Rovisco - Taking the Square: Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rovisco, Maria, editor. | Ong, Jonathan Corpus, editor.

Title: Taking the square : Mediated dissent and occupations of public space / edited by Maria Rovisco and Jonathan Corpus Ong.

Description: London : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. | Series: Radical subjects in international politics | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016012574 (print) | LCCN 2016021833 (ebook) | ISBN 9781783483952 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783483969 (paper : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783483976 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Protest movements--Case studies. | Public spaces--Political aspects--Case studies.

Classification: LCC HM883 .T35 2016 (print) | LCC HM883 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/4--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016012574

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

First of all, this book would not have been possible without the inspiring and insightful work of all the chapter contributors. We are very privileged we have gotten to know them better in preparing this manuscript. Second, we would like to thank our colleagues in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for being a challenging and invigorating intellectual home. In particular, Peter Lunts encouragement and support for this project have been invaluable; without him this collaborationand friendship!would not have happened so quickly. Our project has also been supported by Sandra Kaulfuss, a PhD in our department. Finally, we would like to thank the great team at Rowman & Littlefield International, namely Anna Reeve for her enthusiasm and patience as our commissioning editor and Sinead Murphy, our editorial assistant.

Maria Rovisco and Jonathan Ong

Leicester, 14 December 2015

Maria Rovisco and Jonathan Corpus Ong

From the Arab uprisings of 2011 to the indignados protests and the Occupy Movement sit-ins, the debate on new protest movements gains momentum in the media and scholarly agendas. There is an emerging body of research that is concerned with examining the emergence of a new protest culture in a new political, generational and media environment. Extending Walter Benjamins idea that political culture in modernity is based on reception in a state of distraction, Nick Couldry argues for a critical research agenda in the social sciences that considers todays new iconographies of popular politics and technologized forms of political engagement as crucially embedded in the social and always already implicated in questions of inequality, justice and ethics (Couldry, 2012: 130).

This volume is primarily concerned with understanding the role and impact of digital media platforms and technologies in the recent wave of protest movements in diverse world sites. However, while we remark on the unprecedented scale and quality of dissent in what has been referred to as post-2010 activisms and new global revolutions (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012; Mason, 2011; Biekart and Fowler, 2013), we foreground here the complex and dynamic interrelations between repertoires of protest, communicative practices, media institutions, and associations of power in specific occupations of streets and squares. In so doing, this book contributes to the growing body of work on the role of the media in post-2010 collective action, social movements and civic engagement as it simultaneously draws on approaches in urban communication, media sociology, media in everyday life and de-Westernizing media studies to enrich the discussion. The volume asks: How and why certain occupations of public space that are locally rooted in places with many voice-denying rationalities (Couldry, 2010) nevertheless have the power to mobilize people and achieve media visibility? What are new communicative practices and environments that emerge from the particular material environments of an occupied public space, such as the geography of the protest camp? And what are the conditions for protest where online environments form the primary basis for engagement and community, such as with dispersed transnational protesters?