The Eavesdropper and Onlooker as Proximate Agents of Social Change

CARRIE RENTSCHLER

McGill University, CANADA

 

Abstract

The eavesdropper and the onlooker have become models of activist potential. Their proximity to enactments of racist and gendered social violence, and their abilities to witness, record and disseminate records of this violence via smartphones and social media networks, define some of the conditions for social change around the situations in which bystanders are located online. Drawing from John Peters’ analysis of eavesdropping as the transformation of private talk into public communication, this article examines the contemporary activist reclamation of eavesdropping and onlooking as small-scale, networked conditions of social transformation. Imagined as small acts of intervention tied to participation in contemporary social media environments, their models of social change leverage the positionality of the eavesdropper and the onlooker, transforming the “listening in” that people do on social media and elsewhere into acts of agentic response. In the process, they recode the conditions in which harm is enacted from being surveilled online into conditions that also enable activist intervention. 

Keywords

Onlooking, eavesdropping, bystander, small-scale acts, social media, social change, politics of scale

 

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/156

 

“A good theory helps shape what we pay attention to and how we live and imagine living; it can be an anchor when things are awry, but it can be a harm when it stops us from taking in singularity, anomaly, and unpredicted forms of life.”  – Lauren Berlant quoted in Zarranz et. al., 2017: 13)

“What you pay attention to grows.”   – adrienne maree brown (2017: 43)

“It is in the microstructures of social interaction that the innovations of political culture become apparent.”   – Jeff Goldfarb (2007: 38).

The positions of the onlooker and eavesdropper have increasingly come to matter in social change efforts and social movement thinking. Whether in feminist anti-harassment efforts online and in the streets in groups such as Hollaback! and hashtags #YouOkSis? (Nakamura, 2014; Rentschler, 2017; 2018) or via Black cellphone witnessing initiatives to counter-surveil the police (Richardson, 2020), social movements recognize the potentials of onlookers and bystanders to act as proximate, internet-connected social change agents. For many social movement actors, the conditions of peer surveillance and proximate social relations online are opportunities for bystander intervention into structural oppressions, harassing behaviors, and the enactment of microaggressions (see Rentschler, 2017). And in social media economies where the commodity of attention is so highly valued and the presumption of peer surveillance is so normalized, the person who pays attention while listening-in can also become someone who intervenes into acts of gendered and racialized oppression. By fostering interventionist forms of attention to oppression online, bystander activism treats social media attention as the currency through which harmful interactions can be interrupted by onlookers. As transformative justice activist adrienne maree brown puts it: “what you pay attention to grows” (2017: 43).

Bystander intervention represents an emerging model of social change that frames violence prevention as a networked and spreadable phenomenon online. It identifies the monitorial conditions of witnessing violence against others online as opportunity structures for eavesdroppers and network participants to intervene in oppressive acts of communication. Their activist models of ‘listening in’ aim to transform the eavesdropper into an accountable witness, because “to witness an event is to be in some way responsible to it” (Peters, 2001: 709). If “eavesdropping is always a potential in any communication system in which strangers must handle personal cargo” (Peters, 1999: 176), as John Durham Peters asserts, then bystander intervention into online harassment and violence activates a call to talk back and act against the harms a listener might hear online. The forms of personal cargo to which they pay witness includes harms committed against LGBTQIA+ people, women and gender non-binary folks, and racialized individuals, who disproportionately experience harassment and violence online.

Recent studies demonstrate just how much gender and racial violence people pay witness to online against others and as primary targets themselves. A 2017 Pew Research Center report found that 40% of their U.S. respondents experienced online harassment while over 65% witnessed others being harassed online. The percentage of people surveyed who witness online violence increases to 86% for individuals aged 15-29 (Duggan, 2017). A few years prior, in a 2014 Pew Research Center study, 73% of respondents reported witnessing someone else being harassed online in the form of name-calling and intentional acts of humiliation; 25% witnessed someone being physically threatened, while close to 20% witnessed others being stalked and sexually harassed on social media, often for sustained periods of time (Duggan, 2014). In Canada, the 2014 General Social Survey found that 17% of respondents aged 18-29 reported being harassed or stalked online, 1/3 of whom experienced both.

In these contexts, in which people report significant levels of witnessing harassment and violence online, social change is being re-conceptualized around the interventions that eavesdroppers and onlookers can make by virtue of their participation as monitors on social media platforms. These monitorial citizens often keep watch “even while he or she is doing something else” (Schudson, 1998: 311), enacting a distracted form of surveillance. They “scan the informational environment” (Schudson, 1998: 310), and attend to “gestures, behaviors and patterns” that might reveal impending harassment and present harm, without necessarily paying close attention (Love, 2010: 378). Drawing on Erving Goffman’s concept of “eyes on the street”, they might also come to recognize the “way that different kinds of persons suffer the attention and inattention of others” online (Love, 2010: 379, emphasis added). The movement models I examine here not only presume that conditions of social media surveillance exist, but that these conditions enable certain kinds of bystander-based interventions via people’s social media participation. They conceive of eavesdropping and onlooking as proximately (and even distractedly) situated positions from which to respond to acts of oppression in online social networks.

John Durham Peters’ (1999) analysis of eavesdropping as a condition of telephonically mediated communication in the early twentieth century seems especially prescient in this moment, then, when the practices of surveillance and listening-in online define some of the key parameters of participation—and intervention—in contemporary social media environments. As Peters explains, eavesdroppers occupy positions of “passive witnesses—accidental audiences” that “observe the events of the world” (Peters, 2002: 709). But their “having been present at an occurrence” comes with expectations that they will tell others about it. In doing so, they become witnesses who bear some of the responsibilities, and burdens, to act (Peters 2002: 710). For Peters, the actions of the accidental witness reveal the larger collective purpose, and difficulty, of communication: to “transform experience into discourse” and action (2002: 711). In our networked media environments, eavesdropping and onlooking are conditioned by imperfect and often invasive forms of peer surveillance that, for some social movements, could be re-oriented toward more caring ways to look out for each other. Movements target bystanders in their roles as both participants and observers in cultures of online harassment and violence, who can disrupt incidents of harm as a different kind of witness to them. While the internet is where so much harmful sexualized, gendered, and racist violent takes place, it is also a key milieu in which people learn how to counter-act it and around which several movements are organizing (see Jane, 2017; Mendes, Ringrose and Keller, 2019; Penny, 2014; Phillips and Milner, 2021).

This article extends Peters’ theses in his book Speaking into the Air on eavesdropping as a condition of networked communication systems, the indeterminacies of communicative reception, and the conditions of indiscriminancy between the personal and public in online communication to conceptualize the social change work people are doing in online conditions of intimate publicness. Intimate publicness constitutes both inter-subjective relations of care and pleasure as well as system-supported acts of humiliation and harm. Done in view of and in audible range of others on social media infrastructures, online intimacy is produced in connective conditions that can be caring but also cruel. Some people may care about you, who you are and your individuality online, but some may also betray and punish you and your presentation of self in front of others, creating rituals of humiliation that are meant to be audienced by others. Sometimes these acts are carried out by the same people. Sometimes they are also indifferent to who people are as individuals and how they identify themselves, and yet their power comes in how personal their effects are and can feel.

Peters’ focus in Speaking into the Air on the imperfections of communication and impossibility of perfect communion between interlocutors reoriented scholarly inquiry in communication around the finite, non-transcendent, contingent and even tragic realities of inter-subjective and collective life. I take up Peters’ invitation to rethink communication around the attempts people make to connect with others in conditions that are both profoundly indifferent and also sometimes incredibly personal. His text is, perhaps, a somewhat unexpected place to start re-examining what social change might look like from a scalable interactional framework in contemporary social movements. Peters may not consider social change or movement actors in his work, yet the contingencies of inter-subjectivity, the experiences of loss, love and grief, and the difficult attempts people make to act together point to some of the ways that social movement actors conceive of social change in emergent, non-determined, relational, and scalar ways, communication work that social movement actors are doing in the fungible and situational contexts in which social violence and the everyday enactments of oppression occur.

I connect Peters’ (1999) thesis on eavesdropping and the democracy of indifference in broadcast media to the conditions of harm and oppression that social movement actors identify in interactional contexts that bridge online and offline situations of harassment and violence. I examine what it might mean to “embrace the frail stuff we are made of” (Peters, 1999: 60) at the heart of how we conceive of justice as something that gets enacted in situational practices of communication. The position of the eavesdropper and the onlooker illustrates ways of thinking about what it means to feel, think, and act politically in the current moment around proximate relationships, attention economies, and small-scale interactions online. Thinking from the position of the eavesdropper as a potential social change agent situates witnesses as participants within relationships of power and oppression, as observers and actors. People who use social media, whether they consciously admit it or not, are participants in an attention economy whose currencies of exchange are affective as much as they are communicative. Online, people are situated in the dynamics of these economies in differential ways: as subjects of and to them, as producers and propagators of them, and even, in some cases, as co-strugglers against them (Mariame Kaba cited in Russo, 2019: 27-28). This is the context of social intervention on which this article will primarily focus. My interest lies in the ways social movement thinkers reconceive people’s co-implication in networked systems of oppression as bystanders, and how they model ways to listen to, watch, and interrupt “systemic power relations [that] are sustained and elaborated by the daily, routine behavior of individuals” (Orlie, 1997: 4).

Contemporary ideas about where and how social change happens are increasingly associated with what it means to be on social media and to comport oneself there. These conditions create certain limits for bystander intervention. As Jodi Dean (2010) argues, online activity gets captured in the circuits of attention and capital on social media platforms, where participants are “caught in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance” that “exploit communication” (2010: 4-5). In these conditions, as Dean argues, making or sharing a post constitutes the act of making a social contribution, where a post is “the primary unit designating contribution” online and “contribution” may signal little more than “the fact of sending a message” (Dean, 2010: 49, 101). Dean challenges readers to reconsider the very idea that making a post on social media is the same thing as conducting a political act, as corporate social media platforms profit from the political energies and feelings users produce in the process of their repeated participation on these sites.

In turn, ideas of social change and what it means to participate in political dialogue online are intimately tied to the ways it feels to participate in online attention economies and to become a recipient of their affective currencies (see Nakamura, 2014). Materials like pledge campaigns, for instance, have become central to some bystander intervention training, particularly at universities, where the very idea of drawing online attention to a cause is central to the model of social change. Online pledges to ‘not be a bystander’ offer visual profile templates to users that easily fit into social media economies of status updates and online profile maintenance (Marwick, 2013; see figure 1). Profile templates easily replicate the self-branding work that users exchange in online economies of attention, propagating another memetic form that reproduces the ‘edited self’ while also making a kind of political claim—a promissory note to one’s future self (Marwick, 2013: 195). Campaigns like these function as forms of currency in social media attention economies, where participation is exchanged for being seen as a self-branding participant.

 

With these limits in mind, this article examines how attention is understood across a range of bystander intervention models. I examine public awareness campaigns created by individuals and organizations that model new justice practices regarding gender and racial violence, focusing on infographics and other visualizations of eavesdropper and onlooker interventions that are themselves posted and shared through online social networks. These spreadable media model some ways to intervene into communicative acts of oppression within many of the very circuits of capture Dean (2010) identified. Their formats materialize some of the increasingly “standardizable and transmissible components of feminist [and anti-racist] practice” that presume intervention is, at least in part, online and exchanged in attention economies (Murphy, 2012: 29).

I turn first to recent theories of social change that identify small scale interactional interventions as the foundation on which some bystander intervention draws. This scalar theory of change extends beyond bystander intervention initiatives to include non-violent social movement models of civil disobedience and transformative justice frameworks that, for instance, approach problems of intimate partner violence and child sexual abuse through community accountability practices that explicitly avoid police and criminal justice system involvement. Building habits of response to conditions of violence cuts across these bodies of social movement thought. Bystander intervention, for example, establishes scripts that can be routinized in responses to interactional elements of oppressive behavior that might also disrupt their easy replication. I then turn to an examination of how these models shape notions of bystander intervention in conditions of social media surveillance, and how these conditions span relationships in which people know and don’t know one other. I draw on the concept of relational responsibilities to push beyond the limited sensibilities of care for others that are articulated in some bystander intervention campaigns, particularly around online interventions, and suggest what these efforts might mean for theorizing social change in social media environments.

 

Theories of Small-Scale Change and Habit

Current theories of social change approach social transformation as something that can be scaled up from smaller, situated acts of response to larger collectivizing processes, what adrienne maree brown, drawing on Nick Obolensky’s (2014) work, calls “emergent strategy” that “build[s] complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions” (2017: 2). Issues of dissemination and scale are central to brown’s theory. For brown, “the large is an expression of the small” (2017: 41). Through “relatively simple interactions”, people learn to practice complexity, openness and connection to one another in ways that can be grown and dispersed (2017: 20). Other movement theories take up “the politics of small things”, tuning people into the backstage, kitchen table, meeting room conversations and strategy sessions that sit at the heart of community-level organizing work (Goldfarb, 2007; Kintz, 1997; Eliasoph, 1998). Jeffrey Goldfarb identifies the “microstructures of social interaction” as the building blocks of recent movement organizing. The mobilization of small groups of highly engaged social change agents defines several current models of non-violent social movement.

The climate crisis organization Extinction Rebellion, for instance, models social transformation on the mobilization of a small core of very active participants that engage in civil disobedience, while others play essential support roles that their movement texts recognize as central to activism. Their organizing model imagines a scaling up effect created through the civil disobedience activities of this relatively small but highly committed group of participants (Hallam, 2019). Extinction Rebellion draws from Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s (2011) research into non-violent revolutionary movements, which found that movements that successfully overthrew dictatorial governments mobilized around the participation of relatively small numbers of highly engaged supporters—constituting about 3.5% of the population (see Engler and Engler, 2016: 107-111). Those highly engaged people were central to the popularization of their movements and their goals, transforming bystanders into supporters by intentionally shifting public opinion.

My analysis focuses on similar movement conceptualizations of the bystander as a potential supporter who can be mobilized to change their thinking, but more significantly, their habits, as part of some current movements for gender and racial justice. While so much social change is represented in overly spectacular forms, anti-violence activists approach social change as a matter of changing how people do things. They establish new routines and protocols for how to speak and behave in less violent, dominating, and oppressive ways. This is an activist project that targets what Carolyn Pedwell calls the “material processes of habituation” (2017a: 151), those embodied practices and routines that both sustain relations of power and can also transform them. This is the “paradox at the root of the concept of habit”:

On the one hand, “habit” conjures unthinking reflex, mindless repetition and hence stasis. Yet on the other hand, without the formation of enduring habits, no substantive embodied social or political change can take shape, and become rooted enough to sustain (Pedwell, 2017b: 101-102, emphasis in original).

By targeting the “imbrication of the revolutionary and the routine” (Pedwell, 2017b: 95), Pedwell seeks to explain how social change happens “through what specific material processes and mechanisms”, processes which she identifies with habituated, routine ways of doing things (2017b: 96).

Activists target habituated routines of discrimination and violence in order to replace them with new habits of non-violent communication and interaction. Bystander-based intervention frameworks, for instance, target how structures of power are habitually patterned in social interaction. They provide frameworks that show people how to do situational assessments of oppressive communication and behavior and learn to recognize patterns of sexualized, gendered and racialized violence; they also help onlookers script reports of and responses to them. Octavia Calder-Dawe (2015), for example, refers to the organized patterns through which sexism is routinely enacted in interaction as the “everyday choreographies of sexism”. These are patterns that repeat across multiple incidents of sexual harassment. Websites such as the UK project Everyday Sexism and the feminist blog project Strategic Misogyny led by students at Goldsmiths University “collect, publish and report sexist acts” of sexual harassment and gender violence as part of a feminist movement that makes the violence more visible as a structural problem and thereby more actionable (Whitley and Page, 2015: 36; see also Ahmed, 2017; Bates, 2015). Both projects catalogue online instances of sexual harassment, creating “a deposit system to show the scale of sexism”, a “structure to give evidence of structure” to the problem of institutionalized gender violence (Ahmed, 2017: 30).

As an agent of social change, the bystander is not often portrayed as someone who makes a report, but rather as a person who documents violence using an internet-connected mobile phone (see Rentschler, 2018). In social change efforts that center bystanders, eavesdropping is conceived as a distributed phenomenon: if anyone at any time can be a bystander, then (almost) everyone is situated to become a change agent by virtue of their participation listening-in to networked environments and the internet-connected devices that put them into relation with others. The conditions of networked connectivity, then, are fundamental to the politics of distributed agency on which bystander intervention models depend. Civil liberty organizations such as the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, portray the interventionist positionality of the bystander in their mobile app, “Mobile Justice”. Cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz’s 2015 image posted on the Mobile Justice CA app site depicts the app user recording police harassment of racialized individuals on their mobile phone. In the image, he holds his phone in the same position as the police officer, who raises and aims his gun at a Black civilian who stands with their back turned and arms raised (see Figure 2). The app is designed to automatically send recordings of police violence to the ACLU, collapsing the actions of recording and reporting police violence in acts of what Allissa Richardson (2020) calls “Black witnessing”. Here the ability to disseminate recordings is automated: to record is to have already decided to report and disseminate the evidence. The act of recording by the white male mobile-phone witness in the cartoon does the work of evidence-building and storytelling about police violence against racialized communities that constitutes some of the essential work of witnessing on behalf of Black communities. The act of witnessing modelled in the app includes not only the ‘digital video capture’ of the incident of police harassment but also its dissemination to a non-governmental organization and to social media networks (see George, George and Moquin, 2021). The app presents “bystander digital video” as an “emancipatory technology in restoring justice” against structural anti-Black racism in U.S. policing (George, George and Moquin, 2021: 6376).

 

Other bystander intervention models present the witness as someone who is known to target/victim and other witnesses, whether as friends or other intimates, or as the familiar strangers of networked relationships of programmed sociality online (see Bucher, 2019; Humphreys, 2018). Black feminist author Mikki Kendall’s comic book Paths, for instance, is aimed at male-identified teenagers and their peer relationships. It models how to interrupt the non-consensual sharing of young women’s nude images online, a growing problem of image-based sexual abuse and technology-facilitated sexual violence (Henry and Powell, 2015; Henry, Flynn and Powell, 2018; Maddocks, 2018). Sam and Taylor, two young male friends, are shown commenting on a text chat in which another young man, “Reese”, has shared a nude image of a young woman in their school. Paths depicts the kind of conversation in which such an intervention might happen, in text bubbles and drawings of their exchange. Sam feels that Reese is “getting away with something” harmful: none of the other people participating in the chat say that the non-consensual distribution of the image is wrong, and no one holds Reese or any of the bystanders accountable for their actions.

Sam is situated as an intervener, but he does not initially see himself as one. The process-orientation of the comic portrays peer intervention as a form of infolding interaction, locating points of social change in situations where peers can explain the harms of another’s actions, suggesting ways to become accountable for those harms while working through the feelings of that accountability work. In the conversation that Sam and Taylor have, Sam’s comments imply that someone else should be responsible for putting a stop to the non-consensual sharing of the photos. Over the course of the narrative, we see Sam take more responsibility as a bystander, including talking to Taylor and challenging his blaming of the young woman for having taken the nude image in the first place, a common defense in image abuse cases like the one represented here (see e.g. Hasinoff, 2017). Sam explains how the theft and non-consensual distribution of his classmate’s image is a violation of the girl’s privacy, who, in posting them, did not expect “them to wind up on the internet”. Taylor gets defensive and chastises both Sam and the young woman for not seeing the whole situation as a joke, as “not that bad”, a statement that diminishes the seriousness of gender violence (see Gay, 2018). The young woman, meanwhile, has taken an overdose of pills in response to her violation, echoing recent cases like that of teenager Amanda Todd in British Columbia, who committed suicide in 2012 after being repeatedly harassed online after she shared a partially nude photo of herself with an older man online (who had also used a false identity like Reese in Paths; see Figure 3).

Paths models bystander intervention as something friends and peers do for each other when they degrade, harm and/or violate others through their words and actions. It presents a chain of interactional moments between friends through a visual format where “subtext, performative encounters, and conflicted feelings can be represented graphically” as part of social change efforts (Feigenbaum and Almalholdaei, 2020: 161). We see the conversational strategies that Sam uses, and we witness the conflicted feelings he and Taylor have over the course of their talk. Paths also narrates how interventions scale up from the interpersonal spaces of interaction between friends, peers, and in families, to the institutional scales of school authorities, the police and the hospital.

 

Paths presents bystander intervention as actions that peers communicate in the context of their online participation. It is based on the idea that young people (as well as middle aged professors) relate to one another in conditions of peer surveillance: they follow each other’s social media feeds and regularly communicate through mobile texts and messaging apps. On social media, they are situated as networked ‘witnesses’ to each other’s lives, and the stories they tell of those lives. They monitor other people’s posts, enacting forms of peer surveillance that “watch over what peers upload”, redistribute and say online (Trottier, 2012: 319). Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are designed to enable users to easily gossip about, ‘creep’, and stalk others, to conduct the ‘social surveillance’ that occurs between people on social media: “the ongoing eavesdropping, investigation, gossip and inquiry that constitutes information gathering by people about their peers, made salient by the social digitization normalized by social media” (Marwick, 2012: 382). While this surveillance is increasingly understood by users as mutual and normal on social media, it also demonstrably affects how people behave. It also affects how people present themselves and relate to others in ways that might be caring or harmful (see Trottier, 2012; Marwick, 2012; Andrejevic, 2005). As demonstrated in Paths, people oppress and dominate others online through conditions of social surveillance, by harassing them, saying hateful things, and violating the privacy expectations posters have. Other participants in these networks of social surveillance can interrupt these acts.

Bystander intervention materials and infographics are designed to be shared online and distributed across the same networks where the conditions of social surveillance facilitate harm. They communicate how online witnesses can ready themselves to assess verbal micro-aggressions and respond to racist and sexist jokes and harassing and non-consensual behaviors online. The social media bystander is impelled to pay attention to and read situations for their potential harms and learn to recognize behaviors and actions that can cause harm, including ones they participate in and/or may be subject to themselves. An infographic created in February 2016 by designer and communication strategist Ashley Fairbanks, an Anishinaabe woman and activist from the White Earth Nation, offers a scalar analytic of “how harassment and problematic language lay the foundation for sexual violence and murder”. Her Facebook post was broadly circulated on social media and was used by social movement groups such as Heart Mob (a group that addresses online gender and racial harassment), feminist rape crisis centers and sexual consent campaigns.

The infographic provides an example of how a listener could respond to a sexist joke as part of a larger framework of anti-violence prevention. As Fairbanks explained on Facebook, she made “this tool to explain to one friend why I can’t laugh at rape jokes” (Fairbanks’ post, March 16, 2017). Using a pyramid structure, the image visually represents a scalar understanding of how harassing verbal statements or jokes not only connect to conditions of deadly assault but serve as some of the cultural foundations that reproduce gender violence at the institutional level (see Figure 4). By modeling verbal responses to a rape joke, the image also illustrates how bystanders can react to statements that downplay the harmful effects of misogynist jokes, by directly stating how oppressive humor contributes to a culture of violence. At the same time, the appearance of the interlocutors’ relaxed and smiling faces in this context might seem to contradict the difficult (and uncomfortable) experience of planning for and having to respond to this communication. Perhaps the infographic is meant to depict these conversations as less difficult than one might expect them to be, to communicate that response is do-able. In this way, the infographic offers a proxy representation of what it means to facilitate social change through inter-personal communication, that practice of making difficult work and conversations easier for people to do together (brown, 2017: 30). In such conditions, people can “share analysis, engaging and facilitating deep small transformations that pick up and echo each other toward a tipping point” of behaving and relating in less oppressive ways (brown, 2017: 55, emphasis added).

Fairbanks’ infographic models how to respond to the verbal manifestation of sexist and misogynist speech, and in doing so, take accountability as someone who hears it by interrupting and naming it (Russo, 2019: 25, 29). While the infographic models individual response, other strategies might be required to visualize what more collective iterations of response look like, to scale up from the interpersonal to the collective and institutional. Most of the infographics I identify in my research on bystander intervention model interpersonal rather than collective responses to oppression, where the interpersonal scale of response might stand in for the collective. Models like this show how people can enact new habits of intervention in the form of scripted responses. But they often do not, and perhaps cannot, as easily show the work that people do and the processes people use to scale up these habits from the person-to-person contexts of interaction to larger shared and organized response (see Russo, 2019: 136-138).

 

A Politics of Care Between Strangers

Other models articulate intervention in more collectivized terms around a politics of care, like the care webs that Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2017) and others envision around disability justice activism. Recently published feminist manifestos and disability justice mutual aid manuals, for instance, articulate a politics of care based in looking out for one another, including strangers and those with whom one does not have close emotional connections (see Butler, 2015; Spade, 2021; The Care Collective, 2020; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2017; Samaran, 2019). The feminist Care Collective frames care as a politics of interdependency that requires building “the social capacity and activity involving the nurturance of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life. […] To put care center stage means recognizing our interdependencies” (The Care Collective, 2020: 5, emphasis in original). Models like this one are based in relational responsibilities between strangers. Care here does not only or even necessarily mean one has strong feelings of care for others—though one might—but instead signals ways of relating to one another through the expression and work of care. Care constitutes forms of practice. It can be all-encompassing, which often leads to burn-out when adequate supports for carers are not in place, but it can also be limited, task-based and bounded by one’s own needs and abilities, as disability justice advocates themselves articulate. As John Durham Peters explains, “to treat others as we would want to be treated means performing for them in such a way not that the self is authentically represented but that the other is caringly served” (Peters, 1999: 268). In this way, caring for others is not about “getting our communication right”, as the scripted bystander responses to oppression presented in the infographics above might initially suggest; it is about working to alleviate the conditions of precarity and oppression in which others are harmed in the relationships of interdependency in which we are already implicated, using practices of communication that are often imperfect, contingent, incomplete and sometimes just plain messy. It also, as Peters suggests, does not require that we necessarily know each other intimately, and this is, in part, the difficulty of modeling social change on practices of care.

I myself have grappled with the significance of making small, relational changes between people when the needs for broad system-level transformations are so urgent. Social movement thinkers increasingly focus on social change as a dynamic and emerging process of social relationality, such as brown’s emergent strategy. To scale up this strategy requires intentional practices of “adaptive, relational ways of being, on our own and with others” (brown, 2017: 2). Recognizing patterns and creating new ones is central to the social change process brown identifies. Without using the language of habit per se, brown proposes that social change emerges from new patterns of practice geared toward “critical connections over critical mass” (2017: 9), a term she draws from Grace Lee Boggs. A model of social change located in building new habits recognizes both the durability of embodied routines of power and the possibility that they can be turned and re-oriented toward more enduring patterns of justice (Ahmed, 2007). A politics of care gets embodied in habituated routines of how we relate to one another.

To get there, brown presents facilitation as the guided set of processes through which people learn to cultivate less harmful and more caring relationships and build new patterns of relating that could, ideally, be scaled up. What happens at, and because of, the small scale of interaction models ways of in-habiting different patterns of non-violent social relationality (see Butler, 2020). These changes are not easily represented through spectacular visuals or dramatic and sudden registers of revolution and action. They are embodied, routine, and everyday; they materialize in repeated and nearly automatic interactions (see also Scarry, 2011). To think of social transformation as tied to new habit formation recognizes the “immanent and ongoing” nature of change. It focuses, as Carolyn Pedwell describes it, on how the shock of revolutionary thought and action transforms into “the longer-term cultivation of new habits, rhythms and forms of embodied coordination” (Pedwell, 2017b: 107, 114). This view of what Pedwell calls “social change in a minor key” approaches the disruption and transformation of habit as the generative site and material of social change (Pedwell, 2021). These “minor ontologies of change” scale up through the interplay of habituated embodied acts, transformations in the environments that shape them, and the materials and infrastructures that condition and support them (Pedwell, 2021: 15-21).

As these approaches suggest, social change requires shifts in relational dynamics between people, non-human animals, and their environments. For brown, social change aimed at creating less harmful societies and redressing existing harms happens when people create less harmful patterns of interaction. She urges individuals to “see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet” (brown, 2017: 53). People can cultivate relationality through embodied daily practices. Social change takes shape through facilitative processes that build relationships and communities, reimagining how one works with others in proximate relations. brown describes facilitation as “the art of making things easier”—to “make it easier for humans to work together and get things done” (2017: 30). Things become easier as they become habitual. This work takes time and trust, conditions which must themselves be cultivated. Guided facilitation helps people learn to intentionally pay attention to how they relate to one another, the harms they might witness, experience and participate in, and the patterns of social relationality that reproduce those conditions of harm. What people intentionally pay attention to nurtures movement building and the conditions for social transformation.

brown’s model focuses on small-scale interactions and practices that nurture what another movement thinker and transformative justice practitioner, Nora Samaran (2019), calls the “relational responsibilities” we have to others. We have these responsibilities “regardless of our emotional closeness” to one another (Samaran, 2019: 7).

When we begin with this awareness of our already-existing interconnectedness, we can look at harm in an entirely inverted way, in which we are connected from the start. Harm, whether in the form of violation or neglect, is then understood as a harm to the integrity of those bonds, or as a failure to meet relational responsibilities, not only as a violation of a presumed disconnectedness (Samaran, 2019: 8).

Violence, she suggests, “is nurturance turned backward”, harming people’s relationships of interdependency with each other (2019: 18). As Samaran and others note, part of the difficulty in recognizing and coming to terms with interdependency is the unchosen nature of those structures of relating. Judith Butler argues that our interdependencies are “reducible neither to consent nor to agreement”, and extend beyond our own familiar community bonds (Butler, 2015: 105). They “impos[e] themselves upon us against our will” (Butler, 2015: 109). As Butler asserts: “I am already bound to you, and this is what it means to be the self I am, receptive to you in ways that I cannot fully predict or control” (2015: 110). We are always already in relation, and we do not choose our interdependencies with others. We, in turn, “do not have to know each other or deliberate in advance” in order to act on another’s behalf (Butler, 2015: 186).

Paris illustrator and filmmaker who goes by the handle @itsMaeril on Tumblr posted an infographic of bystander intervention into Islamophobic misogynist harassment that models bystander intervention as a caring form of low-level monitorial (and unchosen) action by and between strangers. The comic panel demonstrates how someone can respond to a stranger committing an Islamophobic verbal assault against a young woman who wears a hijab. The comic is one of a series of comics Maeril created, 10 histoires ordinaires (10 everyday stories), that model how individuals experience the dynamic intersection of multiple systems of oppression in the situational contexts of interpersonal and group interaction. The comics explore a range of situations that include how a Sephardic Jewish man experiences anti-semitism and Islamophobia in the workplace and how a young Chinese woman experiences anti-Asian racism, exoticism and non-consensual touching in her interactions at school. Posted to Tumblr, these images are re-blogged and shared across online networks; in my own social media feeds, I witnessed how people circulated and commented on the infographic as a feminist model of anti-racist intervention.

The one-page comic-format infographic focuses on how bystanders can enact care for the target of the harassment, modelling a conversation the bystander starts with the young woman and, in turn, ignoring the harasser and taking the attention off of him and his attack. It uses the feminist concept of safe space in order to describe the conditions the intervener cultivates by talking with the young woman (see Figure 5). At the same time, the incident in the infographic does not represent conditions in which harassing behavior can escalate, or the ways in which multiple harassers can transform the contexts of harassment and intervention into something more threatening and dangerous. In some recent cases, bystander intervention put both the targets of harassment and interveners in danger when they faced weapon-wielding assailants. In 2017, the year after this infographic was published, three male bystanders in Portland, Oregon intervened when a locally known white supremacist was making threats and yelling anti-Islamic slurs at two young Muslim women while they were riding the city’s light rail system. Two of those bystanders were stabbed and killed by the assailant when they were coming to the women’s aid, while the third bystander survived the stabbing (see Wamsley, 2017). I mention this not to critique the model of intervention that Maeril’s comic represents, but to instead recognize that conditions of racialized, misogynist, Islamophobic, transphobic and homophobic harassment can turn into physical violence that might require other forms of collective response and assistance to disrupt and de-escalate the situation.

 

Maeril’s infographic represents the intervener as a kind of first responder: someone (or anyone) whose position of proximity to an emerging situation or event enables her to witness it, assess the danger and risks, and offer assistance, where it is possible and safe to do so. In the infographic, ‘watching over’ is meant to enact care for unknown others, but in conditions that can sometimes escalate into forms of physical violence. This comic helps to visualize practices of intervention that are otherwise not that easy to see and may not meet expectations for what social change is supposed to look like. It also begins to illustrate the forms of care that can be enacted through relatively easy communicative interventions and what it feels like to be the target of harassment and a witness to this violence. In a single-page illustration, it manifests witnesses’ “capacity to maintain solidarity within a tangled space of antagonism, inconvenience, and non-recognition” (Berlant quoted in Zarranz et. al., 2017: 15): on a subway car, in the midst of strangers, and in close proximity to a large angry man harassing another person. Such an act of ‘standby citizenship’ models the actions of someone who is already in a state of awareness of what is happening around her and who takes responsibility for intervening through her capacity to act (Amna and Ekman, 2014: 2).  She communicates care and support that disrupt acts of harmful speech and threatening behavior.

 

Conclusion

These practices increasingly constitute contemporary visions of social change. The examples of interventionist eavesdropping and onlooking examined here represent an emerging set of standards of movement practice that see bystanders as interveners and social change agents. These standards and their models of intervention reveal ways of thinking about social change at the small scale, around interactional tactics and the creation of new habits tied to care for others that are meant to be scaled up through repetition. They call for behind-the-scenes facilitative processes that can cultivate and train people in how to take response-ability as witnesses to oppression (see Rentschler, 2014; Oliver, 2001). They offer ways of thinking about the prevention of online and in-person harassment as a practice of networked ‘community witness’—of using social surveillance, online, in the street and on public transit—as a tool for anti-violence work that can be transformed from the interpersonal to more collective forms of response. This evolving model of social change builds a system of protocols that aim to transform how people see, hear and interpret the hostilities around them as witnesses to it.

As forms of small and specific strategy, bystander intervention may actually reveal a larger set of transformations transpiring across current conditions of social change that inform communication studies and media theory. As John Durham Peters reminds media and communication scholars: “Civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, and exaggerated civility are all underexplored resources in the theory and practice of democratic communication” (Peters, 2005: 247). Contemporary activists see online communication and dissemination as ways of enacting care for people they become connected to online, via shared experience and concern. The close ties of social media engagement and social surveillance are also, in many cases, presumed and expected. And as Nora Samaran suggests, “in a healthy community, most human interaction takes place in this relational area in between closeness and complete stranger” (2019: 127).

These models necessarily start at the small scales of interaction and inter-relation. Alix Johnson, a transformative justice practitioner from the Bay Area in California, describes the necessity of starting small:

While I deeply believe in collective action and collection transformation, the place I start transformative justice intervention is small-scale. I think, “Who are two people who are going to show up for you? Who are two more people you can talk to about this?” I think about building from the ground up, rather than assuming support is already there, because building trust one by one is where a lot of communities are starting from (quoted in Samaran, 2019: 126-127).

The politics of care articulated here does not require us to love, or even like, people with whom we exist in interdependent relations and with whom we have relational responsibilities. We might recognize, as Samaran suggests, “I may not be your best friend, but I can show up in a few specific ways” (2019: 130).

All “communication is a risky adventure without guarantees”, Peters reminds us (1999: 267).  If “any kind of effort to make linkage via signs is a gamble” (Peters, 1999: 267), then what we have are the imperfect yet necessary attempts to alleviate harm and become more accountable in our relationships with those we know, and those we do not know. We are already witnesses to numerous harms committed against others: “as bystanders to genocide, to litter, to daily chatter, and to everything that happens within the range of our presence” (Peters, 2005: 244). So much bystander-ism, as Alix Johnson suggest, comes from telling ourselves:

“I’m not intimate with that person, they wouldn’t listen to me; I’m not a coparent, or an intimate partner, or a best friend, so I don’t have stakes or a say in this”. When in fact we can often build trust and closeness and community by choosing to actively support survivors, and actively interrupt violence and harm (quoted in Samaran, 2019: 130, emphasis in original).

Current social movement models recognize our situatedness in conditions of social surveillance, and they encourage us to attend to these unchosen relationships with a commitment to not only do no harm, but to extend care to those we do not necessarily know.

 

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Carrie Rentschler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and an Associate Member of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at McGill University. Her research examines feminist movements, social media and mobile networking technologies, and the politics of response, care, and witnessing around gender violence. She is the author of Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and the Media (Duke UP, 2011) and co-editor of Girlhood and the Politics of Place (Berghahn Books, 2016). She is currently writing two histories: one on bystander culture and movements for social change, and another on student media activism against gender violence. She has also started new research on how Type 1 diabetics embody relationships with medical technologies as quantified selves.

Email: carrie.rentschler@mcgill.ca