Raza Gillani is a journalist and organizer from Pakistan with a robust trajectory leading social movements in favor of students, worker, and immigrants’ rights both in his home country and in New York City. In Lahore, where he grew up, Gillani co-founded the Progressive Students Collective and the Haqooq-e-Khalq movement, which advocated for the rights of the masses. He is currently a member of the Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) collective in NYC, where he serves as an organizer of South Asian working-class communities, leveraging power through electoral and movement work.  More recently, Raza started Muhadjireen NYC, a social media activist community that connects South Asian immigrants in New York City with local politics through journalistic reporting. This project emerged as a response to the underrepresentation of South Asian demands in the mainstream media, and it aims to promote in-depth coverage of how immigrant areas operate on a social, political, and economic level. 

This month we interviewed Antoinette Kendrick, a second-year doctoral student and Instructor in CU Boulder’s department of Media Studies. She received her bachelor’s degree in psychology and her master’s degree in social work from the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on the social impact of digital media use on children and how we can enable effective strategies for teaching media literacy.

On the episode, we discuss how Antoinette’s background in social work informs her approach to media literacy for youth. Tune in to listen as we discuss platform politics, how we can curtail exposure to graphic media, and reforms for educating children on digital media literacy.

What does it mean to be a fan in the digital age? What do fan practices look like?

In this episode Dr. Jenkins takes us through fan activism to purchasing practices in China as he discusses research on emerging fan cultures. In this episode we will learn all about the new landscape of global fandom in an increasingly digitally mediated world.

Many of these open social media platforms are also better aligned with nonprofits’ values than major tech companies have been. What are the best ways for non-profits to get involved?

How do nonprofits navigate this emerging space in an already dense social media landscape? In this episode, we will hear from nonprofit leaders and technologists on how the emerging social networks relate to their organizations’ goals.

This episode presents some of Open Social Media’s origin stories from three speakers who have been involved in the development, culture, and communities of their platforms: Christine Lemmer-Webber (co-editor, ActivityPub), Evan Henshaw-Plath (founder, Nos), and Golda Velez (early participant, Bluesky). We will explore how queer experiences and activist movements, for instance, have played a vital role in shaping the design and direction of emerging platforms.

This conversation explores lessons from the past that could help us make social media better today. Our guest is University of Virginia media studies professor Kevin Driscoll, author most recently of “The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media.” He brings us stories of an almost-lost era before the Internet became widespread, whose traces are still very much with us.

This month on Looks Like New, we have a conversation with Eli Pariser, whose career has involved building several influential online platforms, pushing into the status quo by rethinking our online spaces by reflecting on human engagement in other kinds of public spaces—libraries, parks, and the democratic process.

What is Black Twitter?

This month, we had a conversation with Shamika Klassen, a Ph.D. candidate and researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, whose recently published research reveals some powerful findings.

As we witness company leaders and engineers retroactively addressing issues, is there a way for forward thinking to happen within the industry? Dr. Casey Fiesler explores these questions and more.

But for the most part, platforms rely on only very blunt tools for addressing these harms—the digital equivalents of censoring and exiling.

But can we do better than simply imagining we can make harm go away?

Niloufar Salehi (UC Berkeley) and Amy Hasinoff (CU Denver) have been exploring how to bring practices of restorative justice into online communities. This discussion is part of the Metagovernance Seminar (metagov.org).