نعتذر! هذه الوحدة غير متوفرة كلياً باللغة العربية في الوقت الحالي. إن صندوق العدة أداة حية تتطور باستمرار. يمكنكم التواصل معنا لمساعدتنا في ترجمة هذه الوحدة.
باختصار
An innovative cultural campaign that mobilized the huge Harry Potter fan-base to fight for justice, human rights, and democracy in our world, just like Harry did in his world.
The Harry Potter fan-phenomenon is extraordinary. The franchise is the highest selling work of fiction in the history of literature. It cuts across cultures. After the Koran, it’s been the most requested book in the Guantánamo Bay prison. Fans have invested enormous resources into conferences, written reams of fan fiction, started Quidditch sports leagues and tournaments, and birthed an entire genre of music: Wizard Rock, with literally hundreds of bands, all singing about Harry Potter.
And yet, something was missing.
If we really are fans of the books, we should fight injustice in our world, the way Harry did in his.
“If Harry Potter were in our world,” I thought, “he’d do more than talk about Harry Potter. If we really were fans of the books, we should fight injustice in our world, the way Harry did in his.” In the books, Harry starts a student activist group called Dumbledore’s Army that wakes the media and government to Voldemort’s return. I wanted to create a Dumbledore’s Army in our own world that could wake our media and governments to stop global warming and end genocide in Darfur. By tapping into a teenager’s narrative connection to Harry Potter, such an organization could create a fun and accessible point of entry into what could otherwise be intimidating social issues.
And so, in mid-2005, I met up with Harry and the Potters, two brothers, both indie rock musicians who dress as Harry Potter and sing wildly popular punk songs at concerts with audiences in the hundreds and sometimes thousands.
Taking a novel approach to activism, we and a few others founded the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), and began using social media to organize the Harry Potter fanbase. Harry and the Potters reposted my action alerts to their 60,000 followers. Soon, other Wizard Rock bands were reposting the alerts. The biggest fan sites, like The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet, caught on and media coverage followed, with J. K. Rowling praising the group in Time magazine and on her own site. Soon the HPA was organizing among almost every facet of the Harry Potter fandom, and grew to over 70 volunteer staff and over 100 chapters around the world.
In the 10+ years of its existence, the HPA started and led a successful campaign to get Warner Bros to make all Harry Potter chocolate Fair Trade, has built libraries all over the US and world (Rwanda, Uganda, Detroit, Brooklyn, Puerto Rico, the Mississippi Delta, etc), and has sent five cargo planes of relief supplies to Haiti. With chapters in over 30 countries, the HPA has organized YouTube celebrities on net neutrality, advocated for human rights and equality on issues of class, race, sexuality, and gender. It leads a leadership training program called the Granger Leadership Academy. It's groundbreaking methodology has been featured in almost every major publication in the US, best selling books, documentaries, has influenced the direction of a 65 million dollar MacArthur study, and is continually cited as one of the pioneers of cultural activism in the 21st century.
Originally published in Beautiful Trouble.
التكتيكات الأساسية
HPA has over 100 offline chapters worldwide, and relies on distributed action events as a way to act in unison. Our most successful actions have centered on the midnight releases of new Potter films. (They’re simultaneous and worldwide, and people are already going, so it’s a great organizing opportunity.) We asked supporters to organize a specific offline action in the movie theatre line that goes with the theme of the film. Fan sites were more eager to advertise for this event, as they were already hyping the movie release. At one release night, the New York Times showed up at our flagship event, and we gathered thousands of petition signatures from people all over the world asking Warner Brothers to make all Harry Potter chocolate Fair Trade. Distributed actions around movie releases were a tactical approach that can be neatly put to work by other campaigns doing culture-based organizing.
المبادئ الأساسية
Meet people where they’re at, not where you want them to be. Harry Potter has tens of millions of young fans. HPA went to that fanbase as a fan, and then from there to the political issues. HPA has also hooked into another huge base of gifted young people: nerds. Fan and nerd culture make up a huge section of the most active people online, and nerdy teenagers are using the Internet to come together in unprecedented ways (just google Hunger Games, Whedon or Dr. Who). The Nerdfighters (“nerds using the power of their awesome to fight world suck”) are already starting to do for nerd-dom what HPA has done for Harry Potter fans. Remember to speak your group’s language and start with the values they would most readily respond to.
We need to organize through narratives on three levels: personal, collective, and mythological. The personal is your or your constituents’ individual story; the collective is the story of a nation or group; the mythological is the deeper, archetypal language of the psyche. Think: Avatar fans fighting against the Sky People (aka the coal industry) to protect the Pandora for our world. History’s villains — Hitler, bin Laden and mining companies — work the mythological level, so the good guys must, too. In its best moments, the Harry Potter Alliance is engaging in this kind of cultural dreamwork and cultural acupuncture.
People congregate online around common interests, but long for offline and real-world connection. Give it to them. Offer the big fan websites and group leaders a chance to make a difference (they normally want it) while demonstrating how it will help them engage their audience more deeply. Have a project for them with a solid ask that is authentically in the language of their site/fandom. Use social media playfully, and with a healthy balance of the three P’s: patience, persistence, and pizzazz.