Telling Labor's Story: Workers, Media & Politics. Aug. 18 Conference @ Wayne State U with Hamilton Nolan-The Hammer; Kim Kelly-Fight Like Hell; Jonathan Kissam-UE News; Dave Elsila-UAW’s Solidarity Magazine & Annemarie Strassel-UNITE-HERE. events.wayne.edu/2025/08/18/t... @uniondemcomm.bsky.social

CFP Revised and Call Extended for DC Special Issue on Labor and Unionization!!

It was such an amazing time at #UDC2025 last week! I got to meet and reconnect with amazing people! Also presented part of my dissertation where I offer adopting the term “memesque” to address the commodification practices targeting memes and meme culture. @uniondemcomm.bsky.social

It was such a privilege presenting my archival research at the UDC conference in Tacoma, WA, this weekend 🙌🏻 Can’t wait to continue investigating how Robert A. Brady impacted our field. Thank you @uniondemcomm.bsky.social for putting on a great conference!

Unsurprisingly, #UDC2025 was an absolute blast. It was a huge honour to win the Brian Murphy award this year - it will forever live on my bookshelf with pride! Already counting down the 18 months until the next one @uniondemcomm.bsky.social @miccenter.bsky.social @bellisariograded.bsky.social

I am both deeply honored by the prize and thrilled for the first time to experience the warmth and SOLIDARITY that is UDC @uniondemcomm.bsky.social . This is the place to be and to connect!!

Stay in the conversation with the UDC 2025 Starter Pack! Missing from the list? Let us know! go.bsky.app/Fv6xH4y

Illinois at UDC ‘25 @victorpickard.bsky.social Janet Wasko @christina-ceisel.bsky.social @mandytroeger.bsky.social @johnnyrico.bsky.social Brian Dolber @andrew-kennis.bsky.social

Penn State at UDC ‘25

That’s a wrap! Huge thanks to our amazing attendees for sharing their fantastic work and engaging in generative conversation, to our Steering Committee, and most importantly to our Local Organizing Committee at U WashTacoma for their dedication to the org and their incredible work.

Smythe Lecture: we must bear the costs of not accepting AI’s inevitability. We must insist on holding open debate on what it means to make it work toward social ends & community goals Let’s not abandon the too bold and too risky the ideas of facing down corporatization of social life. #udc2025

Smythe Lecture: How ever much we are told the digital future is necessary and invisible and we can’t do anything about it, it’s a lie. We don’t need to retrofit the present for the inevitable future. Lets cooperate with each other to achieve a non-cooperation with corporate power. #udc2025

Smythe Lecture: platforms even, when we love them, produce the social for capital. If we want to change how the world is for us, its necessary to resist--head on--the corporatization of how we interact socially #udc2025

Smythe Lecture: our social world is a Leviathan in fragments from expansion of pure environmental extractivism; social extractivism from social media platforms allowed to build the wrong kind of social will; increasing role of commercial AI in capturing the forces of cognitive production #udc2025

Smythe Lecture: I don't trust oversimple recipes for change that can be read out of a rule book, but I also refuse to give up on change #udc2025

Smythe Lecture: my avoidance of oversimple links to practical politics is because while I hope for a better configuration of everything compared to where we are now, I am skeptical that the path is obvious or easily acceptable #udc2025

Smythe Lecture: effective theory is a tool for everyday life and everyday resistance. To regard the abstraction of theory with suspicion is to miss the power and practicability of theory #udc2025

At each conference, UDC confers the Dallas Smythe Award to honor a critical media scholar/activist whose work exhibits the spirit of engagement, democracy, teaching, and feistiness to which the UDC is committed. We're thrilled this year to present @couldrynick.bsky.social with that honor #udc2025

Huge congrats to @sydneyforde.bsky.social for winning UDC's 2025 Brian Murphy Student Paper Award for her paper is "The Dialectics of Broadband" #udc2025

No better way to end #udc2025 than with the Dallas Smythe Lecture from this year's awardee @couldrynick.bsky.social

Paulus: workers identify working conditions (job security, labor rights, decreased in freelance work) and collective organization (ability to fight the system that incubates sexual assault in a more systemic way) can go a long way toward protection #udc2025

Paulus: the "why" may be more understood, but the "what" has a lot of gaps and doesn't address systemic analysis or issues #udc2025

Now: Paulus on making safer work environments in German cultural and media industries. Despite progress, sexualized power is alive and well, so asking why are cultural and media industries so vulnerable to abuses of power and what can be done? #udc2025

Stoltzfus & Flores: in our current moment Amish people are seen as public health heroes - a white, hyper-reproductive, and antivaxed ideal #udc2025

UDCers: be sure to stop the by the registration table before leaving tonight to get a special discount code for Smythe Award Winner @couldrynick.bsky.social new book THE SPACE OF THE WORLD

Happening now: Stoltzfus & Flores on Christian Nationalist policies, eugenics, and genetic resistance, comparing how language and narratives to genetically fabricate and overdetermine two opposite groups - Amish and Mexicans #udc2025

Hey, #academicsky! Are you following the movement to create Mutual Academic Defense Compacts (MADC) among colleges and universities across the US to defend #highered? The UMass Amherst Faculty Senate is tracking all MADC resolutions. The movement is gaining steam! www.umass.edu/senate/madcs...

Great panel and a big thank you to all the contributors and friends and friends!

Attending #udc2025? The SSHRC-supported Global Media & Internet Concentration Project offers a treasure trove of resources, reports and data on the media, internet & telecoms industries in 36 countries and with considerable historical depth for each. 👇 👇 👇

Kidd: how do we do research that brings in issues of repro justice into the digital and mediatized spheres when digital platforms and surveillance capitalism have intensified the attacks on reproductive justice and basic social sustainability? #udc2025

Next up is Dorothy Kidd on repro rights and digital activism in the Trump era, thinking about what movement are in motion to counterattack the attack of the capacity of people around the world to sustain themselves #udc2025

Yousman: soft girl/trad wife movement primes a generation for backsliding into dangerous ideology: women only valuable if chosen by man to be wife/woman; queer communities are erased by radical embrace of heteronormativity; bodily autonomy nonexistent #udc2025

Yousman: soft girl and trad wife culture is a reaction to girlboss culture and is being validated in culture as normal because of choice feminism while superficially rejecting - but really embracing - capitalism #udc2025

Yousman: reality TV trends (Secret Lives of Mormon Wives) are reflecting and reenforcing social media trends like Trad Wives, but it's really just repackaged post-feminist and girl aesthetics #udc2025

Yousman on soft girls trad wives, and social media Stepford Wives kicks off with Ballerina Farm, can Nara Smith be far behind? #udc2025

Last panel of the day! Social Movements, Feminism, and Reproductive Rights with Lori Bindig Yousman, Isra Ali, Dorothy Kidd, Lars Stoltzfus, Joseph Flores, Aljoscha Paulus, and @tinemalz.bsky.social #udc2025

@aaronhere.bsky.social: Protocol instead of a platform has political saliency understanding that there is no good way out of this. So what happens when you build a protocol to protect the user from the protocol itself? #udc2025

@aaronhere.bsky.social: resistance and platforms - decentralization as a technology and a politics (idea of a Fediverse of promise and project). This brings us to BlueSky #udc2025

@aaronhere.bsky.social: how do we resist enshitification? End to end principle and data transferability and right of exit are two potentials - how do you deal with the core of platformification and platform decay? #udc2025

Now: @aaronhere.bsky.social and @johnnyrico.bsky.social on resistance and resolve on BlueSky (so meta) #udc2025

Post-lunch sessions about to start - we have @anismedia.bsky.social @aaronhere.bsky.social and @johnnyrico.bsky.social for Rethinking Social Media #udc2025

@anismedia.bsky.social: the project all along was controlling eComerce and banning Chinese apps like Alibaba Pay was key #udc2025

@anismedia.bsky.social: apps, digital platforms, and operations systems are inherently geopolitical artifacts emerging at a new frontier for inter-regional power conflicts among BRICS+ countries #udc2025

@anismedia.bsky.social: trade and geopolitics can't be divorced from the app banning conversation. What actors ultimately benefit from prolonging the conflict and high tech warfare in the short and long term? Turns to Benjamin Bratton's The Stack: On Software of Sovereignty and focuses #udc2025

@anismedia.bsky.social: gov't claims that strong digital infrastructure for economic growth, self sufficiency, and digital sovereignty, but may be more about privileging U.S. apps and exercising control #udc2025

@anismedia.bsky.social: apps are being used to link and grow social justice (and anti-government) movements in India, and those movements can be suppressed thru app banning under national security rhetoric #udc2025

@anismedia.bsky.social: India has banned more than 300+ Chinese apps (with more potentially on the way) under national security rhetoric #udc2025

First up is @anismedia.bsky.social exploring who benefits from banning Chinese apps in India #udc2025

During lunch, many UDC attendees took the time to visit the powerful “Melting Ice” public exhibit, which chronicles the pain and struggle of those in the Northwest Detention Center, and the resistance and advocacy against the illegal and inhumane treatment the detainees are subject to.

Macek: the deadline for TikTok may have been waived three times, but that doesn't stop this decision from being incredibly dangerous precedent #udc2025