The Productivity of Protest

by Laura Portwood-Stacer I’m writing this post a few days after the world learned that Donald Trump had won enough electoral votes to become the 45th president of the United States. In the hours following the announcement, those who had feared this outcome (even if they didn’t really expect it) rapidly transitioned from denial to…

The Populist Turn of the 2011 Protest Wave

by Paolo Gerbaudo For anybody with some experience in social movements and the radical Left, the movements of 2011 have come as a real shock; refreshing for some and disturbing for others. They have been like an earthquake, putting into question ideas, tenets, attitudes that had for long been established in protest movements. From the…

“Far from the Official Lights of Facebook Walls and Pages”: Backstage Activism and the Enduring Significance of Internal Communicative Dynamics within Digital Social Movements

by Emiliano Treré In 2012, after one year as a lecturer in Mexico, an unexpected event changed both the face of the country and the direction of my research. During the national elections in May, the #YoSoy132 movement emerged as a new social actor asking for transparent ballots, denouncing the manipulation of the Televisa media…

Articulating Dissent: Protest and the Public Sphere

by Pollyanna Ruiz The mainstream’s current lack of familiarity with the organisational strategies of coalition movements has resulted in a tendency to perceive different types of order as a threatening, potentially violent, lack of order. Partly as a result of this misrecognition, the communicative strategies of coalition movements have frequently been viewed as evidence of…

Networked Critical Masses

by Dan Mercea I am going to start this opinion piece with an oft-heard claim: democratic participation is deteriorating to the point that many of us observing it have become cautious if not pessimistic in our assessment of the strength of democracy. Evidencing this bleak outlook would be the rise of runaway populism bearing little…

“We’re doing it slow” – Community Archives as Protest Spaces

by Anne Kaun (Södertörn University) Community archives as self-organized spaces storing and working with ephemera, posters, books, pins, fanzines and other material forms are crucial to protect the voices of the movements beyond mainstream History writing. Community archives have been of importance since social movements emerged in the USA especially since the civil rights movement…