Activism, academia, and new technologies: The complicities of theorised and mobilised resistances in the globalising- discourses of speed

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways in which several alter-globalist activist groups and thinkers, as well as left-wing academic theorists, mobilise discourses and divisions in an attempt to overcome gendered, raced and classed oppressions worldwide. In particular, this dissertation will draw out how these mobilisations and theorisations, despite (or because of) their liberatory claims, are actually implicated in the intensification of global hierarchies by repeatedly invoking narratives of transcendence, connection, progress and speed. Drawing from the quests for justice and truth that inspire current new media activism, radical Italian thought, and the concept of academia, this dissertation will argue that the humanist aporia that underlies all these practices, is what paradoxically also triggers the increasing disenfranchisement along lines of gender, class and race worldwide. Moreover, validating itself through the productive borderlines of academia and activism, this dissertation acknowledges that it is itself similarly implicated in these discourses and its concurrent reproduction of speed.