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Banners utilized in the occupy demonstrations that took place all over the world on 15 October 2011.
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This article seeks to analyze the mobilizations that are currently taking place in Spain as a result of the multidimensional crisis unleashed in 2008. The authors study the ‘15M movement,’ or that of the Spanish indignados, by focusing on three analytical axes: the cognitive, emotional, and relational processes feeding the construction of a social...
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A considerable amount of the literature on African American activism has been focused on the mainstream political participation and the civil rights and Black Power movements. Subsequent research in this era has primarily focused on the church and post–civil war reconstruction efforts. Few contemporary studies have assessed activist efforts among A...
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... 1294), which goes beyond the usual approach of advocating for demands from the state. Perugorría and Tejerina (2013), in turn, have been focusing on cognitive, emotional, and relational processes in identity-synchronization that allowed people from different backgrounds and worldviews to feel part of the "15M movement." However, the role of the body in public manifestations, its relations with some of society's most powerful structures, and how this affects the body has to be further explored. ...
The escalating frequency and intensity of natural disasters underscore the urgency of the climate crisis. Against this backdrop, the global climate movement has surged, amplifying awareness of the climate emergency and pressuring governments and corporations to take decisive climate action. In climate manifestations, activists are increasingly using their entire body for/in climate activism, with Extinction Rebellion activists barricading driveways, and Just Stop Oil and Greenpeace activists gluing or tying their bodies to objects. These bodily ways of participating in climate activism have provoked public and political hostility, with concerns being raised about these so‐called “radical” forms of bodily activism. In response to these growing hostilities towards bodily climate activism, this study maps how the body is intimately connected to other actors when performing activism. We conducted interviews with nine European climate activists and, based on their stories, we mapped themes of relational practice of bodily activism. Our findings suggest that the body as a tool for climate activism manifestations is in relation to other material agencies, including (a) the public space, (b) other climate activists, (c) material objects, (d) law enforcement, (e) the general public and media, and (f) climate governance and policy. The body is not a stable and autonomous figure, but a dynamic and ever‐changing political tool through its socio‐spatial configurations that co‐constitute climate activism, making the role of the individual body in climate change activism manifestations elusive. Through its relational transformative collectivity, bodily climate activism proves itself as a valuable form of non‐violent participation in politics.
... We find a relationship between the communicational and educational dimension of the 15M, insofar as some of its communication projects possessed a pedagogical intentionality oriented to change people's minds to generate socio-cultural transformations at a broader level (Laraña & Díez, 2012;Perugorría & Tejerina, 2013). In other words, some of these projects -e.g. ...
... She gives prominence to the site (an open space) and to the emphasis on direct democracy, in which every single person can participate (rather than a representative form based on spokespersons), as well as to the preoccupation with prefi gurative politics and the construction of the commons ( della Porta, 2015 : 22). In addition, the aff ective aspects of protest, as explored in James M. Jasper's work ( 1998Jasper's work ( , 2011, provide a rich area of study that can be applied to protest camps (see also Benski and Langman, 2013 ;Perugorr í a and Tejerina, 2013 ). Being present at the same time in a square and sharing that moment generates a social bond and a sense of belonging generated by and channelled through emotions. ...
The global wave of social movement struggles between 2011 and 2014 witnessed a revival of encampments as a form of protest. Protest camps were primarily considered as sites of everyday, prefigurative politics, in which an alternative future could be constructed in the here and now. Feminist and queer approaches to encampments, however, have cast light on the prevalence of structural power within them. Through an analysis of the 15-M anti-austerity movement in several Spanish cities in 2011 and of a feminist camp established for International Women’s Day 2020 in Valencia, this chapter will explore both the possibilities and boundaries of protest camps as a form of resistance. It will discuss how safety may be built through recognition strategies that give account of other subjectivities with intersectional vulnerabilities, and how horizontality is always stratified by power. Finally, the chapter updates the concept of woman-only spaces, thanks to the inclusion of Spanish transfeminist experiences in the feminist encampment. From this perspective, if non-mixed camps constantly revise their dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, they can function as a starting point for the recognition of marginal subjectivities and thus for a more genuinely inclusive and transformative politics.
... Thus, events such as the polarisation of Spanish politics caused by the recession, the economic measures taken by the conservative government of the Popular Party after winning a landslide election following the failed economic policies of the Socialist Party (Martín and Urquizu-Sancho, 2012;Salmon, 2017), the emergence of the indignados movement (Perugorría and Tejerina, 2013) and the creation of the extreme-left party Podemos first and far-right Vox later (Turnbull-Dugarte, 2019;Turnbull-Dugarte, Rama and Santana, 2020) as well as a number of other political problems such as the Catalan secessionist crisis have produced a media climate where news companies seem to be more interested in addressing their own partisan readership than in offering reliable information, which has led readerships to mistrust the information provided by news media, e. g. during the COVID-19 pandemic (Martín-Llaguno et al., 2022). ...
Drawing on the concept of “political sectarianism” proposed by Finkel et al. and on Entman’s classification of media biases, this paper aims to study polarization in three mainstream Spanish news websites, i.e. El País, El Mundo and Abc, during the COVID-19 pandemic through a cross-sectional analysis. For that purpose, a corpus of 900 articles was gathered during June 2020, following the end of the state of emergency and the strict lockdown enforced by the central government to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis relies on concepts used by communication and discourse analysts, i.e. framing and narratives. I have also drawn on the work of Bednarek on semantic choices. The study, which focuses on the headlines and the leads, shows that El Mundo and Abc were more critical of the central government’s handling of the health crisis, while El País was critical of Madrid’s conservative government. This points to the existence of distortion and content bias in the three newspapers. However, the most significant finding is the fact that El País is the only medium that clearly opted for a selection bias, omitting any news that could have been construed as critical of the central coalition government.
... This research technique has been used before in the study of protests and their collective production of symbols (Sarfati & Chung, 2018). The so-called "protest ethnography" allows us to investigate how protesters signify their practices, including emotional aspects, collective experience and solidarity formation (Perugorría & Tejerina, 2013;Smolović Jones et al., 2021). Contact with protest participants also allows us to capture elements of the context surrounding the observed events and understand their impact on the study site (Danley, 2021). ...
This article describes how the "bleeding eyes" symbol was crafted during the social unrest that took place in Chile in October 2019, when hundreds of people suffered from ocular trauma after being shot by the anti-riot police with plastic pellets. This seminal moment of symbolic production has been under-studied in the field of political communication. It draws upon concepts from the so-called "culturalist" approach to social movements studies and conducts an ethnographic account describing the dynamics that gave birth to a symbol. Este artículo describe el proceso de creación del símbolo de los ojos sangrantes en las protestas de Chile en octubre de 2019, cuando cientos de personas terminaron con daños oculares por balines disparados por la policía. Este momento de producción simbólica ha sido poco estudiado en el campo de la comunicación política. Se incorporan concep-tos de la tradición culturalista de los estudios de movimientos sociales y se ofrece una observación etnográfica de las protestas que dieron lugar al símbolo. Palabras clave: Producción simbólica, alineación de encuadre, movimientos sociales, resonancia cultural, trauma ocular. Este artigo descreve o processo de criação do símbolo dos olhos sangrando nos protestos no Chile em outubro de 2019, quando centenas de pessoas ficaram feridas nos olhos por balas disparadas pela polícia. Esse momento de produção simbólica tem sido pouco estudado no campo da comunicação política. Conceitos da tradição culturalista dos estudos de movimentos sociais são incorporados e é oferecida uma observação etnográfica dos protestos que deram origem ao símbolo. Palavras-chave: Produção simbólica, alinhamento de molduras, movimentos sociais, ressonância cultural, trauma ocular.
... The construction of easily identifiable actors responsible for particular grievances combined in the Indignados' mobilizing message with an inclusive "we," made up of "personas" instead of "activists" or "militantes" -terms usually associated with the "old way of doing politics" that was based on ideological or partisan affiliations (Perugorría and Tejerina 2013) and the auto-referential dynamics of traditional social movements. Inclusiveness was a fundamental value for the Indignados, who exercised it in a somewhat novel way in their networks and actions. ...
The Indignados movement was a protest movement that emerged in Spain in May 2011 as part of an extensive cycle of contention against austerity policies, the corruption of political authorities, and the democratic deficiencies of the Spanish political system. In turn, the mobilization of the Spanish Indignados was set in the context of a transnational wave of protest against austerity and for democracy, in which diffusion they played an important role. The massive mobilization of the Indignados attracted international attention and their demands obtained overwhelming public support. The movement consequences have been important at different levels. The rise of the Indignados caused a change in the domestic field of social movements with the emergence of new contentious actors and the strengthening of existing ones. Participation in the movement contributed to the spreading of values linked to deliberative democracy among the citizenry. Mobilization also contributed to a symbolic reframing of the causes and consequences of the economic crisis. The emergence over time of new political parties linked in some way to the movement has led to an important change in the Spanish party system.
... Indeed, while most common definitions of indignation tend to confine it to a form of moral anger, indignation is made of more than one emotion and displays multiple affective textures: it can be a combination of hate towards an oppressor (or an actor to blame) and love towards a victim, who has been harmed (Stolze 2019) 3 ; it can also be composed of disgust and compassion (Cordell 2017), or be a "boiling point" (Lordon 2016a) that builds on accumulated fears which transform into a desire for rebellion (Stolze 2019:144-155). Elsewhere, indignation is said to be the result of pride and shame, where "shame must be transformed into pride in order to allow oppressed groups to feel indignant (Jasper, 2014a: 211-212), and in turn, produce joy and emancipation (Perrugoria and Tejerina 2013). ...
... To further unpack the specific ways in which indignation intervenes in the context of protest and mobilization, it is important to root indignation's complex affectivity in the sociobiographical trajectories of the individuals who express it in the first place. Here, while much emphasis is often put on the "feeling rules" at play in a given context of mobilization (Hochschild 1979) and the way indignation might be "mobilized" by social movements (e.g., Perrugoria and Tejerina 2013), it is also important to consider the lived experiences which explain the emergence of indignation in the first place. In other words: the way indignation can act as a trigger for protest depends on people's dispositions to be moved, affected, by events or situations, which are rooted in their own sociobiographical trajectory (Lahire 2011;Mathieu 2010). ...
... Just like in 2011, the BYV is a movement that expresses the indignation of increasing parts of the population in the face of socioeconomic inequalities, the neoliberal policies driving society, and representative institutions that "do not represent us." In addition, and similarly to the demands for dignity observed in 2011 (Franquesa 2016;Glasius and Pleyers 2013;Perrugoria and Tejerina 2013), the yellow vest movements in Belgium and France demonstrated explicit affective repertoires, calling themselves "the anger of the people" and demanding "to live not survive"-here invoking a meaning of dignity as decent life (Nussbaum 2007). Overall, the indignation of the French and Belgium yellow vests can be seen as part and parcel of a broader culture of indignation (see de Sutter 2019; Innerarity 2019), ignited in part by the 2011 movements and the successful pamphlet by Stéphane Hessel in 2011 ("Indignez-vous!"). ...
In social movement research, indignation features prominently as an affect that triggers protest and mobilization. Yet, scholarly accounts rarely unpack the precise ways in which indignation performs these roles, and how it transforms individuals who join mobilization. This article conceptualizes indignation as a moment of affective transformation, based on affect-theoretical insights and drawing on the empirical analysis of the Belgian yellow vest movement (BYV). Building on focus groups, participant observations, and interviews, we unpack the complex affectivity of indignation and the dynamics that underlie indignation in the context of protest and mobilization. We find that indignation enables three affective transformations: (1) it acts as a tipping point that follows from individual feelings of resentment; (2) it is a moment of affective resonance that binds individuals in affective communities, (3) it acts as affective bifurcation from the disempowered state of fear and towards the reclaiming of political power.
... These proposals for changes awoke a profound reaction in the 'dominant coalition' (Gil-Calvo, 2013), which made a proposal for a political reform from the inside, replacing mainstream parties so as to deactivate social confrontation and redirect the demands of change towards centralisation and technocratic governments. Perugorría and Tejerina (2013) stress that emotions also played a leading role in the mobilisations of the Indignants, both to establish responsibilities (the elites) and to organise solutions: the hope for an alternative democratic future and well-being. The performances, but also websites and social media accounts, were carefully configured and synchronised regarding to stimulate the breakdown of emotional bonds with the previous collective identities in order to elicit, instead, the emergence of new emotional bonds around a new social identity: the Indignants (the people, the 99%). ...
This text examines the role of emotions as a strategy of populist mobilization into a risk context, presuming that populism is a political style useful for any kind of political actor, but especially suitable for ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘low-cost’ parties. The article compares the cases of Podemos and Vox, the two populist parties that emerged successfully into the electoral scene after the Spanish movement of the Indignants (or 15M movement). Combining literature with an exploratory qualitative analysis of their websites and social media accounts, the paper argues that emotional persuasion is widely used by the two both populist parties’ framings, but in quite different ways, according to their cute different ideological projects. Moreover, the text holds that emotions are not exclusive of the populist nor the social protests, but they are a feature of current democracy and even intrinsic to representative democracy from its origins.
... Of all these factors, emotions are found to be most relevant to decisions to participate in the Arab Spring. This confirms a large body of literature on emotions in contentious politics (Aminzade and McAdam 2002;Emirbayer and Goldberg 2005;Goodwin and Jasper 2003;Goodwin, Jasper, and Poletta 2009;Perugorría and Tejerina 2013), in politics more generally (Åhäll and Gregory 2015; Ariffin, Coicaud, and Popovski 2006;Brader 2013;McDermott 2004;Nussbaum 2013;Staiger et al. 2010), and in the Arab Spring in particular (Pearlman 2013;Bishara 2015;Maleej 2012). ...
Why did people mobilize for the Arab Spring? While existing research has focused on the roles of authoritarian regimes, oppositional structures, and social grievances in the movement, these explanations fail to address differences in the behavior of individuals, overlooking the fact that even when millions mobilized for the Arab Spring, the majority of the population stayed at home. To investigate this puzzle, this book traces the reasoning processes by which individuals decided to join the uprisings or to refrain from doing so. Drawing from original ethnographic interviews with protestors and non-protestors in Egypt and Morocco, Dornschneider utilizes qualitative methods and computational modeling to identify the main components of reasoning processes: beliefs, inferences (directed connections between beliefs), and decisions. Bridging the psychology literature on reasoning and the political science literature on protest, this book systematically traces how decisions about participating in the Arab Spring were made. It shows that decisions to join the uprisings were “hot,” meaning they were based on positive emotions, while decisions to stay at home were “cool,” meaning they were based on safety considerations. Hot Contention, Cool Abstention adds to the extensive literature on political uprisings, offering insights on how and why movements start, stall, and evolve.
... Протесты в Португалии активизировали протестные движения в Западной Европе. В частности, португальское Движение 12 марта стало одним из триггеров массо вой мобилизации в Испании [Perugorría, Tejerina 2013]. Протесты в этой стране не однократно становились объектом иссле дований [Peterson 2015;Romanos 2016;Myers 2012;Zamponi 2013;Langman 2013;Manzona 2014;Perugorría 2013;Ruijgrok 2017;Zamponi 2017]. ...
... В частности, португальское Движение 12 марта стало одним из триггеров массо вой мобилизации в Испании [Perugorría, Tejerina 2013]. Протесты в этой стране не однократно становились объектом иссле дований [Peterson 2015;Romanos 2016;Myers 2012;Zamponi 2013;Langman 2013;Manzona 2014;Perugorría 2013;Ruijgrok 2017;Zamponi 2017]. В массовых движениях 15М, Indignados и Toma la plaza участвовали жители 60 испанских городов, протестовавшие против антикризисных мер, высокой безработицы и коррупции 3 . ...
... Как и в случае Португалии, ряд авторов указывают, что появление протестных дви жений в Испании также были спровоци ровано событиями Арабской весны [Fomi naya 2015;Perugorría 2013;Sepp 2013;. В частно сти, К.Ф. ...
Our analysis allows us to talk about two waves of the echo of the Arab spring in Western Europe. The first wave was observed in 2011 and was expressed in the explosive growth of mainly peaceful protests. Taking into account the data on the direct impact of the events of the Arab Spring on the protest activity in Western Europe, the explosive increase in the number of anti-government demonstrations, riots and general strikes recorded in Western Europe in 2011 can be attributed to the influence of the Arab Spring up to a very considerable extent. In 2012–2014 the protest movement in Western Europe acquired its own logic and continued at a fairly high level, despite the disappearance of the "Arab impulse" – to a large extent under the influence of the second wave of the financial and economic crisis. The second wave of the echo of the Arab spring in Western Europe was observed with a noticeable time lag in 2014–2015. and manifested primarily in the form of rapid growth of terrorist (mainly Islamist) activities. One of the consequences of the Arab Spring was the collapse or sharp weakening of several sufficiently effective Arab authoritarian regimes, which led to a significant improvement in the possibility of the activities of terrorist organizations of various kinds, the rapid growth of their strength, influence and effectiveness of organizational forms – including, which is very important for Western Europe, in cyber space. Terrorist activities penetrated from Arab countries to Western Europe through various channels: refugees, quite effective Internet propaganda of ISIS, jihadists returning to Western Europe, and so on. The second wave was expressed in a certain increase in protest activity, but it radically differed from the protests in 2011, since in the latter case it was a matter of the protests organized mainly by the right-wing forces against the migrant wave, which was generated to a very high degree by the tsunami of the Arab Spring.
