ABSTRACT
If Chapters 7 and 8 enquire into the general conditions for its success, in this and the next chapter we ask about the distinctiveness and the political character of democratic media activism. We draw upon a set of interviews conducted in Vancouver, Canada – a self-consciously ‘global’ city of over two million inhabitants, a major trade, investment and immigration gateway between Asia and North America, a scenic playground for jet-setters, and a bastion of some of the previous century’s most significant social movements. From the 1930s Vancouver was an urban stronghold of labour militancy and socialist advocacy in Canada (Phillips 1967). During the 1970s it gave birth to Greenpeace, arguably now the world’s most influential environmental organization (Dale 1996); yet in the same years Vancouver became the home of the Fraser Institute, one of the most successful neoliberal advocacy think tanks. In the 1980s the city hosted the largest annual peace rallies on the continent (Hackett 1991) and was also the site for an urban reform movement that gained strong representation in city government in the mid 1980s and in 2002 helped elect a left-wing council (Vogel 2003). Studies of activism in Vancouver in the 1990s documented affinities and differences between ‘new social movements’ and the labour movement (Carroll and Ratner 1995); they explored the network of ‘cross-movement’ activism in terms of differing social visions (Carroll and Ratner 1996); compared the media strategies of Greenpeace with those of the leading local anti-poverty and gay/lesbian/bi/trans groups (Carroll and Ratner 1999); and documented the persistence of distinct ‘oppositional cultures’ within movements (Carroll and Ratner 2001).
