for social movements to take root. For this talk, Chris Robe will particularly focus on collective organizing and copwatching, exploring their historical roots in the U.S. through labor organizing to the present moment

Chris Robé is a professor in Film and Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. He focuses on issues of community media, radical filmmaking, and digital activism. He has published essays on radical media in journals like Jump Cut, Rethinking Marxism, and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. His first book is Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture. He is also a contributor to the PopMatters and Cineaste.