The birth of gen free

: measuring how creative activism can generate change

Abstract

This study measures the effectiveness of creative activism and how it fares when compared to conventional approaches. Conventional forms of activism like protesting or petitioning are still in use today (Nygård & Jakobsson, 2013) and are seen as an effective way to influence the public and achieve change (Ekman & Amnå, 2012). Creative activism makes use of these same methods, but adapts to the evolving nature of audiences and provides a solution to the challenging landscape of information that activists have to fight through (Duncombe & Harrebye, 2021). This innovative way to achieve change has had few studies and real-life applications since its conception, which is why this project will significantly further its study. The Duncombe-Harrebye method will be used to collect data, which will strengthen the method’s ability to accurately measure how people react, feel and remember creative campaigns of an advocacy nature. Proving that creative activism is the ideal form of advocacy would shift how social movements should perform their actions, presenting them with a more effective way to achieve their goals. Through a mix of quantitative and qualitative data, collected from observation, spot interviews and follow-up questionnaires, we analyze how passersby felt during three staged interventions, what they thought about the message and elements of these interventions, and finally what and how they remembered them some time after experiencing them. The results show that creative activism outperformed conventional methods in every quantitative metric, with the qualitative results showing appreciation by participants toward the creativity, entertainment and originality of creative activism. On top of this, we registered better long-term memory results as well as more initiative to perform actions to advance our proposed solution.

Date of Award	11 Jan 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Alexandre Duarte (Supervisor)