Spoiler Alert! On pop culture and organizing

By Joseph Phelan, CSS Fellow

Tracy Van Slyke is busy.  When she isn’t pushing for gender justice in the media, or writing books about the power of linked progressive media she is challenging progressive organizers and activists to think of prime-time TV shows not as guilty pleasures but as some of the most powerful avenues for shaping our future, at least that is what she does with her new report – Spoiler Alert! How progressives will break through with pop-culture.

Tracy spent the last year interviewing and researching leading thinkers and actors in social justice, video game design, advertising, culture producers, and cultural campaigners. At the end of it she wrote Spoiler Alert! To capture all of the things she learned and to, “..provide a framework for social change makers on how to invest in pop culture and creative organizing and activism.”

Luckily, Tracy is a close friend and collaborator (you can check out our podcast the CultureCast here), so I called her to find out why she started on this project, she said:

“In all of my wonderful work in journalism and organizing I realized that we spend so much time on the political space that we often forget about the cultural space. It is in the cultural space that our ideas, values,  and beliefs come to life and can expand to diverse audiences. I wanted to make sure that his was balanced in our movements and it is a lot of fun.”

Check out Spoiler Alert! and get ready to think differently and innovatively about your organizing.