Digital Alchemy

Moya Bailey 0:02
ICA presents

Moya Bailey 0:15
Hello, and welcome to the Digital Alchemy Podcast brought to you by the International Communication Association Podcast Network. My name is Moya Bailey. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and the founder of the Digital Apothecary Lab. For our second episode, I've invited Jeanette Lee to join me to discuss what is Digital Alchemy, and how it applies to her journey to help facilitate transformative initiatives in organizations.

Moya Bailey 0:54
I am so excited to be here with Jeanette Lee, who is the CO executive director of Allied Media Projects, where she has worked in various leadership roles since 2006. Over this period, she has led the growth and evolution of the organization through facilitative leadership, innovative program design, resource mobilization and network cultivation. She honed the theory and practice of media based organizing, that is at the core of AMP's work. She received her education and visionary organizing from her involvement with the youth leadership organization, Detroit Summer, founded by the late James and Grace Lee Boggs and the National Feminist Collective Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. She studied comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She's a mom, a dancer, and a motorcycle writer. Jeanette, thank you so much for taking the time. I'm so excited to talk to you.

Jeanette Lee 1:56
Thank you, Moya, I'm honored to talk with you.

Moya Bailey 1:59
Oh, thank you. I would love to hear a little bit about your AMP origin story. What's so interesting to me about your AMP origin story is that I think it also has seeds from your time at University of Michigan. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the courses, perhaps professors that I think kind of influenced you and got you into amp work?

Jeanette Lee 2:27
Well, it was certainly student activism, while I was at U of M, that kind of led me into the anti corporate globalization movement of the early 2000s, and specifically, the independent media wing of that movement. I was part of starting the Michigan Indie Media Center to cover a protest of the Group of Eight Energy Summit that was happening in Windsor, right across the river from Detroit, I think in 2002 or so. That was all sort of swirling around local organizing in Detroit, student organizing at U of M. I would say it was through my time at U of M also, and through that organizing work that I crossed paths with one Detroit Summer, the youth organization that would then become my sort of political place of upbringing for the next several decades. Also with Incite!, as you referenced in the bio. I took some courses while I was at U of M, with Nadine Naber, Andy Smith, Emily Lawson, Jyoti Lo, just incredible radical women of color scholars and folks who kind of really gave me the framework of radical women of color feminist thinking. I do remember that in 2005, specifically, it was through a class called Radical women of color feminism that I learned about Incite!. And there was a conference happening in New Orleans that year called the color of violence. I think those threads all kind of came together in the genesis of my involvement with AMP. My first job for Allied Media Projects was to coordinate the Youth Track in 2007, I believe. Also, I was working really closely with Nadia Abu Carr to kind of bring the what was called the Insight track to the AMC once it was moving to Detroit. It was sort of all the radical women of color media makers that were part of the blogging world that Nadia was deeply embedded in.

Moya Bailey 4:40
Yes, and that's what I love about it. That it has all of these different seeds and threads that come together to make kind of your position in AMP so powerful, and what you all have been able to accomplish is just incredible. I'm curious what has surprised you most about its growth? I mean, we talk a lot about how Allied Media Conference, specifically, went from an incredible zine conference to what it is today. And I think we're even struggling with the language to talk about what it is today. What has been interesting to you, or what are some moments in that growth, that have been particularly surprising to you?

Jeanette Lee 5:31
One moment that felt like surprising, for sure, and I always think of this as one of the kind of turning points in amps story was that after the conference had moved to Detroit, and the quality of it had substantively shifted to be rooted in the radical movement legacies of Detroit, as well as kind of weaving in these different movements from around the country. Yet, it felt like a big question of what's the value of this conference to Detroit. But after every conference, more and more local organizers would come to to us and say, like, we learned how to do you know, cell phone journalism at this conference, even though that was taught by de labor organizers from Los Angeles. They would be like, we want to learn how to do that, and will you lead a training for us? We're like, well, we don't necessarily know how to do all these digital media skills that you experienced at the conference, but we can try and start building up capacity for more of these kinds of trainings and infrastructure. When Obama was elected in 2009, and the Stimulus Act was passed, there was a big piece of that was committed to "closing the digital divide" in cities like Detroit. We were part of a coalition that kind of came together around this idea that if all this federal money was going to flow into our city, we didn't want it just to go to the big telecom corporations. We wanted it to go to the grassroots to really think about how digital infrastructure could be a layer on top of the really vibrant organizing infrastructure that we saw in Detroit. And so that was the the origins of the digital Justice Coalition, and I think the biggest surprise was that we actually got that federal money, because it was a sort of thing where it was like, we're welfare rights organizers, and EJ organizers, and grassroots media makers, and hip hop youth leading activists, and we're not going to actually get this federal money. But we're gonna make this coalition and come up with a brilliant vision for how we would use it if we were to get it. When we actually did, and it was through partnership with Michigan State University that we were able to get that money, it was really game changing. And I think for all of the the folks who were involved of that era, we were stretched in ways that we couldn't have imagined in terms of both our organizational capacity, our all of our personal relationships, our political ideas. It was just stretch, stretch, stretch, and so that was a period of such learning and growth upon the you know, the ending of that. What we ended up doing with the infrastructure that was built through that was to launch what's now our our sponsored projects program.

Moya Bailey 8:14
Brilliant. It seems like with all this work, there seems to still be this thread of like academics. I heard you mentioned, Michigan State being part of this and kind of your own origin story of U of M. I wonder if you have any thoughts for how academics and communication scholars can show up better for digital media makers for the kind of work that amp is doing? Going forward, what do you wish that academics and communication scholars would like take to heart about our movement work and what AMP is growing?

Jeanette Lee 8:56
Well, it's interesting. The professor who was the key to the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition was someone who we had never worked with prior, and really haven't worked with sense. But his approach to me really embodies what I wish more academics would do in the sense that there were several rounds of this federal money, and I believe Michigan State had gotten an initial round. They had been working with libraries in rural areas to distribute that money. They had come to Detroit, and they wanted to partner with Detroit Public Schools with the library system. They had been making inroads at the top institutional heads around here and getting nowhere, and so he they were like, well, I don't know, maybe we shouldn't partner with Detroit. We'll just stay focused on the rural areas. I crossed paths with him at an event where the National Telecommunication Information Agency had been doing these little kind of info sessions around the country, so I attended one of those and he spoke about their first app first started application. So I approached him afterwards and I said, we're in Detroit, and we're a grassroots coalition that has been doing all this type of training with teachers, and working with small businesses, etc. Maybe Michigan State wants to partner with us, if you can't get a connection with like the the schools. Basically like you can enter go into schools via teachers and students more from the bottom up, then the top down. And he was just like, Sure. The trust that this kind of partnership could happen with an entity, or a movement that was already in progress versus the idea that I think oftentimes academics come with, which is that they have to enter a space and start something new. Then it's a matter of bringing people from a place into that new thing, getting them to the table, getting them bought in. And here was a perfect example where it was we've been doing all this organizing to create this whole vision for how this money could be used. And you academic could just basically play a crucial role in kind of CO signing our application. Yeah, that was, again, a surprise that happens that way. But a really good surprise.

Moya Bailey 11:06
Yeah. And I'm curious then, what about his talk made you fee like you could approach him? Was there something in what he was saying that made you feel like, "Oh, we can probably do this"?

Jeanette Lee 11:19
I don't know. It was so many years ago. I don't think it was anything particular other than the fact that he said that they had had a successful first round application and that they were trying to find partners in Detroit.

Moya Bailey 11:31
I love that I'm just want to reflect back to our listening audience, that academics can play a crucial role in helping organizing that's already happening. They don't need to reinvent the wheel. They can really come in and just be the link.

Jeanette Lee 11:50
Yep, just have to really be listening and attentive to that rich world of organizing and thinking and movement building that's outside of the academy.

Moya Bailey 12:01
Absolutely. And building on that, this podcast is called Digital alchemy. And digital alchemy is something that I kind of came up with, but definitely has its origin in my experiences at or attending the Allied Media Conference. And so I've, I've said that when I talk about Digital Alchemy, I'm thinking of the ways that radical women of color, transform everyday digital media into valuable social justice, media magic, and I was wondering, you know, what does Digital Alchemy mean to you? And how do you see that showing up in your work with amp in AMC?

Jeanette Lee 12:44
Yeah. So I have to admit, before the podcast, I was like, let me Google digital alchemy, then, of course, it was like Moya Bailey's original term, which I love. I guess in that moment that alchemy was to say, like, let's really think about how digital media digital infrastructure can be the best forms of organizing relationships of trust and mutual aid and exchange, as opposed to replicating relationships of harm. A lot of it was about what are the kinds of relationships that we want to be growing through these technologies. That should inform the design of the technologies. That should inform the design of the programs that are teaching people these technologies. When I look at some of the outgrowth of that work today, it does feel like alchemy. This thing, the internet that can do so much harm, was transformed into a source of healing, connection, and radical idea generation rates. That feels like a kind of magic and I guess I'm thinking especially of like the work of the Detroit Community Technology Project, and their equitable internet Initiative, where grew out of the training in how to use the internet, how to make media for the internet, but became how to build the internet and do it in a way that is countering the legacy of digital redlining. Do it in a way that maximising neighborhood strength and connectivity. And now they're like on this whole other next level journey of imagining, like digital trusts. So the concept of community land Trust's, what does that look like for digital assets? And it's just, it's amazing, yeah, how that has alkalized out of that initial work.

Moya Bailey 14:39
I love that. I think AMP and AMC being so instrumental in introducing people to new tech, so my question now is kind of what new tech do you see on the horizon? What are some of the things that you're dreaming of? Hoping that we'll have in this new world as we go forward?

Jeanette Lee 15:02
So hard to say. For a while we've joked about this is going to be the year where the opening ceremony is like a hologram presentation by someone from another time, or someone from across the world, I think it will always be like some level of like tech innovation that, you know, we won't know till we get all the session proposals in and we're like, Whoa, that like that sounds wild. Like we need to have that. But then it'll also be like the concepts that like folks really need to be understanding in order to have the tools for navigating and dismantling the system of harm under which we live. And then also dreaming up the next thing.

Moya Bailey 15:44
Thank you so much for taking the time. And I want to just give this last moment to you. Is there anything else that you want to say, related to these topics? Anything else that's on your heart or mind at this moment?

Jeanette Lee 16:01
Yeah, just that I appreciate you so much, and this conversation, and the work of academics like yourself, who are like thinking about all this work. I guess I've got a bird's eye view, right? Because like for me, you know, in the day to day of it, I'm just thinking about how to make sure that people's bills get paid, right. When you first asked me, I was like, I don't really have anything to say about digital alchemy, because I feel like that lives in the realm of people who are making media and I'm don't even use social media, and I'm running an organization. The fact that you have this special role for like the radical folks within academia who are memory keeping. Being able to kind of like look at all these pieces and say this, this amounts to something that is worth naming, and remembering, and tracing back the origins of. Otherwise, just the crush of information and current events and things that turn in turn. I wouldn't even remember some of these things, if not prompted to remember and keep remembering, and telling the story over again. So thank you, Moya.

Moya Bailey 17:09
Oh, thank you so much, Jeanette. I so appreciate our time. We'll see you next time on another episode of Digital Alchemy.

Moya Bailey 17:19
Digital Alchemy is a production of the International Communication Association, Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Our producer is Daniel Christain. Our senior production coordinator is Nick Song. Our executive producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. The theme music is by Matt Oakley. Please check the show notes in the episode description to learn more about me, my guests and Digital Alchemy overall. Thanks for listening.