Mali protest movement looks set to challenge the junta

Headline MALI: Protest group looks set to challenge the junta

Connecting Publics in a Fractured Public Sphere

Chapter 4 presents an empirical case on the problematic public disconnect in contemporary democracy where multiple publics are fractured in the public sphere. The chapter explores how a group of everyday citizens created connections between diverse publics in the public sphere. The analysis centres on the creative and playful connective activities of Knitting Nannas Against Gas (KNAG), an Australian-based social protest group opposed to coal seam gas development. Drawing on interviews conducted with the members of these groups across four different locations in New South Wales, the chapter reveals a rich variety of ways in which these groups seek to create connections with two opposing publics, as well as with latent publics. The chapter shows the significance of aesthetic-affective forms of communication, including non-verbal communication in crafting novel connections in a fractured public sphere, and discusses the ways these connections can help enhance the epistemic quality and reflexivity of the public sphere. The chapter concludes by discussing how the case of KNAG enriches current ideas on connectivity in deliberative systems.

Collective identity and discourse practice in the followership of the Football Lads Alliance on Twitter

Previous studies of online (collective) identity have explored how social media–specific practices like hashtags can enable identity construction and affiliation with a wider community of users. Practices such as mentioning and retweeting have also been discussed in the literature but the practice of following as a discourse practice is underexplored. This article presents a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analytical approach to the study of collective identity on Twitter that focuses on the relationships between following and language use and details a study conducted on the language used by followers of the Football Lads Alliance – a protest group who say they are ‘against all extremism’. This approach was fruitful in identifying correlations between salient discourses in follower profile descriptions and their tweets and suggests that a portion of the followership constructs identity in relation to radical right-wing and populist discourse specifically concerning Islam/Muslims.

Outcomes of Chinese Rural Protest

There are many protests about loss of village land in rural China. By following both short-term and long-term outcomes of one such protest, in Wukan, Guangdong, this article illustrates the strategies Chinese governments employ to appease protesters, and the consequences of a local protest for individuals, the protest group, and the broader society.

Performing Loitering: Feminist Protest in the Indian City

Why Loiter is a performative, feminist protest group based in Mumbai. Using strategies developed from the 2011 book of the same name, Why Loiter brings women together in public spaces to loiter as a way to normalize the sight of women taking pleasure in doing nothing. The group is part of a growing movement of young feminists using performative protests to reclaim public spaces for women.

Continuing Visions

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.

From Rabble-Rousing to SPARCing Community Transformation

This chapter describes the evolution of Chattanooga Organized for Action as they transitioned from a popular protest group into a 501-C3 non-profit who initiates, supports and connects place-based social justice movements across downtown Chattanooga. It also discusses two components of a participatory action research initiative related to this research project: the Sustaining People and Reclaiming Communities (SPARC) Initiative and the Planning Free School of Chattanooga. Both were experimental community planning processes, designed to offer alternatives to mainstream citizen engagement and capacity building in the city.

Does Violent Protest Backfire? Testing a Theory of Public Reactions to Activist Violence

How do people respond to violent political protest? The authors present a theory proposing that the use of violence leads the general public to view a protest group as less reasonable, a perception that reduces identification with the group. This reduced identification in turn reduces public support for the violent group. Furthermore, the authors argue that violence also leads to more support for groups that are perceived as opposing the violent group. The authors test this theory using a large ( n = 800) Internet-based survey experiment with a politically diverse sample. Participants responded to an experimental scenario based on recent violent confrontations between white nationalist protesters and antiracist counter-protesters, allowing the authors to study whether violent protest would reduce public support even when used against a widely reviled group. The authors found that the use of violence by an antiracist group against white nationalists led to decreased support for the antiracist group and increased support for the white nationalist group. Furthermore, the results were consistent with the theorized causal process: violence led to perceptions of unreasonableness, which reduced identification with and support for the protest group. Importantly, the results revealed a striking asymmetry: although acts of violence eroded support for an antiracist group, support for white nationalist groups was not reduced by the use of violence, perhaps because the public already perceives these groups as very unreasonable and identifies with them at low levels. Consistent with this interpretation, the authors found that self-identified Republicans, a subset of the sample that reported less extremely negative views of white nationalists, showed reduced support for white nationalists when they engaged in violence.

Counterpublics in the age of mediatisation: Local responses to Femen in the Arab world

In this paper we analyse the impact of the mediatised strategy of the global protest group Femen. In addition to the concept of mediatisation, we employ the concept of counterpublics and find that Femen have limited impact in the Arab world due to a lack of embedment in local communities. We show how mediatisation of protest can hamper the dual function of counterpublic discourse and action. By focusing primarily outwardly and adopting dominant media logics (outwardly focused, interpublic discourse), Femen’s protest strategies result in a sensational and top-down message. This is not embedded in a conversation with local communities (the inwardly focused intrapublic function of counterpublic discourse) and as such results in much resistance in the Arab world. Moving beyond an analysis of Femen’s message to include local Arab responses, our analysis allows us insight into the lived experiences of mediatised protest, which suggest that Femen’s antagonistic actions foster alienation rather than empowerment.