Intersections 2010: Encounters

Panel A: Sensual Travelers
Saturday, March 13, 2010
9:45 - 10:55 am
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, room ENG-LG11
Ryerson University
245 Church St

Digesting Imperialism
Daphna Atias, University of Michigan

Though the English encounter with Barbados in the 17th century, unlike many English encounters with the New World, was not framed by meetings with indigenous peoples (the native population had been decimated by disease long before English colonization began), settlers arriving on the island’s shores were met with an array of new foods. Their writing about these gastronomical encounters reveals the polyvalent function of food as sustenance, food as metaphor, and food as a site for knowledge production in a time when the British Empire, far from being inevitable, was an aspiration burdened by logistical uncertainty.

"Digesting Imperialism" will focus on Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Iland of Barbados (1657), an account of his encounter with the world beyond England’s shores that doubled as a promotional treatise hoping to spur and fund future settlement. Though Ligon depended on collaboration with Indians to learn about native food sources and adapt English dishes to tropical ingredients, his actions were not without risk. As the English approach to its colonies shifted from information-sharing to subjugation, Ligon operated contrary to the dominant model for engagement; additionally, his status as a traveler sparked fears that upon reencountering England, he would be too changed by his experience to successfully reenter the body politic. The summary retelling of Ligon’s History in Samuel Clarke’s A True, and Faithful Account of the Four Chiefest Plantations of the English in America (1670), demonstrates that before Ligon’s advice could be fully digested by English audiences, it had to be made digestible. By replacing scenes of partnership with judgmental claims of English superiority, the textual reframing of Ligon’s experience dampens the possibility that the encounter with the New World would be open to the chance discoveries that arise from cultural exchange. Clarke’s Account renders Ligon’s empirical information palatable even if his techniques are not.

Performing Tolerance: The Politics of Self-Congratulation and the Study of "World Music"
Juliet Hess, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

This paper examines how the study of "world music" and encounters with the real or imagined Other define the white, bourgeois subject as "tolerant" or "exalted" (Thobani, 2007). My conception of world music is spatial, as it represents a figurative (or literal) journey into or encounter with a culture in order to study music. I explore the subject matter of world music as an unknown or exotic space, essentialized through the very nature of being an object of study. Exoticization, commodification, and consumption arise in the context of studying world music; I address these issues throughout the body of this paper. The paper then investigates the different ways through which encounters with world music establish the Self. I explore the concept of "musical tourism", both in Toronto and in Ghana, relying primarily on my own personal encounters with world music and engagement with musical tourism. My theoretical framework on musical tourism begins with Aoyama’s (2009) work on Flamenco tourism and Nestel’s (2002) project on midwifery tourism. I conclude by offering several alternative practices which may allow for a non-essentializing approach to the study of world music.

References
Aoyama, Y. (2009). "Artists, Tourists, and the State: Cultural Tourism and the Flamenco Industry in Andalusia, Spain". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33(1), 80–104.
Nestel, S. (2002). "Delivering Subjects: Race, Space and the Emergence of Legalized Midwifery in Ontario". In S. Razack (Ed.), Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between the Lines.
Thobani, S. (2007). Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Encounters in Music and Public Transportation
Samuel Thulin, Concordia University

This presentation will investigate relationships between music, place, and mobility through an examination of mobile music devices, such as the iPod, and city travel, specifically walking, bussing, and taking the metro. A central question for this research is: how is the city experienced and engaged with as it is traveled through while listening to music? This presentation will discuss a research-creation project in which field-recordings of a specific travel route in the city of Montreal were used as the material for an electroacoustic musical composition that was then listened to by participants while they traveled along the same route. This intervention combined theory and practice to address encounters between and through: the real and the imagined; the real and the mediated; the soundscape and music; everyday life and art; and the senses. During the presentation I will give an overview of the project, play some brief excerpts (total time: 3:30min) from the composition, and consider how the above-mentioned encounters play out in the combination of city travel and listening to music.

Panel B: Modeling Learning
Saturday, March 13, 2010
11:15 am - 12:05 pm
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, room ENG-LG11
Ryerson University
245 Church St

Museological Encounters: The Choreography of Touch at the Royal Ontario Museum
May Chew, Queen's University

This paper will delve into the museological landscape—specifically, The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)—in order to explore touch, manifested through both haptic and figurative "contact." The ROM has recently seen significant shifts towards curatorial practices that attempt to incorporate interactive and immersive exhibits. However, rather than heralding a progressive departure from older paradigms, I argue that curatorial renovations newly centred on "contact" simply remobilize and, in fact, crystallize vestigial imperialist-colonialist notions of contact as an inherently one-sided model, where a "touchable" and penetrable other is constructed through the intervention of science and technology. In the museum, the cumulative effect of discourse—congealed through the synchrony of language, technology and architecture—effectively guides the visitor spatially, semantically, and ideologically into identifying with the ethnographer-scientist embarking on the quest to seize and "undercover" the body of the other. I will explore the ways in which mediating technologies might also function as sites of convergence that extend and destabilize the boundaries of proximal bodies, and therefore significantly challenge myths of subjectivity as singular and uncontaminated.

Teaching to Digress: Artists' Educational Models & Reverse Pedagogy
Mark Clintberg, Concordia University

A séance, a gnocchi-making party, an impromptu live talk show, and a tin-can phone sex service. These artworks were part of a collaborative effort by twenty contemporary artists to bend educational structures during an experimental artist’s residency called Reverse Pedagogy that was facilitated by artist Paul Butler in 2008 at The Banff Centre. As guest faculty for the residency, I witnessed a curious schedule of seminars that closely resembled extended, raucous house parties.

Contrary to the model often used in the contemporary public educational system, where learning is framed as a form of labour, Butler’s model eschews work per se in favor of leisure for educational means. A primary source for his approach is Jacques Rancière’s text The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which demonstrates how students can negotiate their learning under deft and gentle supervision rather than instruction per se.

This paper serves as both a reflective and prognostic tool to address the questions: what results are achieved in artworks that follow alternative educational models like Rancière’s, and who will benefit directly from such practices?

Panel C: Imaginative Historiographies
Saturday, March 13, 2010
2:25 –3:15 pm
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, room ENG-LG11
Ryerson University
245 Church St

The interstice of fact and fiction in Iranian cinema
Nima Maleki, European Graduate School

The intersection of fact and fiction in aesthetic traditions has the potential to unfold a multi-dimensional representation that is porous and supple in relation to our understanding of reality. Much of modern Iranian art, such as in 'neorealist cinema', has a genealogy that is rooted in pre-modern Iranian poetry. It does not arise from an Aristotelian mimesis that mainly holds representation as an aspect of reality (icastic mimesis). In traditional Iranian poetry, the icastic can correspond to a phantastic mimesis that is not limited to what actually exists. Fact and fantasy intrude upon each other and can become indiscernible. Here, the use of both modes of mimesis can help us see what is other than the real within reality. By real, here is meant "the constellation of signs before they have been forced into signifiers that we now collectively call reality." (Dabashi)

I propose to present and examine this indigenous character of traditional Iranian art as evidenced in neorealist cinema’s intersection of icastic and phantastic mimesis: to review its alternative forms of understanding (socio-political) reality, as well as touch on the application of this form on the country’s special experience with an aterritorial form of colonialism.

References
Dabashi, H. (2007). Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema, Washington: Mage Publishers.
Other sources for the above abstract include Martin Heidegger, Edward Said, Mula Sadra, and Khwaja Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (thinkers), as well as Iranian films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Ebrashim Golestan, and Abbas Kiarostami.

Encountering history: aesthetics, temporality, and relationality
Laura Thrasher, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

My paper will examine the terms of encounter with the past initiated through aesthetic texts that reference history. Drawing on recent theoretical work by Jill Bennett (2005) and Avery Gordon (2008), I will examine the terms on which the encounter with the past takes place through aesthetic texts, specifically the contemporary visual art of Omer Fast including Spielberg’s List (2003) and The Casting (2007). On what terms does the encounter with the past take place other than the facing of a transmission of information? How do we develop relationalities with the past and with history that are not premised on transmission of information from the past to the present, but instead set up a bidirectional relationality that allows both sites to be productively altered by such an encounter? How can we talk about the substance of the encounter that representational practices initiate beyond something of the ontological outlines of past people and events? What is at stake in these questions is the development of a new relationship between the past and the present, one that holds open the possibility of inventing "new forms of curiosity" (Gordon, 2008). My paper will regard aesthetics and affect as sites for the production of new forms of relationality that implicate us in the present moment of encounter.

References
Bennett, J. (2005). Empathic Vision : Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly Matters : Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 2nd Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Panel D: Audiotopias
Saturday, March 13, 2010
3:35- 4:25 pm
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, room ENG-LG11
Ryerson University
245 Church St

Late 1990's, Senegal: radio waves encounter liberation and the field of development but forgot to mention it
Jeanne Dorelli, Concordia University

In the late 1990’s, Senegal’s airwaves became liberated and both private and communitarian radios emerged. Simultaneously, development projects became more "community oriented." Circumstantially, radios and development actors started to work for one another, creating a strong social network of people working for the good of community radios. Almost twenty years later, these radios picture themselves as dependent on development’s institutions. Unequal power relations between the different actors rub shoulders with new social patterns such as ex-community radio journalists or managers working as consultants for the development institutions. The complexity of created relations translates the complexity of the social network at stake and the many possibilities of "encountering” within the network. I will use the image of "encountering” as a metaphor to stress the level of agencies of the various institutions and actors involved in the field of Senegalese community radio. My presentation will be greatly inspired by the field research and interviews I conducted in Dakar, Senegal during the fall 2009.

An Organization in Continuous Renewal: Negotiations of Canadian Space in Contemporary CBC Audio Distribution Models
Miles Weafer, York and Ryerson Universities

In 2005, CBC Radio began offering many programs as podcasts: digital recordings available for download and playback, in whole or in part, according to user discretion. This paper reads the national broadcaster's evolution from a provider of shared Canadian airtime to a manager of its own archives as a retooling of the CBC's attempt to situate its Canadian Broadcasting Centers as central managers of Canadian cultural space. My analysis emphasizes how the broadcaster's traditional collection of regional cultural activities and distribution of manufactured audio products is becoming a collection and repackaging of its own, regionally aired material. Reading the CBC's activities through Dowler's (1999) emphasis on the struggles between central cultural producers and marginal, content-providing communities, this paper discusses how CBC's management of its podcast archives reveals historical tensions and intersections between the regional representation mandated by the CBC, and the strategy of centralization by which it operates. Drawing from Benjamin's (1968) attention to the progressive and revelatory potential of film, this paper argues that podcasting provides both: a renewed agency for audiences who can repeat, fast forward, and select among CBC audio products, and; a public demonstration of the historical struggle between regional content providers and the centralizing cultural producer.

Panel E: Environmental Ethics
Saturday, March 13, 2010
4:35- 5:25 pm
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, room ENG-LG11
Ryerson University
245 Church St

"Silent" Alarm: The Mosquito Youth Deterrent and the Politics of Frequency
Mitchell Akiyama, McGill University

In 2005 the introduction of a new device threatened to deeply alter relations between adults and young people. This invention, the Mosquito emits ear-splitting high-frequency sound that, while unbearable to most under the age of 25, is completely silent to those older. As such, it stratifies space through sonic frequency, creating zones that, depending on who's listening, are simultaneously silent and noisy to the point of being painful. While the Mosquito has been marketed as a benign means of controlling space, I argue that the device causes pain and therefore constitutes a weaponization of sound. I make this case in direct opposition to the manufacturer's insistence that the Mosquito is harmless because it does not cause long-term hearing loss. This claim has a sinister resonance with the US army's use of music as a part of their "no-touch torture" policy.

I further argue that the age categories established by the Mosquito are arbitrary and that such a segregation is a part of a tradition that has constructed youth as a biologically discreet category. As well, by delegating the ability to control space to a machine, authorities and business owners remove themselves from any possibility of contact or dialogue.

Encountering the "Ecopolis": Foucault's Epimeleia Heautou and Environmental Relations
Petra Hroch, University of Alberta

Frédéric Gros, the editor of Michel Foucault's 1981-1982 lectures, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, remarks that the last years of Foucault's life (from 1980 to 1984) marked a crucial shift in the focus of his thought. After a long career of describing systems of power, in these lectures Foucault speaks of the subject "no longer [as] constituted [by]" but rather as "constituting itself through well-ordered practices" (513) [my emphasis].

This paper examines Foucault's late lectures and their relationship (or re-encounter) with Foucault's earlier work on "space," "governmentality," "discipline," and "biopolitics." Specifically, I examine Foucault's interest in the Ancient Greek practices of epimeleia heautou, or techniques of "care of the self," and how these relate to environmental ethics – the ethics of encountering the spaces that surround, and indeed, sustain us.

Foucault's conception of "care" is far from a solipsistic exercise; rather, it is constituted by attitudes, practices, and actions that are fundamentally relational, or, as Foucault emphasized, "shot through with the presence of the Other" (537). This paper examines the "politics" of "care" – namely, Foucault's provocative reading of the nature of the relationship between the self as apart from, and the self as a participant in a polis, or a political sphere. While, for Foucault, the polis was comprised of human subjects, I am interested in how the polis can be more broadly articulated, and how Foucault's ideas extend to our encounters with non-human entities such as other species and spaces (ecosystems, habitats, landscapes and our everyday environment) – with the "ecopolis" as a whole.

Although Foucault apparently "detested nature" and (quite surprisingly) never addressed environmental issues or the ecological crisis directly, much of his thought is relevant to contemporary concerns regarding our relations with the environment. Central to this paper is a concern with the connection, in Foucault's work, between "care" and "citizenship." In particular, this paper asks: How is this late work relevant to emerging concerns regarding the meaning of "citizenship," and the role of a "global citizen" in a world of 21st century environmental concerns?

References
Foucault, M. (2000). The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982. Eds. Frédéric Gros and Arnold I. Davidson. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador,

Darier, Éric. (1999). Discourses of the Environement. New York: Blackwell Publishing.

Panel F: Dynamic Orientations
Sunday, March 14, 2010
9:45 - 10:55 am
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, room ENG-LG11
Ryerson University
245 Church St

Beyond Stasis: sensing bodies in motion through Ginette Laurin's La Chambre Blanche
Niomi Anna Cherney, Concordia University

The following paper proposes a model of contemplating embodiment through the lens of contemporary dance. The medium of moving bodies, exemplified in Montreal choreographer Ginette Laurin's La Chambre Blanche, provokes a re-articulation of the interpenetrating relation between the work of dance and its audience. This re-imagination forces questions that envision the material body as a location of "in-between", a site of intercorporeal relation and as a locus of dialogue. Moving beyond discursive tendencies to analyze bodies at the site of their static positioning, I explore Brian Massumi's "sensing body in motion" (2001). I seek to unveil stasis as a coagulation of movement between points of freeze-frame. Readings of this coagulation, such as those posed in a discursive trajectory of embodied subjectivity, might derive its consequence as a body/ world relation in which world constructs body. Instead, La Chambre Blanche, read as an allegorical representation of Massumi's sensing body in motion, illustrates the becoming bodies of both viewer and work. La Chambre unfolds the relational potential immanent to corporeality.

The Cyborg Affect: Encountering Switch with Embodied Relation
Barbara Fornssler, European Graduate School

Framed as a necessary departure from Donna Haraway's theoretical cyborg, the figure of the "switch" is utilized as a new metaphor that opens different possibilities for conceptualizing agency in our encounters with technology. Appropriated from the complex sexual politics of BDSM culture, the figure of the switch allows for a renegotiation of relation and by extension Haraway's cyborg. The cyborg is bound in hybridism, a situation that limits engagement and insists on metaphysics. Technology should instead be understood as a 'life technique' that moves the human into a relation of 'living through' our technologies (cf. Schirmacher). This movement gives renewed impetus to the relation and its ontogenetic potential. The switch metaphor creates a space wherein the submissive/dominant dichotomy of the 'emancipatory feminist cyborg' and the 'patriarchal military-industrial cyborg' may be explored as a contextual and meshed embodiment of contingency; materialized as either/or via affective decision. The switch engages as submissive or dominant dependent on the context of encounter, allowing for a new agency of the becoming-subject without contradicting the necessity of Hegel's dialectic. This framing emphasizes a conception of relation and encounter that is rooted in sense perception and embodied affective choice, generating new directions for feminist philosophies of technology.

Queer Spaces and a Politics of Disorientation
Elizabeth Leinveer, University of Western Ontario

Sara Ahmed argues that objects appear queer when they are misaligned with the patterns through which the world is discursively organized that place certain bodies acting in certain ways or in proximity with others as out of line. The expression of queer sexualities and the sexualities of people with disabilities are often seen as bodies acting outside of the lines within which they are supposed to stay. This paper engages with the phenomenological possibilities of a "politics of disorientation," the strategy of resistance that Ahmed briefly proposes in Queer Phenomenology.

Working from the mandate of Acsexxxable, a queer and accessible sex party in Toronto, I propose that such a space is governed by a mandate of 'disorientation', creating a new set of 'orienting devices', framing the encounters that take place within it, allowing people to interact with queerness and (dis)ability as contingent and constructed against 'straight' categories. We face others with openness when we acknowledge and take accountability for the role that we play in the production of the other's body-identity, and we make ourselves vulnerable to the role that others play in our own. The queer accessible sex party creates a space to practice and realize a 'politics of disorientation'.

Panel G: Re-Forming Identities
Sunday, March 14, 2010
11:15 am - 12:05 pm
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, room ENG-LG11
Ryerson University
245 Church St

Working Through Post-Conflict Liminality: Rwanda and Northern Ireland
Jobb Arnold, Queen's University

This project contributes to filling gaps between the macro and micro level literature on changing identities, values, and practices following periods of ethnic violence and traumatic upheaval. By conducting a micro-political analysis of these features in Northern Ireland and Rwanda, the divergence and similarities with respect to national level discourse, I call attention to the importance of deconstructive micro-political engagement in moving toward (even if failing to attain) a non-binary identity discourse. While the macro / state-level discourses have significant influence on identity categories, local micro-political values and practices, though not independent, are not reducible to broad categorizations and influence important and less considered aspects of identity change. Both case studies demonstrate (intentionally or not) deconstructivist approaches that discard elements of former identifications while re-emphasizing others. Taken together, these case studies provide examples of how micro-political practices and values influence the negotiation of identity boundaries following periods of social upheaval.

Even though it was lawful and well intentioned, we're sorry.: Canadian identity and Canada's Indian Residential School apology
Jason Stabler, University of Victoria

Lawfulness and benevolence are deeply entrenched characteristics of Canada’s national identity. The social construction of this identity has its roots in the colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands and informs historic and ongoing power relations between Canadians and Indigenous peoples. This paper/presentation explores the hostile encounter of lawfulness and benevolence as characteristics of Canadian national identity with Indigenous self-determination, an essential component of decolonization. This encounter provides an opportunity for resisting the reproduction of Canadian national identity as lawful and benevolent and thus for transforming the relations of power between Canadians and Indigenous peoples. The exploration of this encounter will form the basis of a future discourse analysis of Canada’s 2008 Indian Residential Schools Apology.

Panel H: Impossible Communication
Sunday, March 13, 2010
1:15- 2:05 pm
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, room ENG-LG11
Ryerson University
245 Church St

Incorporeal Encounters and Affective Relationality in Krzysztof Kieslowski's film The Double Life of Veronique
Justin Derry, York University

Focusing on the body and individuality, this paper will explore the possibility for qualitative transformation and becoming to unfold from affective encounters between the incorporeal and corporeal dimensions of the body and bodies. Specifically, this paper will examine how incorporeal encounters of sensation and affect crystallize a multiplicity of individual bodies in a moving, relational depth. This challenges hierarchical divides between self/other, while opening quantitative pluralities of determined identities that structure political discourses of 'us' versus 'them'. Rather, individuality and identity are qualitative multiplicities, meaning, they are expressions of a body's embedded relationality, embodied affective depth and incorporeal encounters.

This argument will be presented through a reading of the Polish and French film The Double Life of Veronique (1991), directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. The film portrays Weronika and Veronique who are identifiably distinct female characters, yet we as viewers come to realize that these two characters constitute one and the same Figure. The characters encounter each other in what Deleuze would call a 'body-without-organs', a non-extensive, non-representable, indeterminate plane of experience. The film, along with this paper, will demonstrate the potentializing force of incorporeal and affective encounters, and the hybridizing effect these incorporeal encounters have on embodiment, individuality and relationality.

An Encounter with the Dead and a Fantasy of Communication: Intersubjectivity of Elegiac Poetry
Toshiaki Komura, University of Michigan

Helen Vendler once remarked that Elizabeth Bishop's elegy, "First Death in Nova Scotia," depicts an effort to "conspire in a fantasy of communication still possible" between the living and the dead. In many ways, this "fantasy of communication" is precisely what elegy, as a genre, has been predicated on, as the living elegist attempts to speak to and through the dead in an imagined encounter with them. As Paul de Man suggests, in the prosopopoeia of elegiac lyric, the living take on the characteristics of the dead: the encounter results in an intersubjective reformulation of the living speaker's subjectivities.

The present paper examines this intersubjective encounter between the living and the imagined dead in Theodore Roethke's "Elegy for Jane." In a re-reading of the poem, the paper presents the poem as less a Catullian elegy than an elegy for a student whom the speaker hardly knew, whereby the elegy itself constitutes an effort to speak to and come to know and understand the deceased. Based on this premise, the paper inquires: does an elegy make communication between the living and the dead possible? How does such an intersubjective encounter affect the sensibilities and subjectivities of the living speaker?

Panel I: Web of Power
Sunday, March 14, 2010
2:15 - 3:05 pm
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, room ENG-LG11
Ryerson University
245 Church St

A State-Run Internet: Developing an Authoritarian Internet Ontology of Control
Andrew Hare, The New School

While it is easy to relate the concepts of open source architecture and net neutrality as logical corollaries for the transformative and liberal possibilities of the Internet in the developed Western world, a vastly different Internet has begun to emerge during the last decade inside authoritarian societies. I argue this provides yet another major turning point in our understanding and conceptualization of the Internet. No longer must the Internet be seen as a media with a specific set of inherently democratic values, but instead as a broader socially constructed global technology strongly dependent on individual state's ideological sovereignty. By taking a survey of the methods of control and the evolution of Internet governance, it appears that instead of moving towards democracy as many Westerners have predicted, the space is becoming more authoritarian in many parts of the world.

In case studies taken from Iran, China, and Russia I'll demonstrate that the implementation of a sophisticated and diverse set of IT controls can provide us with a model of how authoritarian power is structured and constructed online. The analysis uses a social construction of technology framework to uphold three theoretical assumptions about the ontology of the Internet in authoritarian countries. First, I posit that the Internet does not inherently favor any particular political morality or moral philosophy. Second, I argue the contemporary authoritarian state has the technology, resources, and institutional support to remain the primary motivating actor in a new media environment. Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, I prove that the Internet is being used in authoritarian society as an effective tool of coercion and dominance that serves to reinforce and legitimize the state's ideological goals. Ultimately, I believe the development of Internet Technology in the authoritarian world provides a new working ontological model for understanding how a variegated technology can function and evolve alternatively around the world and how acting on this knowledge might shape the future of the global Internet.

Technologies of Freedom? Deconstructing Online "Resistance" and "Empowerment" through The Case of Moroccan Social Movement's Use of the Internet
Mohamed Ben Moussa, Concordia University

The Internet has been widely appropriated by civil society groups and movements that are struggling against authoritarianism and aspiring for social and political justice in various societies, particularly in the developing world. As a form of radical or alternative media, the Internet is believed to have not only helped these groups to challenge dominant discourses and frames, but also to establish more democratic forms of communication based on grass-root participation, dialogical discourse and horizontal networking. However, notwithstanding the vast literature acclaiming the ability of the Internet to empower political groups and movements to resist and challenge authoritarian governments, limited evidence has been provided to illustrate this potential within particular socio-economic and cultural contexts. To address this issue, the present paper deconstructs the notions of 'resistance' and 'empowerment' in relation to online political communication, focusing on the specific case of Moroccan social movements. Using both content and structural analyses, the study compares the websites of Islamic and leftist-oriented new social movements in Morocco, and the way they appropriate the Internet as a medium of communication and mobilization. One of the main findings of the study is that key features of online communication, such as interactivity and networking, are used selectively and strategically to serve specific discursive aims and political objectives in a way that reflects complex patterns of participation and control, as well as a group's identity, ideology, and organizational structure.

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