“I Will Be Out There Every Day Strong!” Protest Policing and Future Activism Among Ferguson and Baltimore Protesters

An established body of literature shows that people engage in protest events for a number of reasons, including grievances, collective identity, increased efficacy, and emotions. However, it is unclear what happens to individuals’ motivation toward protest participation as they experience the reality of repressive policing. This study contributes to the theoretical body of knowledge of protest policing and social movements by investigating the microlevel processes that affect protest participation. Specifically, we build from the insights of previous research by examining how 102 Ferguson and Baltimore protesters with varying levels of commitment—revolutionary, intermittent, tourist—experienced repressive policing and how such tactics affected their subsequent decision to engage in future activism. Our findings suggest that those with the strongest commitment toward protest goals experienced the most repressive tactics, and yet did not seem to be deterred in their motivation to be engaged in future protests. In contrast, while repressive tactics appeared to deter the less committed individuals from street protests, they remained motivated to engage in other forms of civic engagement.     

The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions In and Around Social Movements

The recent explosion of cultural work on social movements has been highly cognitive in its orientation, as though researchers were still reluctant to admit that strong emotions accompany protest. But such emotions do not render protestors irrational; emotions accompany all social action, providing both motivation and goals. Social movements are affected by transitory, context-specific emotions, usually reactions to information and events, as well as by more stable affective bonds and loyalties. Some emotions exist or arise in individuals before they join protest groups; others are formed or reinforced in collective action itself. The latter type can be further divided into shared and reciprocal emotions, the latter being feelings that protestors have toward each other.     

Tweeting India’s Nirbhaya protest: a study of emotional dynamics in an online social movement

Abstract

Previous research has recognized the role of emotions in protests and social movements in the offline world. Despite the current scenario of ubiquitous social media and ‘Twitter revolutions,’ our knowledge about the connections between emotions and online protests still remains limited. In this study, we examine whether online protest actions follow the same emotional groundwork for supporting and nurturing a social movement as in the offline world, and how these emotions vary across various stages of the social movement. Through a computer-assisted emotion analysis of 65,613 Twitter posts (tweets), posted during the Nirbhaya social movement (movement against the Delhi gang-rape incident) in India, we identified a strong resemblance between online emotional patterns and offline protest emotions as discussed in literature. Formal statistical testing of a range of emotions (negativity, positivity, anger, sadness, anxiety, certainty, individualism, collectivism, and achievement) demonstrates that they significantly differed across stages of the social movement; as such, they influenced the course of the online protest, resonating parallels with offline events. The findings highlight the importance of anger and anxiety in stirring the collective conscience, and identify that positive emotion was pervasive during the protest event. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

An ‘ordinary man’s’ protest: self-immolation as a radical political message in Eastern Europe today and in the past

The article describes the tradition of self-immolation in Eastern Europe as a form of radical protest during periods of structural crisis. The authors describe cases of self-immolation (Ryszard Siwiec, Jan Palach, Evzen Plocek, Musa Mamut) which took place in the communist period, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. In the context of Eastern European tradition, they also describe the last case of self-immolation, when Piotr Szcz?sny set himself on fire in Warsaw in October 2017 to protest against the authoritarian rule of the Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland. After this incident, Piotr Szcz?sny and his memory have become an element of the ‘culture of protest’ in Poland. Quotes from his manifesto began to appear on walls and during anti-government demonstrations. Piotr Szcz?sny has also become a protagonist of protest songs.     

Extracting the commons

This article investigates how resources that are perceived as common are turned into property through different interventions of extractivism, and how this provokes counter-activism from groups and actors who see their rights and living conditions threatened by the practices of extraction. The article looks at how extraction is enacted through three distinct practices: prospecting, enclosure and unbundling, studied through three different cases. The cases involve resources that are material and immaterial, renewable as well as non-renewable, ‘natural’ as well as man-made. Prospecting is exemplified by patenting of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, enclosure is exemplified by debates over copyright expansionism and information commons, and unbundling through conflicts over mining and gas extraction. The article draws on fieldwork involving interviews and participant observation with protesters at contested mining sites in Australia and with digital rights activists from across the world who protest against how the expansion of copyright limits public access to culture and information. The article departs from an understanding of ‘commons’ not as an open access resource, but as a resource shared by a group of people, often subjected to particular social norms that regulate how it can be used. Enclosure and extraction are both social processes, dependent on recognising some and downplaying or misrecognising other social relations when it comes to resources and processes of property creation. These processes are always, regardless of the particular resources at stake, cultural in the sense that the uses of the commons are regulated through cultural norms and contracts, but also that they carry profound cultural and social meanings for those who use them. Finally, the commonalities and heterogeneities of these protest movements are analysed as ‘working in common’, where the resistance to extraction in itself represents a process of commoning.     

Memories, vision and hope: themes in an historical sociology of Britain since the Second World War

Abstract This paper suggests in an exploratory way that an historical sociology of post-war British society should include a concern with changes in sentiment and emotion or in what following Raymond Williams is termed 'structures of feeling'. The main theme discussed is what people from different social backgrounds feel about the changes which have taken place in their lives and in the society around them and in how the future is conceived. Three issues focus this - change in aspects of national identity, in prevailing conceptions of citizenship and belonging, and in feelings towards the welfare state.     

Social reproduction and the limitations of protest camps: openness and exclusion of social movements in Japan

This paper investigates how activists conduct participatory democracy and realize prefiguration and horizontality in a protest camp setting. Recently, scholars have shown increasing interest in the internal lives of social movements. Anti-G8 direct action in Japan has provided an opportunity to examine how protesters practise prefiguration and horizontality in everyday experiments in alternative ways of living together. In the protest camp in Japan, participants faced institutional and material limitations. This study discusses the social reproduction processes within protest camps that operate according to these limitations. Three key findings emerged: first, the protest camp shows a great openness towards beginners; they can easily find roles in its social reproduction processes. To accomplish this, they use skills developed in their daily habits outside the protest. Second, the collective practice of social reproduction creates and clearly displays a hierarchical partnership between activists, in the sense that beginners are not only politically socialized, but that they learn the limited cultural codes of anti-globalism movements from other activists. The relationship between teaching and taught serves to create hierarchy and exclusion among participants. The third key finding is related to exclusion. For some activists who have experienced discrimination, the protest camp is a frustrating experience because it forces upon them codes and manners constructed in capitalist society. To them, the camp recreates the cleavage between majority and minority protesters. The paper argues that both exclusive and inclusive sides of the protest camps, particularly when discussing collective lifestyle practices, exhibit ambiguity.     

The ‘proper’ way to spread ideas through social media: exploring the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms as perceived by Italian activists

Social media have become a relevant arena for different forms of civic engagement and activism. This article focuses on the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms as they are perceived by Italian activists. Instead of focusing on single protest movements, or on single platforms, we adopt a media ecological approach and consider a variety of environments where people can choose to express protest‐related content. Our main goal is to explore whether, and how, the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms are perceived by users, and how such perceived differences are integrated in everyday social media activities. To this end, we combined in‐depth interviews with an adapted version of the cognitive walkthrough and thinking aloud techniques. Respondents reported that they act on social media platforms according to specific representations of what each platform ‘is’, and how it works. Such perceptions affect users’ protest‐related social media practices. Although they perceive major social media platforms filtering strategies and are aware, to different extents, of their commodified nature, they report continuing to use them for activism‐related communication, often adopting an instrumental approach.     

Assessing the role of hope in processes of transitional justice: mobilizing and disciplining victims in Sierra Leone’s truth commission and reparations programme

Existing studies have not been able to take the role of hope in processes of transitional justice (TJ) into account, as they focus on how TJ changes institutions and the relationships between individuals and therefore conclude that failed processes of TJ have no effect. In contrast to this approach, a different understanding of power as productive helps to understand how TJ-instruments create hope and which effects this has on how people conceive of themselves and the world they live in. A framework for analysing such processes is introduced that brings together individual meaning-making of hope and hopelessness with the role of the state in the provision of hope in the context of uncertainty. Transitional justice is therefore discussed as a performative project that aims at triggering specific emotions among the persons taking part in it and the broader society and at creating a vision of a better future based on social equality through the protection and fulfilment of human rights. By applying this framework to the case of the Sierra Leone truth and reconciliation commission and the reparations programme, it is argued that hope had a mobilizing as well as a disciplining function in these instruments. The promise of support mobilized victims to provide statements to the truth commission, and therefore enabled the commission to work in the first place. However, it failed in its attempt to discipline victims in their feelings about the past violence. The reparations programme constituted the embodiment of these promises, but victims interpreted its inadequate benefits and bad management as a proof that the state still does not care for them and competition over benefits is the norm despite their entitlement to support. This experience destroyed the hopes of many victims and created social envy among them, preventing the development of solidarity among victims and the chance for resistance against this policy.     

When Emotion Work is Doomed to Fail: Ideological and Structural Constraints on Emotion Management

This paper explores how workers try to manage their emotions under conditions that doom them to fail. The workers in question—floor instructors at a sheltered workshop for people with developmental disabilities—were expected to infuse clients with positive feelings about work and to help transform them into committed workers. But structural conditions—boring, poorly paid assembly work and long gaps between contract jobs—forced them to obtain clients' compliance through coercive and confrontational emotion management techniques that contradicted their ideological beliefs. The floor instructors sought to peacefully increase their control over clients through “preventive emotion management” but most often they experienced a loss of control, leading some of them to experience “burnout.” This paper defines burnout as “occupational emotional deviance” that workers experience when they cannot manage their own and other's emotions according to organizational expectations.     

The Formation and Manipulation of Collective Identity: A Framework for Analysis

This paper is concerned with how people involved in ‘local’ protest might come to see themselves as part of wider social groupings and even global forces of resistance. An ethnographic study of the No M11 Link Road Campaign in London examines participants' definitions of their collective identity boundaries at different stages of involvement. Cross-sectional material from the beginning and later in the campaign shows that there was a transformation in collective identity boundaries towards a more inclusive definition of ‘community’. Analysis of participants' accounts before and after involvement in the eviction of a tree suggests the role of conflict with the police in producing an oppositional definition of the collective identity, facilitating links to other groups in resistance to illegitimate authority. Finally, biographical material indicates the implications of transformed identity boundaries for co-action with wider social groups. It is argued that the same intra- and inter-group processes that determine how identity boundaries extend to include a broader community might account for how people come to see themselves as part of a global social movement.     

Activist Identity as a Motivational Resource: Dynamics of (Dis)empowerment at the G8 Direct Actions,Gleneagles, 2005

This paper describes a study examining how different groups at some of the G8 protests, Gleneagles, 2005, negotiated experiences of (dis)empowerment. A recent survey of protest events speculated that, as a function of their social identities, experienced activists have available to them particular strategies to counter disempowerment and hence provide motivation for continued involvement. The G8 direct actions in Gleneagles provided an opportunity to examine such dynamics of (dis)empowerment in situ. An ethnographic study was carried out covering the duration of the Gleneagles events, including interviews with forty participants. Two key findings were as follows. First, across the protest group as a whole there was little unification and no agreed definition of success. Consequently, feelings of empowerment varied systematically across the sample. The second key finding concerned changes in definitions of success among some participants. For experienced activists, their activist identity entailed access to sets of arguments and discussions with fellow activists which allowed potentially disempowering events to be (re-)interpreted positively. An example was the re-evaluation of the importance of the Stirling campsite, which came to be seen by some as a key achievement. We argue in conclusion, however, that some activist strategies to maintain empowerment, while appearing to be based on a radical position, can operate as a break on escalation. The analysis as a whole suggests both the subjective and objective significance of identity and empowerment in movement dynamics.     

Photography and cultural memory: a methodological exploration

Recent years have seen a flowering of research and scholarship on cultural memory across the humanities and social sciences. Among the many facets of this work is a quest to extend and deepen understanding of how personal memory operates in the cultural sphere: its distinguishing features; how, where and when it is produced; how people make use of it in their daily lives; how personal or individual memory connects with shared, public forms of memory; and ultimately, how memory figures in, and even shapes, the social body and social worlds. Personal and family photographs figure importantly in cultural memory, and memory work with photographs offers a particularly productive route to understanding the social and cultural aspects of memory. Beginning with a study of one photograph, this article develops and interrogates a set of interlocking memory work methods for investigating the forms and everyday uses of ‘ordinary photography’ and how these figure in the production of memory.     

Dissecting the Conditions of Political Protest. An Exploration of Interaction Effects in the Explanation of Political Protest

This study addresses the conditions for the participation in protest activities. Starting from social psychological value expectancy theory and the theory of collective action, we study the effects of political discontent, perceived political influence (efficacy), norms to participate, identity, and membership in protest encouraging networks (“social incentives”) on protest. This study challenges the common assumption that these factors have additive effects only and provides a detailed analysis of interaction effects. Another contribution is the theoretical derivation of interaction effects. Our empirical analyses refer to the protests in Leipzig (East Germany) in 1989 under communist rule. Two‐way interactions are found between the following pairs of variables: discontent, influence, and norms. “Identity” (i.e., identification with West Germany) only interacts with discontent. Furthermore, identification is a surrogate for discontent: If identification is strong, discontent no longer influences protest. If identification is weak, increasing discontent raises protest.     

Social media,temporality, and the legitimacy of protest

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the rise of social media affects the temporal relations of protest communication. Following a relational approach, it traces how regimes of temporality are constructed and transformed through the entanglement between media infrastructures, institutions, and practices. These regimes involve particular ‘speeds’ -the rate at which media content is renewed – as well as ‘temporal orientations’ towards present, past, and future. The article questions how specific temporal regimes enable or complicate protestors’ efforts to gain public legitimacy. A large body of research suggests that it is difficult to gain such legitimacy in the mainstream news cycle, in which protest is primarily covered from an ‘episodic’ perspective, ignoring larger protest issues. The present analysis suggests that despite the participatory affordances of social media, it has not become any easier to generate sustained public attention for structural protest issues. Drawing examples from three case studies, it demonstrates that the dominant mode of social media protest communication reproduces and reinforces the episodic focus of the mainstream news. While other temporal perspectives on protest are certainly developed in the alternative and mainstream news, as well as in activist social media communication, these do not fundamentally challenge the prevailing temporal orientation towards the present, towards the event.     

Place making,grassroots organizing,and rural protest: A case study of Anahim Lake,British Columbia

Contemporary rural social movements bring diverse interest groups and stakeholders together at the local scale in the pursuit of common visions and goals, often against the backdrop of an external threat. The challenge for a movement's leaders is to negotiate and design a rural agenda that resonates with this complex constituency. One way to approach this problem is to construct and politicize a local sense of place as a means of rallying insiders against outside forces and pressures. This article explores the place-making activities of rural leaders operating within a complex social setting through an analysis of a grassroots social movement in Anahim Lake, British Columbia. The study uses the concept of the “place frame” to explore how Anahim's activists created a local discursive framework that enabled them to bridge dissimilar environmental values and practices within the community. The removal of external pressures following protest, however, saw the dissolution of this alignment. In documenting this process, the article contributes to a fuller understanding of the significance of place in grassroots protest and activism.     

Mobilizing in transnational contentious spaces: linking relations,emotions and space in migrant activism

Despite proliferation of political protest by migrants in recent years, analyses from a social movement perspective remain scarce. This lacuna is not coincidental, but theoretically grounded. According to dominant movement theories, migrants are unlikely subjects of mobilization due to legal obstacles, scarce resources and closed political and discursive opportunities. The article therefore explores how marginalized migrants organize transnational political protest against all evident odds. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and bridging transnational migration and social movement studies, it is argued that migrants mobilize within transnational social spaces, which link relations and emotions acquired on the move with the relational qualities at the locality of arrival. The article illustrates how the transnational spaces most migrants inhabit can be politicized and transformed into particular social formations, for which the term ‘transnational contentious spaces’ is suggested.     

When the Management of Grief Becomes Everyday Life: The Aftermath of Murder

This study examines how others indicate that our emotions violate social norms and how people feel about and respond to those indications. The data come from in‐depth interviews with thirty‐two people who had recently lost a loved one to murder (“bereaved victims”). Through the symbolic interaction process, bereaved victims came to appreciate the burden their grief imposed on others, and some of them took steps to minimize that burden. Despite their awareness of the burden, however, many of the bereaved expected others to express heartfelt sympathy for their loss. Instead, people offered inappropriate (and even hurtful) responses, including avoiding the topic of their loss, offering unnecessarily dramatic responses to the loss, and telling them to move on. The responses suggest that current feeling rules and emotion norms surrounding grief do not reflect the true extent of bereaved people's actual experiences, creating awkward situations for potential supporters and the bereaved.     

Media and information praxis of young activists in the Umbrella Movement

Young people were key participants in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the media also played an important role in this protest. This study examines how Hong Kong’s young activists developed communication strategies and media practices to mobilize this social movement. A framework termed “media and information praxis of social movements” is proposed for the analysis. The findings showed that in their praxis, the young activists used their media and information literacy skills to initiate, organize, and mobilize collective actions. They not only used social media and mobile networks but also traditional mass media and street booths in a holistic and integrated approach to receive and disseminate information. Hence, these young activists served as agents of mediatization. The results also indicated that the young activists moved away from the traditional movement mode which just tried to motivate a large number of people to protest in the streets. They actively engaged in the new movement mode, which emphasizes the media and information power game. Their praxis in the Umbrella Movement reflects the trend toward the mediatization of social movements in Hong Kong.