Images of Surveillance: The Contested and Embedded Visual Language of Anti-Surveillance Protests (original) (raw)
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2013
This contribution provides an analysis of images produced and employed in protests against surveillance in Germany in 2008 and 2009. For this purpose, a method of visual analysis is developed that draws mainly on semiotics and art history. Following this method, the contribution examines a selection of images (pictures and graphic design) from the antisurveillance protests in three steps: description of components, detection of conventional signs, and contextual analysis. Furthermore, the analysis compares the images of the two major currents of the protest (liberal and radical left) in order to elucidate the context in which images are created and used. The analysis shows that images do not merely illustrate existing political messages but contribute to movements' systems of meaning creation and transportation. The two currents in the protests communicate their point of view through the images both strategically and expressively. The images play a crucial role in formulating groups' different strategies as well as worldviews and identities. In addition, the analysis shows that the meaning of images is contested and contextual. Images are produced and received in specific national as well as issue contexts. Future research should address the issue of context and reception in greater depth in order to further explore the effects of visual language on mobilisation. Overall, the contribution demonstrates that systematic visual analysis allows our understanding of social movements' aims, strategy, and collective identity to be deepened. In addition, visual analysis may provide activists themselves with a tool to critically assess their visual communication.
Introduction: The Aesthetics of Global Protest : Visual Culture and Communication
The Aesthetics of Global Protest, 2019
Protest movements are struggles to be seen and to be heard. In the last 60 years protest movements around the world have mobilized against injustices and inequalities to bring about substantial sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic changes. Whilst familiar repertoires of action persist, such as strikes, demonstrations, and occupations of public space, the landscape is very different from 60 years ago when the so-called 'new social movements' emerged. We need to take stock of the terrain of protest movements, including dramatic developments in digital technologies and communication, the use of visual culture by protestors, and the expression of democracy. This chapter introduces the volume and explains how aesthetics of protest are performative and communicative, constituting a movement through the performance of politics.
Special Issue on Methods in Visual Politics and Protest
Journal of digital social research, 2024
This special issue draws together five articles in the arena of methods in visual politics and protest. It addresses three core methodological challenges across the research process (data access, collection, analysis, visualisation): the proliferation of visual social media, the emergence of novel visual practices, and the increasing application of digital methods. Their key contributions lie in the development of mixed visual methods approaches, new techniques for constructing and curating visual datasets, and methodological explorations of visual anti-publics.
Visions of protests. A media-historic perspective on images in social movements
Sociology Compass, 2014
Social movements and the messages they wish to spread are essentially visual phenomena. Although this is both an obvious and momentous assertion, social movement research has been hesitant to integrate visual data. Until lately, most insights into the use of images in social movements originated from historical and media studies. This contribution presents the recent surge in literature devoted to the visual analysis of social movements. It focuses on activists’ practices of image production and distribution under certain media-historic constellations. In this perspective, the current opportunities to create and spread images of dissent are contrasted with previous appropriations of technical possibilities from early print to electronic media. In times of mobile devices combined with social network sites scholars of movement images are confronted with profound changes in the ways images contribute to the emergence and dynamics of social movements. Thus, we argue for a media-sensitive analysis of images in social movements.
Visualizing Protest:Transnational Approaches to the Aesthetics of Dissent
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, 2018
In this issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, we invited contributors to engage with how protest is visualized, that is, rendered visual in the form of iconography and through social media, and imagined as a utopian project of feminist, queer, and anti-racist worldmaking. Inviting scholarship and creative engagements from the overlapping perspectives of feminist media studies, transnational feminist theory, critical race studies, visual studies, and postcolonial digital humanities, this special issue examines the aesthetics of feminist protests in terms of their networked circulations as well as their affective bonds and material contexts. Exploring the emerging modes of visibility, networked solidarity, and collaborative knowledge production, “Visualizing Protest: Transnational Approaches to the Aesthetics of Dissent” examines the relationships between the aesthetics of feminist transnational protest and digital revolt in a dynamic, polymedia context characterized by amateur remixing, instantaneous sharing, immaterial labour, corporate ownership of digital platforms, and institutionalized state surveillance of social media. Read the intro here: https://adanewmedia.org/2018/11/issue14-przybylo-novoselova-rodrigues/
The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements edited by Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani, 2015
Visual forms in which movements express themselves matter and movements are pivotally perceived through vision. However, only in the past decades have seen a lively debate on visuals in many disciplines in the field of humanities and, also, in the social sciences that has also started to echo in the field of social movements. After a brief literature review on visuals in such fields of research, this chapter addresses images, and other visual artifacts, in social movements from a twofold perspective able to highlights different foci in the visual analysis of social movements. First, the performative dimension of social movements becoming visible, by focusing on collective practices that are developed to express and represent a movement’s cause. Second, visual aspects in the mediatization of social movements to underline the fact that visualization is largely dependent on different kinds of media technologies. Conclusions considers some relevant lines of investigation that might deepen our understanding of both social movements and the images they are associated with.
Beyond the Iconic protest images.docx
Social Movement Studies, 2019
Using the Gezi Park protests as a case study this article considers the performative component of protest movements including how and why protestors actively produce protest activity ‘on the ground’ and how this is expressed through visual images. It looks beyond iconic images which appear as emblematic of the protest and instead shifts our focus to consider the more ‘everyday’ or mundane activities which occur during a protest occupation, and explores how social media allows these images to have expressive and communicative dimensions. In this respect, protests can be performed through humdrum activities and this signifies a political voice which is communicated visually. The research is based on visual analysis of Twitter data and reveals methodological innovation in understanding how protestors communicate.