Rosemary Clark-Parsons

Rosemary Clark-Parsons completed her Ph.D. in communication from Penn's Annenberg School for Communication and the graduate certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies in August 2018. In addition to her research affiliation with the Alice Paul Center, Dr. Clark-Parsons is an Annenberg Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Activism, Communication, and Social Justice. Dr. Clark-Parsons' research focuses on feminist social movements in the United States and their media practices. During her time as a postdoctoral fellow and research affiliate, she will be working on a book project, Doing it Ourselves: The Networked Practices of Feminist Media Activism. Based on her dissertation research, this project charts a paradigm shift in feminist organizing in the U.S. Whereas 1960s-era feminism unfolded through the in-person activities of formal organizations, today, feminist movements are mediated and networked. Contemporary feminism manifests as hashtags, blogs, print zines, digitally coordinated protests, online communities, and more. Case studies of recent movements suggest that, for feminists, to be networked is to be both politically empowered and politically vulnerable. At the same time that emerging media platforms enable activists to quickly reach wide audiences at little or no expense, networked movements face online harassment, commercial cooptation, and activist burnout. Drawing on a qualitative, mixed-methods approach, the book examines how feminists are navigating the double-edged nature of networked activism. In particular, Clark-Parsons demonstrates how feminists are taking up networked media to organize resistance, mobilize protests, and cultivate communities, all while juggling the affordances and limitations of their media tools.