15M Movement Research Articles

Iconos audiovisuales en las redes sociales: del 15M al 12M

This paper aims to investigate the role of visual icons in the new journalistic storytelling that take place in social networks. The case study is the marches of May 12, 2012, on the first anniversary of the 15M movement, narrated in Twitter. The paper is part of previous studies that point to the role of visual icons as hubs of social networks. Through methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis it is concluded that Twitter is developing new journalistic visual storytelling, in which professional journalists and citizens converge. Videos have more viral than pictures and text, but the influence of the message depends less on its format than on the power of is content. Journalists and mainstream media are still very influential, but now share that influence with social media and more active citizens.

La opinión publicada sobre el movimiento 15-M. Un análisis empírico de los periódicos digitales españoles: elmundo.es, elpais.com y abc.es

La opinión publicada sobre el movimiento 15-M. Un análisis empírico de los periódicos digitales españoles: elmundo.es, elpais.com y abc.es

Indignados en España e Indecisos en Polonia. La inspiración española en el contexto polaco y el fracaso de la protesta en el país de “Solidarnosć”

The 15-M movement raised in Spring 2011 and the social activity of the Indignants in Spain was a social and cultural phenomenon of big interest not only in the Spanish society but also in other countries of Europe and America. It seems that the Indignants Movement -that was started in Spain- was also the inspiration for a segment of Polish youth to protest against the Government. But the nature and the scope of these protests were clearly different from it was happening in Old Europe. The objective of this article is to show similarities and differences of the young people’s attitude in Spain and Poland, making reference to comments of the Polish press.

Las comisiones de diversidad funcional en el 15M español: poner el cuerpo en el espacio público

This article aims to analyze some of the implications of the committees of functional diversity created in two Spanish cities during the 15M camps of 2011. Firstly, we situate them in the context of the historical evolution of disability activisms in Spain. Secondly, we describe the main traits of such committees within the 15M, based on their published materials on the Internet along with the assessments of some participants. Once contextualized, we analyze what we have considered the main contribution of the committees. It is the experience of "putting the body in the square", a form of embodied politics performed at the public space. This opened a debate on the logics of exclusion / inclusion within citizenship, and in turn it got back the awareness that precariousness and vulnerability are common traits of every human being. Therefore, we conclude that the committees of functional diversity represented a significant moment for both the disability activism and the 15M movement, with their use of the body as a liberatory tool to question the very definition of the human.

Communication among young people in the #spanishrevolution: Uses of online–offline tools to obtain information about the #acampadabcn

Recently, social movements worldwide have introduced innovations in their communication methods. The #spanishrevolution that started on 15 May 2011 shows this new-style communication in action. Amidst regional election campaigning, thousands of people, mainly young, took to the streets and occupied Spain’s main squares, becoming known as the Outraged ( los Indignados) or 15M Movement. This article evaluates how the Outraged involved with the #acampadabcn, the camp in Barcelona’s central square, used online–offline tools to get information about the Movement. This research combines participant observation, surveys, in-depth interviews, and web analytics. The results show that social media were vital for getting information during 15M. While the majority of those surveyed became aware of the camps via word of mouth, a posteriori it was social media that were the main tools for informing and mobilizing. 15M Movement, together with networked social movements, has updated the communication methods of social movements.

The 15-M movement: formed by and formative of counter-mapping and spatial activism

This article examines 15-M as a movement that has made manifest the claims that have been ongoing since the 1970s in much less prominent participatory urban interventions and art about space, memory and democracy under neoliberalism in Spain. The practice of counter-mapping and 15-M are both interested in Henri Lefebvre's “lived space” and are equally concerned with making political action possible again. Artistic space-related activism is becoming an important form of political struggle not only in Spain, but also worldwide. Drawing on the meaningful connections between the practice of counter-mapping, the still-developing story of indignation, participatory democracy, and the favored role of historical memory in the Spanish context, this article explores and compares the participatory mapping of a neighborhood in Barcelona known as la Barceloneta (2009) and the mapping of subjectivities in various interventions by Spanish artists Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González (2005–2012) in order to better gauge the relevance of the 15-M movement for spatial activism in the future.

Spanish Indignados and the evolution of the 15M movement on Twitter: towards networked para-institutions

The Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the #YoSoy132 movement, the protests in Istanbul's Taksim Gezi Park, the Brazilian Spring (#jan25, #arabspring, #15M, #ows, #YoSoy132, #occupyGezi, #vemprarua): in the last three years the world has witnessed the emergence of networked citizen politics. These movements are not institutions, but oftentimes mimic their nature. At the same time, they are unlike traditional citizens’ movements, but very much alike in their decentralized structure. Networked citizen politics, characterized by decentralization, swarm-like action and an intensive use of information and communication technologies have been playing an increasing role in worldwide protests and movements, often overtaking and circumventing the actions of governments, parliaments, political parties, labour unions, non-governmental organizations, mass media and all kinds of formal democratic institutions. Taking the case of Spanish Indignados, we analyse the nature of networked citizen politics as an extra-representational kind of political participation – for instance, the pervasiveness of Twitter's use in the 15M movement. We begin by characterizing users, including a description of how movements propagate from one to another. Next we explore the bonds between networked citizen movements and formal democratic institutions and how they relate to each other, especially the movements with political parties and mass media. We also examine how networked citizen politics may use tools similar to those of the so-called Politics 2.0 but with very different purposes and, accordingly, the result is of the two conflicting approaches. Our analysis shows that different movements – that is, 15M and 25S – act as a continuum for networked citizen politics that use the Internet as the support for new institutionalisms, and despite the lack of traditional organizations, people, practices and ideas are shared and used as foundations for further action. Nevertheless, there is almost no inter-institutional dialogue, with exceptions being individuals belonging to minor and left-wing parties.

The Spanish 15-M Movement: a consensual dissent?

Since May 2011, the Spanish 15-M Movement (commonly referred as los indignados [the outraged]) has become a major player in the domestic political scenario. Public opinion data reveal that there is a cross-sectional support for the 15-M among the general population in Spain, affecting people of different ages, genders, employment situations and levels of urbanization. The data present a “movement of dissent” and confirm the crisis of the consensual culture of the Spanish political transition from Franco's regime to democracy. The 15-M challenges previous consensus and expresses the need to reform or to overcome the close-knitted institutional map designed by the elites driving the transition. The outraged movement advances and leads a new political culture based on widespread social dissent. Our data suggest an imbalance between the cultural and the political impact of the 15-M, and how this tension will be a central element of cultural and civic life in the next decades in Spain.

Reflections on The Free Fare Movement and Other "New Social Movements"

On June 6, 2013, the Free Fare Movement (Movimento Passe Livre) began a very aggressive campaign against the rise in bus and metro fares in São Paulo, Brazil. In an ultimately two-week campaign, the movement organized six demonstrations blocking some of São Paulo's most vital avenues. After the demonstrations became massive (some in excess of one million people), both city and state governments relented and reduced the fares. The June mobilizations were horizontal, non-partisan, and based on direct action. These events are akin to other recent mobilizations such as Occupy Wall Street and the 15M movement in Spain but are different in one important aspect: they had only one demand—a 20-cent reduction in bus and metro fares. This one demand allowed the movement to develop a clear and successful strategy while retaining the horizontality and countercultural creativity of other new movements. Indeed, this series of demonstrations may have provided a model for coordinating a concern for processes with strategically aiming for outcomes.

Nuevos movimientos sociales en el Estado español: una visión desde los principios del aprendizaje dialógico.

En los últimos años han aparecido diferentes movilizaciones sociales dentro del Estado español que han adquirido una importante relevancia en el espacio político, como el movimiento 15M o la Plataforma de Afectados por las Hipotecas. Estas movilizaciones tienen unas nuevas formas de acción y organización que guardan relación con algunos principios del aprendizaje dialógico. A través de la observación y participación en estos colectivos en la ciudad de Cáceres, además de la revisión documental de artículos realizados sobre estas movilizaciones, hemos querido mostrar algunas evidencias de esta relación. Nuestra conclusión es que estas nuevas formas de organización contribuyen a caminar hacia una democracia más asentada sobre el diálogo igualitario que sobre las imposiciones de poder desde las esferas políticas.

The 15M Movement. Collective and volatile actions in the political arena

From data obtained in a survey conducted in May 2011 to identify some characteristics of the media impact of Spanish 15M Movement, this paper presents a critical reflection on the role of new media, especially social networks, in the generation of massive social actions. As a result of current information processes, social networks have been positioned in the imaginary as informative multiplication scenarios, and as spaces that generate immediate social mobilizations. However, the rapid spread, spontaneity, immediacy and volatility that characterize these movements contrast with the lack of lengthy movements, which arise from deliberative processes, necessarily built on institutionalized public spheres. The article shows the opposition between the change in media consumption habits and the reception of information by citizens and their permanent apathy to action-mobilization. Thus, changes in the forms of communication, individualization, connection and multipresence keep unchanged collective action spaces, and can even reduce these spaces if they are not utilized properly.

The political economy of Israel's ‘social justice’ protests: a class and generational analysis

In the summer of 2011, similar to and partly inspired by Spain's 15M (indignados) movement, Israel experienced an unprecedented wave of socio-economic protest featuring tent encampments and mass rallies. Headlined ‘the people demand social justice’, the protest was surprising since distributive conflicts and social policy issues are peripheral to Israeli politics, and Israel was not in the throes of an economic crisis. These were not anti-austerity protests, but reflected the eroding life chances of young adults. Specifically, liberalisation of Israel's political economy – which contributed to a substantial rise in the living standards of the parental generation of the middle class and improved their life chances in the 1990s – is now impeding inter-generational class reproduction for their children. We document significant changes in home ownership, relative incomes, and the value of higher education and other assets that were previously the key to middle class incomes and lifestyles. The impact of neo-liberal policies is evident, for instance, in the declining scope and generosity of the public sector's role in employment and housing. At the subjective level, on the eve of the protests young adults with higher education were less optimistic about their economic prospects than other groups. Finally, even though the protests appeared to be broadly consensual and inclusive, a closer look reveals that its core supporters and activists were drawn from social and political sectors closely associated with the middle class.

Democracy in an age of viral reality: A media epidemiography of Spain’s indignados movement

The present article draws from fieldwork on the indignados (or 15M) movement in Spain to propose a new approach to the study of protest movements in the digital era: ‘media epidemiography’. This composite of the terms ‘epidemiology’ and ‘ethnography’ is used as a heuristic to address the research challenge of today’s swiftly evolving techno-political terrains. I argue that viral media have played a key role in Spain’s indignados movement, with Twitter as the central site of propagation. Protesters have used Twitter and other viral platforms to great effect and in a range of different ways, including as a means of setting the tone and agenda of the protests, spreading slogans and organizational practices, and offering alternative accounts of the movement. These developments may signal the coming of an era in which political reality is shaped by viral contents ‘shared’ by media professionals and amateurs – an age of viral reality.

Political activism online: organization and media relations in the case of 15M in Spain

The Internet is causing major changes in the field of political activism. One particularly significant case is the 15M movement, which emerged from a popular initiative organized in several Spanish cities in 2011. Based on the analysis of these protests as a case study, this paper has two aims: first, to examine the role of digital technology – websites and social networks – in the online organization of political activism; second, to analyse the relationships established between the conventional media on the one hand and activists on the other. The methodology combines the technique of in-depth interviews and qualitative analysis of reports, working papers and file data about 15M. The findings show an intensive use of digital technology by activists, both of their own social networks (for example, N-1) and commercial ones (Facebook or Twitter). These digital tools enabled them to disseminate their own information and optimize their internal organization. The indignados established an interplay between online activism and offline actions. Digital technology facilitated the organization of the mass gatherings in the streets. The possession of communicative and technical skills played an important part in organizing 15M. On the other hand, the relationship between journalists and activists was a difficult one. The indignados did not follow the established patterns of the journalists’ work routines. The latter had to resort to the demonstrators’ websites and social networks to obtain information. The activists recognize that the conventional media were crucial to the protests achieving a widespread impact in the news.

Prologue: Value as theory

In the introduction to part one of this special issue we addressed the thorny question of whether an anthropological theory of value is needed or indeed possible at all. By way of a Socratic debate, we argued respectively for one of two opposite positions. Ton Otto suggested that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory and he was in favor of bringing the papers together from a “history of ideas” perspective, thereby tracing how the authors’ varied perspectives and approaches to questions of value advanced particular—and easily specified—trends in social theory. Rane Willerslev, to the contrary, proposed that anthropology is an ethnographically driven discipline, which can only produce idiosyncratic “antitheories” of value. In Willerslev’s view, anthropologists are and should be, primarily, warriors of the periphery—that is, “guerrilla warriors,” using indigenous conceptual productions as tactics to fight dominant theoretical traditions. The debate reflects an underlying disagreement, which runs through the collection of articles themselves, about the place of anthropology in relation to other disciplines and, in particular, whether anthropology is primarily theory-driven or ethnography-driven, and whether or not these two abstractions (“theory” and “ethnography”) can be reconciled. This debate continues in part two of this special issue, but with new fields of inquiry and objects of analysis. The contributions of part one were largely concerned with aspects of value in exchange theory and with the radical comparison of diverse cultural structures. Part two addresses the relationship between value and action, including actions deemed to occur outside the sphere of reciprocal exchanges. Additionally, part two raises questions about what value means for anthropological practice by considering how anthropologists engage with their field sites and projects via critique and collaboration.

Acción vs representación: el 15-M y su repercusión en la ciudad

This article seeks to analyze the relationship between public space –the physical– and civic action –the social –. It uses the 15-M Movement as a case study, framed within the global occupation movement. It will examine the self-organization and the use of new technologies and their potential for citizens’ action and transformation of public space, as well as the phenomenon of occupation and empowerment. How public is public space? The research focuses on the two opposing actors involved in public space: the legal and regulated (current planning system) and the spontaneous and often illegal (social movements). The conclusions lead towards ways to achieve a balance between the design of a public space as a place for representation and for action , as both an insurgent and institutional space, halfway between a rigid and regulated design and a flexible and spontaneous one.

Politics of the encounter: Cognition, emotions, and networks in the Spanish 15M

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 movement identity. First, the article refers to the diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing tasks performed by 15M participants to define the problematic situation and attribute blame, articulate a solution to the problem and devise strategies to achieve that end, and motivate participants to sustain their engagement and remedy the situation. Second, the article concentrates on the emotions that were ‘mobilized’ by social movement organizations linked to the 15M (e.g. outrage or indignation), and those emotions that emerged spontaneously during the ‘encounters’ that took place in the public space: joy, efficacy, and empowerment. Finally, the article addresses the relational aspects entailed in the process of identity construction, that is, the activation and de-activation of both ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ ties between 15M members and previous and/or current political and social collectives within the ‘progressive field.’ In following this triple objective, the article describes the process of identity-synchronization that has allowed people with no previous political participation and with different and oftentimes opposing politico-ideological trajectories to feel part of the movement. The data come from 17 in-depth interviews and eight focus groups with key activists, ethnographic observations in camps and assemblies in both Bilbao and Madrid during the summer of 2011, and visual materials displayed in web pages and Facebook accounts associated to the 15M.

El movimiento 15-M: sus acciones como rituales, compartir social, creencias, valores y emociones

ResumenUn estudio correlational (N = 243 trabajadores y universitarios) comparó las creencias, valores, emociones y procesos grupales de participantes en el 15-M y personas que no participaron. Los participantes comparten más valores post-materialistas y creencias sobre identidad, injusticia y eficacia de la acción colectiva que los no participantes. Informan de más ira y vergüenza colectiva, y de más esperanza en que el movimiento triunfe. La vergüenza y la esperanza median entre el marco de injusticia y eficacia respectivamente y la participación en el 15-M. ha comunión emocional y creación de identidad colectiva son más intensas en las manifestaciones del 15-M que en actividades grupales más rutinarias, y la comunión se asocia a más acuerdo con las creencias y valores del 15-M y más apoyo social subjetivo. Los participantes en el 15-M desconfían más de las instituciones y perciben un clima emocional de mayor ira. La mayor comunión emocional e identificación colectiva refuerza el apoyo social y el clima emocional de ira en el caso de la participación en el 15-M. El compartir social refuerza las emociones y valores. Los resultados se enmarcan en un modelo neo-durkheimiano convergente con la perspectiva de la identidad social.

Hiszpański Ruch 15-M: tożsamość projektowa in statu nascendi

The Spanish movement of May 15th (15-M) has become a reference point for other groups of indignados, which have emerged in different parts of the world. This is why 15-M has already inspired a number of studies by Spanish and foreign scholars, both in the camp of sociology and in political science. It has also aroused a rising of interest among journalists. In this study, we make a fi rst step towards better understanding of the 15-M movement, by trying to define its group identity. Our analysis point to an evolutionary nature of the movement. Initially, it was rather chaotic and lacking coherence, but with time it acquired several proper characteristics, among them domination of young people, political indifference, pacifism, as well as a widespread use of new technologies. Besides, while resistance and discontent served as its common ground at the very beginning, after that the movement has bacome an advocate of a specific social change. Its idea of a change has consisted in the development of partcipatory democracy, in the harnessing of the global capitalism, and in the provision of social justice and adequate conditions for self-fulfillment for individuals. Such a transformation inside the movement is consistent with the theory of “group identities“ developed by Manuel Castels. The Spanish sociologist argues that in the network society of our times, group identities are based most of all on group resistance and only afterwards they can transform into project identities. In this particular example, such a transformation may have been fostered by the emergence of several other points of resistance in the world, inspired by the Spanish movement. Nevertheless, the durability of 15-M’s group identity will depend on its ability to influence the current domestic politics. Interestingly, the Spanish indignados seem to embody many transformations typical for modern societies, defined by Anthony Giddens as a passage towards the “late modernity“. Their demands are in many respects convergent with the program of “life politics“, described by this British sociologist. The passage towards the late modernity is also visible in the global reach of their protests. On one hand, they raise the issue of global processes haveing local effects. On the other hand, their protests have a clearly expansionary nature. With the emergence of several other groups of indignados, for example in United States or in Chile, the 15-M may become an avant-garde of a wider global movement. At the same time, it has become clear that, regardless of a particular economic, political and social context which undoubtedly served as a catalyst for social unrest in Spain, the identity of the 15-M movement is based strongly on universal values, going far beyond the domestic context.

Elecciones Generales y redes sociales en el caso de España, 2011 General Elections and social networks in the case of Spain, 2011

General Elections of November 20, 2011 marked a turning point in the use of social networks in Spain for political purposes: on the one hand, was the first time the major parties decided to use social networks in their election campaigns, and on the other, all studies show that small parties won on this field. Given that “the smalls” reached unexpected good election results, therefore we must examine the question of a possible relationship between votes won and presence in social networks. It is also important that the vast majority of messages against politicians came from users participants in the 15-M Movement (“The Outraged”). From their personal accounts they proposed different hashtags attacking the two major political parties: the Popular Party (PP) and the Socialist Party (PSOE).