ABSTRACT
On November 19, 2014 a group of over fifty mostly young activists, artists, and politicians from Egypt, Turkey, Sierra Leone, New Zealand, Venezuela, North Korea, Taiwan, Mexico, Yemen, Russia, as well as the United States, gathered at Union Market in Washington, DC, for the oneday event titled Fusion RiseUp. Housed in the trendy, urban Union Market, this event fea tured presentations, conversations, and discussions with today’s leading citizen advocates with the goal “to transform rising tides of protest into a wave of sustainable change”.1 The lineup of speakers included a wide variety of civic actors, ranging from Samantha Powers (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations), Cory Booker (New Jersey senator), Nadya Tolokon nikova and Maria Alekhina (founding members of the Pussy Riot collec tive), Wael Ghonim (one of the leading activists of the Arab Spring), and Cansu Yapici (active member of the group Taksim Solidarity, which played a key part in the Gezi protests of 2013). With topics such as the Syrian war, immigrant rights, online bullying, animal advocacy, online privacy, the role of social media in protests, and freedom of speech, Fusion RiseUp aimed to address some of the core concerns that have inspired waves of protests and acti vism throughout the world in the past decade. The event was organized by Fusion, the new TV and digital network launched by Univision and Disney/ABC in late October 2013 and targeting mostly the Englishspeaking Latino community. The list of partners behind this ini tiative was as diverse as the lineup of speakers: from Unicef, the United Nations Foundation, and the California Endowment, to Uber, Ashoka, and Noticias Univision, among others.
