Politics and Prose at Busboys and Poets 14th & V welcomes L.A. Kauffman, author of Direct Action, and Zeynep Tufekci, author of Twitter and Tear Gas to discuss the evolution of social and political movements.
Kauffman is a long-time organizer, strategist, and journalist. She was deeply involved in the anti-war marches of 2003 as a mobilizing coordinator, and she’s been at work on this detailed and insightful history of protest for twenty-five of the thirty-plus years she’s been involved in organizing. The book starts with the myriad socio-political movements of the 1960s and traces activism through ACT UP to Occupy to Black Lives Matter. More than just compiling a chronology, Kauffman highlights the particular challenges presented to different groups, assesses their strategies, and traces how these initiatives have helped shape the American left and define the country’s culture of resistance.
In her groundbreaking study of 21st-century protest movements, Tufekci, a New York Times contributor and a faculty member at Harvard’s Berkman Center and the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, looks in detail at the role of technology in three recent uprisings. Focusing on the Zapatistas in Mexico in 1994, Egypt's Tahrir Square in 2011, and the Occupy movements in the U.S., Tufekci argues that social movements are valuable for their abilities to set a narrative, disrupt the status quo, and effect systemic change. Doing all three, however, has proved difficult, and she mines these different internet-fueled protests for lessons to guide organizers of the next movements.
