Teachers in the Digital Imaginary
摘要
This chapter connects the teachers’ movement to the broader wave of digitally enabled protest in recent years through their shared activist imaginary. Together, these movements have envisioned a world in which the public interest is guarded against continued encroachment by the market logics that have become hegemonic in the neoliberal epoch. Owing to the success of early movements in this wave, activists often romanticized the potential of the Internet, believing that its horizontal structures could manifest in egalitarian, non-hierarchical future societies. Movements like Occupy and the Indignados eschewed formal organizations and refused to engage with political systems that they saw as hopelessly captured by neoliberal logics. As a result, the public gatherings slowly died out without any notable policy changes being made. This is where teacher activists have succeeded, as they are anchored to institutions like their schools and unions. In Bennett and Segerbeg’s (The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Cambridge, University Press, New York, 2013) formulation, the teachers benefited from both the adaptability of “crowd-enabled mobilizations” and the endurance of “organizationally enabled mobilizations.” While the mobilization of broader publics provided the show of public support necessary to build momentum around specific issues, the union architecture provided teacher activists the legitimacy and organizing capacity lacking in other movements in this wave of contestation.