Risa Applegarth’s Just Kids: Youth Activism and Rhetorical Agency is a three-part analysis of adolescent activism over the last thirty years. The analysis centers on their activist rhetorical agency so as to reframe youth efforts as not just emblematic of the movements they represent, but as symbols of embodied power in their own right. Each of the three parts is developed around a specific case study set in the United States. Reflexive interviews complement the research and enable participant consideration of subsidiary concepts such as temporality, memory, and materialism.
Keyword: agency
UBI as a Tool for Solidarity: A Response to Richard Todd Stafford
I am examining UBI in order to imagine a more egalitarian democracy under capitalism through the redistribution of national wealth that all labor, paid and unpaid, create. I maintain that the redistribution of capital through a UBI cannot be completely dismissed; however, the key would be to remain dedicated to emboldening individual economic agency through bottom-up initiatives while battling for infrastructural changes in a governmental, top-down fashion.
“Up for Grabs”: Agency, Praxis, and the Politics of Early Digital Art
In its infancy, digital art was, as artist and writer Anne M. Spalter enthusiastically put it, “up for grabs.” But how did women artists overcome the fallacy that computer technology was inherently masculine? And why did computing become a kind of sanctuary for some women artists? I will show that the indeterminacy and flux that permitted freer agency, was reflected in the computing field as a whole. Over time, anti-computer sentiment, which affected all artists using the medium, would prove so pervasive that it often eclipsed the sexism later suffered by women.