Indymedia is a wide-ranging phenomenon: its genesis in opposition to dominant powers; its constituency spanning numerous public interest movements; and its continuing success creating a proving ground for a next generation of leaders who today, 20 years later, are scattered globally, yet ascending into positions of power and influence.
The Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center (UCIMC) is, and always has been, a relative outlier in the Indymedia landscape. But it rose quickly to become a dominant nexus for local social and economic justice organizing, and, as it happened, the legal headquarters for Global Indymedia. This local IMC incubated scores of projects that, for the half-decade before ubiquitous smartphones, were important in bringing documentation resources in some way to the front lines of nearly every major global justice and pro-democracy protest on the planet. Continue reading