As part of our ongoing fieldwork visit to London for the digital activism project, we went down to St Paul’s Cathedral to have a look at the things that are happening at #occupyLSX. Hundreds (thousands? — hard to say) of people were out there hanging around their tents, holding meetings, giving speeches, playing music (The Guns of Brixton by The Clash) and handing out flyers. My ethnographic focus was to get an insight into the offline practices relating to the #occupyLSX hashtag, and also to find and note expressions of on-site activities connecting to the digital.

Yesterday, I visited the Museum of London to take a look at a youth activism project where suburban kids of various classes and ethnic backgrounds have “broken into the museum” by creating two-minute YouTube clips representing their comments to the exhibits of London throughout history. These online audiovisual comments are accessed through QR codes that are scanned and decoded with smartphones. The code takes the viewer to the short films that renegotiate the meanings of the museum objects. This is a good example of how offline, very physical, places and things that are embedded in hegemonic understandings of history and voice, can be — not replaced but rendered in alternative ways with digital and social media tools.

I am currently doing fieldwork for my research on digital politics. The project seeks knowledge about conditions for activism, collective action and social movements in the age of digital media. Particular interest is devoted to the issue of interplay between the digital spaces and physical place in relation to creative initiatives in the overlapping fields of culture, media and politics. Today, we visited ReelNews out in Hackney. They are an activist video collective, set up to publicise and share information on inspirational campaigns and struggles from across the world. They are producing a bi-monthly newsreel, made up of a number of videos short enough to use in union and campaign meetings. The interview was great and gave lots of highly interesting information about translating engagement from the digital to the physical and vice-versa.

This is a video version (slides + voiceover) of the talk from Screening Gender 2011.