Current Issues in Alternative Media Research

Research in alternative media has burgeoned since the turn of the millennium. The majority of studies has examined the political and social dimensions of alternative media and has focused on the media of social movements. The value of these amateur media projects lies not only in the content they produce, but also in the educational and political empowerment they offer to their participants. Other forms of alternative media, such as blogs and fanzines, present challenges to mainstream journalism; they challenge the exclusive authority and expertise of professional journalists. Recent research has begun to examine the relationship between alternative and mainstream media practices, particularly examining how alternative media offer ways of rebalancing media power and how 'ordinary' people are able to represent their own lives and experiences and concerns in ways that are often ignored or marginalised by the dominant media institutions. However, we need to learn more about specific alternative media practices and how audiences use their content.     

The Grillini in Italy: New Horizons for Internet-based Mobilization and Participation

This article looks at the case of the Grillini movement and its emergence on the Italian political scene, and discusses its contribution to the growing literature on the increasing opportunities offered by the Internet for social movement participation and mobilization. My findings are that the movement is successful in both mobilizing and promoting open debate and participation because of its policies and its use of multiple, and fairly open platforms for participation and horizontal decision-making. The Grillini have been able to conciliate the characteristics of newly emerging, Internet-based, ‘internetworked movements’ as well as the more conventional use of the Internet on behalf of well-established social and political movements. They have been able to do so by articulating issues and mobilizing on a national scale, with an increasingly large bureaucratic elite, while retaining a vibrant, partly online- and partly offline-based public sphere and decentralized organizational forms. My conclusion is that the Grillini movement, with its peculiar structure and commitment to participation and inclusion, is a crucial example of how the Internet can be used to aggregate new political issues and foster continuous debate while consolidating a growing electorally driven organization, which is still mostly held accountable by the movement's public sphere.     

Repression,resistance and lifestyle: charting (dis)connection and activism in times of accelerated capitalism

ABSTRACT

Studying the nexus of media and social movements is a growing subfield in both media and social movement studies. Although there is an increasing number of studies that criticize the overemphasis of the importance of media technologies for social movements, questions of non-use, technology push-back and media refusal as explicit political practice have received comparatively little attention. The article charts a typology of digital disconnection as political practice and site of struggle bringing emerging literatures on disconnection, i.e. forms of media technology non-use to the field of social movement studies and studies of civic engagement. Based on a theoretical matrix combining questions of power, collectivity and temporality, we distinguish between digital disconnection as repression, digital disconnection as resistance and digital disconnection as performance and life-style politics. The article discusses the three types of digital disconnection using current examples of protest and social movements that engage with practices of disconnection.

Abbreviations: AFA: Anti-Fascist Action; CHRI: Center for Human Rights in Iran; DDoS: Distributed Denial of Service     

Technology and Counter-hegemonic Movements: The case of Nike Corporation

This paper examines ways in which the Internet and alternative forms of media have been employed to enhance political struggle in contemporary society, and are in fact redefining political struggle. It uses a case study of Nike Corporation to highlight that although the power and autonomy of transnational corporations operating within the global economy has been enhanced over the past few decades, there are accompanying modes of grassroots organizing which foster globalized resistance to such hegemonic tendencies. The analysis argues that the Internet provides the resources and environment necessary for cohesive organized resistance to corporate culture across the domains of production (labor issues) and consumption issues (marketing). The Internet and independent media have facilitated organizing strategies among emerging new social movements, such as the anti-sweatshop movement and the Culture Jammers movement. This paper draws on both modern and postmodern theory to explore ways in which marginal groups can utilize the new modes of technology for their own ends, and use micro-level forms of resistance to challenge macro-level trends.     

Social media teams as digital vanguards: the question of leadership in the management of key Facebook and Twitter accounts of Occupy Wall Street,Indignados and UK Uncut

Recent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the US, the indignados/15M movement in Spain, and UK Uncut have witnessed the rise of social media teams, small activist groups responsible for managing high-visibility and collective activist social media accounts. Going against dominant assertions about the leaderless character of contemporary digital movements, the article conceptualises social media teams as ‘digital vanguards’, collective and informal leadership structures that perform a role of direction of collective action through the use of digital communication. Various aspects of the internal functioning of vanguards are discussed: (a) their formation and composition; (b) processes of internal coordination; (c) struggles over the control of social media accounts. The article reveals the profound contradiction between the leadership role exercised by social media teams and the adherence of digital activists to techno-libertarian values of openness, horizontality, and leaderlessness. The espousal of these principles has run against the persistence of power and leadership dynamics leading to bitter conflicts within these teams that have hastened the decline of the movements they served. These problems call for a new conceptual framework to better render the nature of leadership in digital movements and for new political practices to better regulate the management of social media assets.     

Everyday politics,social practices and movement networks: daily life in Barcelona's social centres

The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored collective identity, ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence. This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non‐activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.     

The World Social Forum between politics and NGOs

ABSTRACT

The WSF was established as a forum that gathered movements opposing a certain political ideology, neoliberalism, but it has refrained from openly supporting a political ideology. The WSF has empowered more radical leftish movements and thus played a role in the separation of these movements from more conventional left-wing parties that have embraced neoliberal capitalism as an undefeatable reality. Right-wing politicians have capitalized on this separation by promoting a populist rejection of capitalist elites. WSF itself has profiled itself as a forum of social movements rather than a forum of socialist movements. The article analyses to what extent the hegemonic role of NGOs in the WSF is at the roots of this apolitical positioning and to what extend rightsholder movements might have benefited from a more explicit embracement of a coherent socialist political alternative rather than the diversity that WSF has fostered as one of its central principles.     

The Contribution of Social Movement Theory to Understanding Terrorism

The study of terrorism and political violence has been characterized by a lack of generalizable theory and methodology. This essay proposes that social movement theory can contribute a necessary conceptual framework for understanding terrorism and thus reviews the relevant literature and discusses possible applications. Terrorism is a form of contentious politics, analyzable with the basic social movement approach of mobilizing resources, political opportunity structure, and framing. Cultural perspectives call attention to issues of collective identity that allow for sustained militancy, and movement research recommends alternative conceptions of terrorist networks. Previous research on movement radicalization, repression, and cycles of contention has direct bearing on militancy. Emerging perspectives on transnational collective action and the diffusion of tactics and issues informs an understanding of contemporary international terrorism. Research on movement outcomes suggests broader ways of considering the efficacy of political violence. Finally, methodological debates within the study of social movements are relevant for research on terrorism. In sum, a social movement approach to terrorism has much to contribute, and research on terrorism could have important extensions and implications for social movement theory.     

Social Movements Seen as Radical Political Actors: The Case of the Polish Tenants’ Movement

This article casts new light on the processes of collective claims and identity formation in social movements, with the help of the radical political framework of Laclau and Mouffe (Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, Verso, London, 2001). Polish tenants, classified as “losers” of transition and marginalized in the mainstream discourse, nevertheless act collectively, mobilizing alliances with other democratic struggles and thus challenge the hegemony of neoliberal dogmas in the country. The very fact of mobilization of a socially and economically deprived group demanding the right to the city is provocative in the studied context. The empirical foundations of our study are 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with Polish tenants’ activists cross-referenced with media material produced by and about the movement, and previous studies on the topic. The contribution of this article is twofold: it combines social movement theory with radical political framework and fills the empirical gap in the body of literature on social movements in post-socialist Europe.     

Imagining new feminist futures: How feminist social movements contest the neoliberalization of feminism in an increasingly corporate‐dominated world

Increasingly it is argued that feminism has been co‐opted by neoliberal agendas: becoming more individualistic and losing touch with its wider social change objectives. The neoliberalization of feminism is driven in part by increased corporate power, including the growing role of corporations in governance arenas, and corporate social responsibility agendas. However, we turn to social movement theory to elucidate strategies that social movements, including feminist social movements, are adopting in such spaces. In so doing, we find that feminist activists are engaging with new political opportunities, mobilizing structures and strategic framing processes that emerge in the context of increasingly neoliberal and privatized governance systems. We suggest that despite the significant challenges to their agendas, far from being co‐opted by neoliberalism, feminist social movements remain robust, existing alongside and developing new strategies to contest the neoliberalization of feminism in a variety of innovative ways.     

Conspiracy theories and social movements studies: A research agenda

It is surprising to note the scarcity of contributions in social movement literature related to so-called conspiracy theories. A considerable amount of the work on these topics has been produced in political science, history, media studies, social psychology and other disciplines. These accounts have often adopted a stigmatizing approach, looking at conspiracy theories as forms of pathologies (whether psychological, social or political). Moving from such a perspective to a constructivist one, I argue that conspiracy theories should represent an object of interest for social movement scholars: conspiracies supporters go into the streets to highlight their issues, protest against authority, propose alternative lifestyles and often claim to look for a better/different society. Applying the social movements toolkit can allow to better understand this phenomenon and apply critical perspectives in a more effective manner. On the basis of this premise, the first part of this article reviews the existing literature on conspiracy theories, also identifying the main lacunae; the second part outlines some possible research questions and lines of inquiry, moving beyond the classical theories in the field of social movement studies. The paper also introduces a number of new concepts, such as conspiracy mobilizations and conspiracy coalitions.     

Clothing and social movements: Tibet and the politics of dress

The ‘cultural turn’ in social movement studies has brought a renewed outlook on new social movements and lifestyle movements. In this development on the symbolic challenge of contemporary movements, research has expanded to both music and art. However, little is known about the role of clothing in movements and how activists use it for social change. In making the case for a greater consideration of clothing’s tactical use in identity work, this paper explores the case of the Tibetan Lhakar movement. I argue that for Lhakar activists, clothing is the materialization of the political consciousness of the movement and symbolically acts as a mechanism of communication in shaping its political goals. By using social media to observe individualized collective actions of wearing Tibetan clothing, the paper demonstrates how activists frame and create new political opportunity structures for civic participation in a one party state that controls all speech and movement.     

FROM MEDIA POLITICS TO E-PROTEST

New forms of political expression are often taken as further evidence of the 'cultural turn' within contemporary societies. Taking two recent cases - the use of popular culture in the election campaigns of British political parties (and particularly the Labour Party) and the so-called 'Carnival Against Capital' of June 18th 1999 - this article argues for caution in assuming that such cultural modi vivendi necessarily require culturalist forms of explanation and analysis. Weargue that both established political parties and extra-parliamentary social movements have found new opportunities for political communication and mobilization through media and information technology (particularly the Internet). However, the resource and organizational problems they confront remain the same, as does the familiar instrumental rationality of their actions. Rather than leading us to abandon established analytical tools such as political intermediation, political opportunity structures or resource mobilization, shifting opportunities and conditions require the adaptation and extension of such concepts. In this spirit, we attempt to offer an analysis of the cultural mode adopted by parties and movements without losing sight of their broader goals and motivations.     

COALITION FORM AND MOBILIZATION EFFECTIVENESS IN LOCAL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Little has been written on the form that coalitions take in social movements. Three months of fieldwork by a five-person team documented the population of social movement events (SMEs) across seven movements in a Southwestern city. We investigated the process and form that led to these events at the interorganizational level. Three different coalition forms, as well as single social movement organizations (SMOs) acting alone, organized the SMEs. The network invocation form a single SMO making strategic and framing decisions while encouraging other SMOs in its network to mobilize participants was significantly more effective than other forms at mobilizing attendance at events.     

Social Movements and Europeanization Processes: The Case of the French Associations Mobilizing around the Asylum Issue

This paper seeks to analyse the process of Europeanization of social movements mobilizing around the asylum policy since the middle of the 1990s. Taking the example of the principal French associations which have mobilized on this topic, the paper explores the dynamics that lead these associations to increasingly address the European institutions since the launching of the process of harmonisation of asylum policies. In particular, it shows that particular attention shall be given to the relationship between the associations that have constituted at the national level and the set of actors that are mobilized on this issue exclusively at the European level (which is defined as a European advocacy coalition). Through the analysis of this relationship, it can be seen that the French associations follow different processes of Europeanization. Some follow a process of inclusion into the existing European advocacy coalition while others create alternative mobilizations at the European level. This study allows us to observe and to analyse the similarities and differences in the interactions between social movements and institutions in the national political space and in the European political space on this particular issue. In doing so, it seeks to present an original perspective on a process of ‘Europeanization from below’. This research is based on the in-depth analysis of 11 associations which are representative of the diversity of the movement related to the asylum issue in France. It uses different methods that were developed in social movements studies: frame analysis, protest-event analysis and network analysis. It is based on several sources: associative discourses and publications, in-depth interviews, and associative internal literature.     

The mediatization of leadership: grassroots digital facilitators as organic intellectuals,sociometric stars and caretakers*

ABSTRACT

Scholars of both resource mobilization theory and new social movement theory recognize leadership as integral to traditional social movements. Following global protest movements of 2011, some now characterize movements relying on social media as horizontal and leaderless. Whether due to an organizational shift to networks over bureaucracies or due to a change in values, many social movements in the present protest cycle do not designate visible leadership. Does leadership in social media activism indeed disappear or does it take on new forms? This paper undertakes an in-depth analysis of data obtained through interviews, event observations and analysis of media content related to three Canadian cases of civic mobilization of different scale, all of which strategically employed social media. The paper proposes a conceptual framework for understanding the role of these mobilizations’ organizers as organic intellectuals, sociometric stars and caretakers. By looking closely at the three cases through the lenses offered by these concepts, we identify the specific styles that characterize digitally mediatized civic leadership.     

Piety over Protest: Cognitive Liberation and Deflected Collective Action in Central India

Cognitive liberation is often treated in the social movements literature as a mediating factor through which political opportunities and mobilizing structures generate protest. This paper unpacks multiple dimensions of cognitive liberation and finds that they may operate in tension with one another. Building on scholarship that focuses on subjective factors in social movements, the paper examines the case of the Korku, an oppressed indigenous community in central India, who choose not to protest despite the presence of several dimensions of cognitive liberation. Rather than engage in collective political action, the Korku’s grievances are deflected toward depoliticized religious goals. The Korku seek communal improvement through Hindu piety in a context of the Hindutva cultural-nationalist ideology, rather than protest against the encroachment of this ideology on their community.     

The old left revisited: Machine technology as “social myth”

Recent perspectives on social movements have focused on the importance of organization, who participates, and the process by which they develop their social base. This paper uses the Old Left as an example of how symbols can serve as a mobilizing force for a social movement. The paper attempts to analyze the use of symbols in the Old Left by grafting Leo Marx's apolitical formulation of cultural antimonies (the machine and the garden) on George Sorel's political conceptualization of “social myths.” The paper examines how the machine operated as a “social myth” for the Old Left. The paper traces how the Old Left used the machine and machine power to dramatize the irresistible dynamism of a new industrial order.     

A situated understanding of digital technologies in social movements. Media ecology and media practice approaches

Abstract

The article tackles two main aspects related to the interaction between social movements and digital technologies. First, it reflects on the need to include and combine different theoretical approaches in social movement studies so as to construct more meaningful understanding of how social movement actors deals with digital technologies and with what outcomes in societies. In particular, the article argues that media ecology and media practice approaches serve well to reach this objective as: they recognize the complex multi-faceted array of media technologies, professions and contents with which social movement actors interact; they historicize the use of media technologies in social movements; and they highlight the agency of social movement actors in relation to media technologies while avoiding a media-centric approach to the subject matter. Second, this article employs a media practice perspective to explore two interrelated trends in contemporary societies that the articles in this special issue deal with: the personalization and individualization of politics, and the role of the grassroots in political mobilizations.     

LIBERATION FREQUENCY: The Free Radio Movement and Alternative Strategies of Media Relations

A crucial element of struggle for any social movement is the ability to convey its message to both movement participants and the broader public. Movements frequently deal with problems of reframing and reinterpretation of their messages by mainstream media by trying to build relationships with mainstream media actors. But this is not the only way that movements can gain positive media coverage. This article reveals two little-discussed media strategies that movements may adopt in order to mitigate the problem of how to best get sympathetic news coverage. First, movements can circumvent mainstream media altogether by using alternative media. Second, movements can work to reform the media, thereby changing the rules and structures that govern movement–media relationships. I use data from interviews with participants in the free radio movement to illustrate these two media strategies and how their use helped the movement achieve moderate successes. I argue that control of (or access to) alternative media can help a social movement overcome the difficulties of gaining sympathetic mainstream media coverage. I also argue that the media reform movement, if successful, could further help social movements overcome this problem. This case study suggests that scholars' preoccupation with mainstream media coverage may have caused us to underestimate the power of social movements to generate positive media coverage.