Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

Karen Miller

Subject Categories

American Studies

Keywords

New York City, Rat Subterranean News, High School Student Union, WIMP, participation, alternative media

Abstract

This study of three collectively-organized activist printing projects examines how information production is a strategy for communities to reimagine and reconfigure oppressive power structures. I consider the High School Student Union and their newspaper, the High School Free Press; the women’s collective that took over RAT Subterranean News; and WIMP, a radical printing collective that broke away from the New York City Students for a Democratic Society chapter and supported a variety of progressive movements in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This research examines how dissatisfaction with oppressive power structures leads individuals to build collective formations that intentionally place information production at the core of their work. Centering the lived experience of participants by drawing on interviews and oral histories, this study asks a series of questions: how are individuals changed by their involvement in making print media together, and what contributes to that? What kinds of new communities were built in these projects, and how did information production play a role in creating these? How can the space of a communal print shop build something that is more than the sum of its parts? How does this build power that might reach beyond itself? How do collective media making projects give participants space and tools to change the terms of participation for themselves and for others? And finally, how do these projects relate to existing power structures and build new ones? What do these projects actually do about power in the world? Ultimately, this research demonstrates how the goal and result of producing information together isn’t just to produce information. Rather, the space of making things together in a variety of collective formations is space to experiment with new power structures, to learn about how power can work in nonbinary formations, and to change the world.

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