Community Activism in the Digital Age: Reinforcing and Combatting Structural Violence in a Struggling Neighborhood

This thesis uses a multi-modal ethnographic approach to study activism engaged in on behalf of a neighborhood in the struggling community of North Minneapolis. The study explores the duality and convergence of community activism in both online and IRL (in real life) environments. The most prolific online activism for the community comes from the Facebook Group "North Vent" whose members frequently engage in a raw, of-the-moment, subtly tinged racism designed to represent the neighborhood as a war-zone in desperate need of intervention from law enforcement to sources of power including government, the police, and the media. In contrast, there is another activism taking place in the community, one that lives primarily offline and has a starkly different stance as is exemplified in this thesis by the community oriented around the Tale Tract garden. These individuals believe in a North Minneapolis they believe has many redeeming qualities and a few frustratingly serious realities like violence and unemployment that they do not believe are interminable. They focus their efforts on marshaling and reconstituting power and reestablishing the locus of shared value away from race and towards amenities like the Tale Tract. Over the course of this ethnography, the Tale Tract group was able to take control of their local neighborhood association to use as a new and influential tool for their advocacy. Meanwhile, the number of "North Vent" members continued to grow and several articles were written about their frustrations in the local newspaper. In the case of "North Vent", the real win for them seems to be the perpetuation of structural violence in the community with the ultimate intention of clearing out an, "other" they see as the reason for the ills of the community. In the case of the Tale Tract group, their success stems from highlighting structural violence and staring it down by the sharing of white privilege with a diverse group of neighbors focused on finding a way to live together in peace.
activism; structural violence; affordances; north minneapolis; facebook; social media; ethnography; digital media; anthropology; applied anthropology; neighborhoods