The struggle for ‘our streets’: the digital and physical spatial politics of the Ferguson Movement

Spatial dynamics of protest: Themes and trajectories

“…Acknowledging multiple spaces that we now inhabit as they relate to new technologies, scholars offered a more complex understanding of public space and dissent, one which includes both physical and virtual spaces (Amin, 2015;Steinhilper, 2018;Vasi & Suh, 2016). Starting with the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement and growing with the expansion of the Black Lives Matter Movement in the U.S. after 2014 (Cheng & Chan, 2016;Mislán & Dache-Gerbino, 2018;Ray, 2020), some scholarly debates engaged with different aspects of protest in place (presented throughout this article) in the context of in-person/online activism and the back and forth between the physical and the virtual (Steinhilper, 2018;van Haperen et al, 2020;Vasi & Suh, 2016). As one example, van Haperen et al (2020) investigate the relation between presentation and online performance, and locational context.…”

“Everything I Believe In Is Rooted in Love”: Women and Non-binary Activists of Color Fighting for the Practice and Promise of Abolition

“…The nation also saw waves of uprisings after the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida; the 2014 murder of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri; and the 2015 murder of Freddie Gray by police in Baltimore, Maryland. These movements inspired several studies to analyze their organization and impact (Boyles, 2019;Cobbina, 2019;Mislán & Dache-Gerbino, 2018;Potter, 2017). Barbara Ransby ( 2018) describes Martin's 2012 murder as the spark that ignited the fire that erupted after Brown's murder two years later.…”

Journalism and the Politics of Mobility

“…Furthermore, these forms of geographic bias underpin the greater issue of racialized and gendered politics in journalism (Clark 2014;Gutsche and Estrada 2017;Gutsche and Hess 2018b;Richardson 2017). Scholars have identified the biases embedded in urban planning through racist and classist zoning; practices that continue to this day and have become part of the way news flows occur as well (Mislán and Dache-Gerbino 2018;Sharp 2009;Wacquant 2001). As noted previously, the protests linked to the killing of George Floyd and the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson have brought the impact of these racist structures on journalistic routes to light (Mislán and Dache-Gerbino 2018;Richardson 2017).…”

“…Scholars have identified the biases embedded in urban planning through racist and classist zoning; practices that continue to this day and have become part of the way news flows occur as well (Mislán and Dache-Gerbino 2018;Sharp 2009;Wacquant 2001). As noted previously, the protests linked to the killing of George Floyd and the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson have brought the impact of these racist structures on journalistic routes to light (Mislán and Dache-Gerbino 2018;Richardson 2017). "Parachute journalism"-covering a story mostly from a distance, just traveling in for a few days to cover an area the journalists usually do not cover-does not apply only to foreign reporting but also to a domestic urban reporting increasingly criticized for making its narratives fit dominant hegemonic and racist ideologies (Gutsche and Hess 2018b).…”