Communication Activism as a School of Politics: Lessons From Spain's Indignados Movement

Abstract

In this article, we draw on ethnographic research to examine some key communication activism practices of Spain's indignados (15M) movement. The 15M radically transformed communication activism in Spain through its strong political-pedagogical orientation. Here lies the greatest 15M lesson for Communication for Social Change: Ordinary citizens in countries like Spain are rejecting traditional roles as "beneficiaries" of institutional communication campaigns. Instead, they have become active political actors who are able to generate their own processes of political pedagogy and communication. We conceptualize this lesson by positing the existence of three principles of 15M communication activism as a school of politics: the principles of pedagogical sovereignty, action, and networking.

The (in)visible barriers to free software: Inequalities in online communities in Spain

“…This principle connects with the scientific literature addressing the educational dimension of social movements as entities with the capacity to generate knowledge on their own (Casas-Cortés, Osterweil, & Powell, 2008;Cox & Flesher Fominaya, 2009;Della Porta & Pavan, 2017;Stephansen, 2016). Barbas and Postill (2017) identify those practices of learning from the experiences of counterparts unrelated to commercial and state institutions with those of 15M activists in Spain.…”

Las pautas de comunicación digital de los principales movimientos ciudadanos en Málaga (España) en el periodo 2018-2019

“…Este movimiento nació a raíz de las protestas en España el 15 de mayo de 2011, en las que se reclamaba una democracia más representativa y participativa. Dicho movimiento ha sido profundamente estudiado (Haro y Sampedro, 2011;Toret, 2013;Barranquero y Meda, 2015;Iranzo y Farné, 2015;Tormey y Feenstra, 2015;Barbas y Postill, 2017y Candón-Mena, 2016, entre otros) y ejemplifica lo que Toret (2013: 109) define como "la sincronización multicapa del comportamiento colectivo", la unión del espacio real (offline) con el virtual (online), mediante la comunicación que se establece entre ambos espacios de acción de los grupos ciudadanos y donde "la información, la atención y el afecto se concentran y canalizan gracias a múltiples dispositivos y capas de comunicación, que están entrelazadas entre sí" (Toret, 2013: 109).…”

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“…For its part, Spanish communication research is also striking insofar as it tends to intersect communication perspectives of Latin American and Anglo-Saxon traditions. Moreover, the emergence of the 15-M Movement in Spain (2011) has hybridized the Spanish communication field to such an extent that it can be regarded as a "social and communication" laboratory worthy of attention, as underscored by authors such as Tufte (2017) and Barbas and Postill (2017).…”