Project 2: Inventions of Activism (Present Tense)

English 1020
Spring 2010
Project 2: Inventions of Activism (Present Tense)

IntroductionNow that we’ve taken a look at inventions of activism from the past, let’s turn our attention to the ever-changing present. In America and around the globe, scores of activists, young and old, take to the streets, both the physical streets and the virtual streets of the world wide web, to promote, defend, justify, extend, explain (along with many other action verbs) their particular causes—the issues, situations, and beliefs that keep them up at night. We need only check the daily news to find an issue to rally around.
Who (or what) is an activist? What does it mean to activate? Some forms of activism are plainly radical. Radical activists can be provocative; that is, they actively seek to provoke the opposition, to push matters to a head. Since this type of direct action can put someone afoul of the law, often activists themselves wish not to be readily identifiable (such as these WTO protesters in Seattle, WA, 1999). Radical activism can be violent or nonviolent.
Many activists, from a wide array of causes, espouse nonviolent resistance. They, too, wish to move things to a head, but their approach is less confrontation. Often nonviolent protesters try to make themselves a nuisance, an obstacle. Environmental activists in West Virginia staged a sit-in in the state capital building, blocking the hallway outside the governor’s office. They were arrested and carried out, one by one, including an 80 year-old woman. Similarly, activists protesting at a Mountaintop Removal site chained themselves to a bulldozer, forcing work to a halt; other activists (including former MTSU student, Eric Blevins, right) erected platforms high in treetops of land slated for MTR mining. The main goal of these versions of nonviolent protest is simply to bring media awareness to the problem at hand—in this case, the systematic and irreversible destruction of the Appalachian mountains, all the ecosystems therein, and all the human environments, too.
For this second project, we’ll choose current forms of activism, get to know the conversations surrounding these forms of activism (through focused research), assess what we think we know and what we need to know, begin to formulate claims about these topics, consider a rhetorical stance and purpose, consider our audience(s), concentrate on the material we gather, take special care with documenting our source material, think carefully about organization, consider style and tone appropriate for an academic research argument on these particular subjects, consider how we design our presentations and what, if any, visuals might enhance them; and, finally, when we’re nearing completion, we’ll begin to meticulously proofread and edit our work.

Due Date: Monday, March 29th
Length: 1900 words
Format: MLA; a minimum of six (6) academic sources (NO WIKI!)