Picturing protest: visuality, visibility and the public sphere

Abstract

Aims and scopeThis special issue is concerned with how and why certain visual images picturing protest events and social movements are rendered visible or invisible in the public sphere. 'Picturing Protest' responds to the growing interest in a new protest culture and new ways of 'doing politics', ranging from Arab revolts to the Occupy Movement, the Indignados and anti-austerity protests Taken all together, the different contributions ask how and why activists, photojournalists, citizen journalists and journalists use protest images, ranging from maps, posters, to amateur and professional photographs, to communicate with a range of audiences within and beyond nationally-defined public spheres. The contributors do so by employing theoretical tools and methods that originate from within a variety of disciplines, including media and

Raining on SeaWorld’s Parade: PETA’s Direct Action and Public Interest Communication

“…This study thus points to the need to explore the interplay between the visual nature of direct action and its online circulation. Recent scholarship explores how and why some events and images are rendered visible online and gain momentum, while others are not (Rovisco & Veneti, 2017). So, although the symbolic meaning of visually embodied direct action discussed here is important, future research should consider how it is represented and shared in new media (DeLuca, Lawson, & Sun, 2012;Milner, 2013;Rovisco & Veneti, 2017).…”

“…19). What PETA and others are adept at doing is using one channel to influence interest in another, which has been noted as a key hallmark of contemporary activism (Rovisco & Veneti, 2017). Embodied direct action is a crucial part of driving attention to PETA's other channels and messages.…”

Group selfies and Snapchat: From sociality to synthetic collectivisation

“…Accordingly, in our analysis of the Snaps, we differentiate between the positioning of individuals and groups, where an individual is a single person who is shown or heard on their own in the video and where collective identities are constructed in content where more than one person is seen or heard. This distinction is important as it cuts across the many different kinds of collective identities that can be construed in Snaps, and allows us to make comparisons between the kinds of multimodal positioning that can be negotiated for different types of collective identities, such as protest identities (Rovisco and Veneti, 2017) or fandoms (Van den Bulke et al, 2015). Indeed, the ways in which individuals and groups are represented in Snaps can vary considerably, where the representation can infer the well-recognised distinctions between 'me', 'us' and 'them' used to suggest affiliation, approbation, legitimacy and distance as documented extensively in Critical Discourse Studies.…”

A tale of two squares: spatial iconization of the Al Tahrir and Rabaa protests

“…Investigating images of protests corresponds to the growing interest in an emerging protest culture and new ways of politics exposure ranging from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement as well as anti-austerity protests in Europe (Rovisco and Veneti, 2017). This ‘new wave of contention’ (Doerr et al, 2013) necessitates studying the visual representations of protest movements (Askanius, 2012, 2013; Doerr et al, 2013; Philipps, 2012) and the ways protest images are composed and symbolized (Rovisco and Veneti, 2017; Ziemann, 2008). In this view, this article explores the role of visual representations in iconizing protest urban space.…”