Author Bios

Dr. Anna Feigenbaum joins The Media School at Bournemouth University as a lecturer in August 2012. In 2012-2013 she holds a postdoctoral associate post at the Rutger’s Centre for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University to conduct research on how protest camps share and exchange knowledge and strategies. Her research takes a transdisciplinary approach to communications combining sociological and cultural studies methods around the notion of collective actions as communicative phenomenon. Her work also engages technology studies to investigate new media development and expand upon traditional notions of what count as communication technologies—to include things from shoe boxes to snipped bits of wire. In 2008 she completed her PhD dissertation, ‘Tactics and Technology at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp,’ at McGill University in Montreal, where her project was funded internationally by a Mellon fellowship from the Institute for Historical Research, University of London and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Published research includes studies of global resistance to fences (ephemera 2010), women’s protest music production (Journal of Popular Music 2010), and protest camp-based print cultures (Feminist Media Studies 2012). Anna is involved in campaigns around gender, sexuality, climate change and migrant rights and is a member of the Anarchist Studies Network and the Creative Resistance Research Network.

Dr. Fabian Frenzel is a lecturer at Leicester University and Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research and interests cover democratic politics with a special focus on the role of leisure, mobility and culture trans-national political action and the potentials and limits of a ‘globalisation from below’. His has worked on empirical cases of democratic politics in Europe and Africa, looking at issues such as alternative media, international development and climate change. His PhD thesis, titled ‘Politics in Motion: The mobilities of political tourists’ is from the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University. It analyses critically the way activist identities and social movements are formed in practices of mobility, for example international solidarity travel or protest camps. His work has been published in journals such as Environment and Planning, Tourism Geographies and in a variety of collected editions.

Dr. Patrick McCurdy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications at University of Ottawa.  His research and areas of interest cover media protest and spectacle; the media practices of social movement actors; media events; and media and international development, particularly in Africa and with a specific interest in the issue of climate change. Patrick McCurdy obtained his PhD from the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in May 2009. His dissertation, entitled “‘I Predict a Riot’ – Mediation and Political Contention: Dissent!’s media practices at the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit”, focused on the ways in which radical social movement actors think about and interact with media at the site of protest. His thesis both documents the media strategies of radical social movement actors, as well as critically examines the utility of such “spectacular” actions in an age of media saturation. His work has been published in academic journals including the International Journal of Communications, Critical Discourse Studies, and Communications – European Journal of Communication Research.