Protest March Research Articles

The transformation of political culture in Hong Kong: Tracing the decline of protest space

While it is obvious that the space for protests in Hong Kong has declined significantly, it is far less apparent how the political culture has been transformed. Based on an analytical framework using the Lefebvrian concept of space, the paper draws on the July 1st protest march to trace how the political space of the population has been reduced. Relatively quickly, Hong Kong has transformed from a vibrant civil society to one marked by fear and self-censorship similar to other authoritarian regimes. Following an expansion of protest space during the 2019 anti-extradition bill movement, the Chinese government has enacted a National Security Law to eliminate most political activism. The study shows the success of the government’s repression although the long-term impact is not yet clear.

역사왜곡 대응방안에 관한 예비적 고찰

This paper aims to develop a strategy of countermeasures against pro-Japanese history distortions on the Korean history. Korean history has long been distorted by Japanese historians and their Korean students under the influence of the Japanese imperial power in 20th century. And the intensity of this distortions, become deeper and wider in recent years, has threaten the stability of the national identity and people’s mental health.
 This article is composed of 3 chapters and introductory remarks. In the first chapter, the past salient instances of distortions made by pro-Japanese groups were over-viewed focusing on the era of the second half of the 20th century. Those instances included are War-indemnity, History-textbooks for the middle and high school students, Dok-do Island, Sex slaves in Japan imperialism, Etc.
 Second chapter introduces the countermeasures against those pro-Japanese distortions, practiced by Korean people and government. It includes government’s official letter of protest, people’s social movement organization formation and it’s protest gathering and marches. Reviewing this responses, this paper is inspected on the perspective of social movement theory.
 Third part shows the strategy of the newly constructed counter-measures against history distortions. This new counter-measure is constructed as a conceptual system, composed of 4 elements including subjects, aims, resources, and object of social movement. These elements construct a social movement action system on the base of the concerted inter-relationship of those 4 elements, named the counter-measure system against history distortions. This new countermeasure system can improve the ratio of success and achievement in the counter-measure social movements against history distortions.

The violent turn in non‐violent collective action: What happens?

AbstractCollective actions (e.g., protest marches, social movements) that begin peacefully sometimes turn into violent clashes between demonstrators and police, with alarming consequences. Research on the violent turn, informed by intergroup social psychology and micro‐sociology, has made significant but separate advances. We review them jointly to form an integrated, fuller understanding of the violent turn and promote interdisciplinary dialogue by discussing their respective strengths and identifying areas where they complement each other. For these purposes we first extract from the psychology of interpersonal aggression literature a three‐phase temporal pattern of aggression escalation to provide a common reference for reviewing representative studies and theories in intergroup social psychology (e.g., elaborated social identity model of crowd rioting, intergroup emotions theory) and micro‐sociology (e.g., micro‐sociological theory of violence, emotional dynamics and behavioural dynamics). The results of our analysis show a sequence of events beginning from instigators and their impellance in the early phase of the violent turn, psychological transformations forming a proclivity to aggress in the middle phase, and collective empowerment that disinhibits violence in the late phase. Group power and, to a less extent, group emotions permeate all phases. The sequence of events reveals transitional points where intervention may be applied to avert or abort violence.

Forever is Now by Mariama J. Lockington

Reviewed by: Forever is Now by Mariama J. Lockington Natalie Berglind Lockington, Mariama J. Forever is Now. Farrar, 2023 [416p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780374388881 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780374388898 $11.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 7-12 After Sadie witnesses an incident of police brutality, her generalized anxiety disorder increases to a point where she is unable to even leave the house. Other than her outlets of boxing and writing poetry, Sadie finds solace in therapy, where she’s diagnosed with agoraphobia. Journaling via livestreaming on an activist version of TikTok called Ruckus also helps, and she’s able to find other Black kids who struggle with their mental health. Still, Sadie continues to feel like she’s letting down those she loves, and as the Oakland, California, community organizes protests on behalf of the woman who was arrested, Sadie yearns to contribute, if only she can bring herself to do so. This novel-in-verse depicts a range of relevant struggles for Black girls: Sadie is painfully aware of a world that is both physically dying and politically corrupt, and she’s furious that her generation is expected to save it even as the threat of racial violence means she could be the next person whose name gets chanted at protests. Notably, Lockington equally emphasizes Sadie’s cherishing of sources of Black joy, especially through Sadie’s best friend and a cute boy who moves in across the street. Sadie is a character readers will root for as she overcomes her first heartbreak, advances with her therapy enough to attend the protest march, and finds her voice: “I am a sad, anxious Black girl./ And all I have are these fists,/ telling [End Page 331] a fury tale.” An author’s note explains that Black women’s mental health often goes untreated, and it also provides a list of resources for Black and queer kids to find therapy and adults who can help. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Weaving the Spiderweb: Mujeres Amazónicas and the Design of Anti-Extractive Politics in Ecuador

This article examines the strategic politics of an Indigenous network called las Mujeres Amazónicas (the Amazonian Women) that is resisting the expansion of extractive projects in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest. It asks, what are the Mujeres Amazónicas’ political strategies to resist extractive occupation and how do they develop and deploy these strategies in their territorial struggle? To answer this question, I analyze how their organizing is characterized by a political design that merges public expressions of resistance – such as mobilizations, protest marches, and other public actions – with communitarian practices that reproduce human and more-than-human life in the Amazon. To illustrate this strategic fusion, the article turns to an image that the Kichwa leader Elvia Dagua wove into an artesanía (handicraft) called la Araña Tejedora (the Weaving Spider). By analyzing Dagua’s artesanía and other self-descriptions of the Mujeres Amazónicas, the article shows how practices of communitarian reproduction are used and transformed by the Amazonian Women, thus enabling their political work and sustaining their lives at the same time. The strategic deployment of reproductive practices reveals how Indigenous women’s cultural and social identities are neither static nor unchangeable. It also illustrates that the Mujeres Amazónicas’ organizing should not be interpreted as a simple example of local politics responding to extractive occupation. By contrast, the article shows how the Mujeres Amazónicas are historical and political subjects with the power to shape the lines of political confrontation vis-à-vis the state and extractive capital, and to build global connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of living.

Charbons ardents par Maryline Desbiolles

Reviewed by: Charbons ardents par Maryline Desbiolles Kate M. Bonin Desbiolles, Maryline. Charbons ardents. Seuil, 2022. ISBN 978-2-02-149547-8. Pp. 144. The publisher classifies this work of writing under the rubric "roman," but this category is an uneasy fit. The I narrator is demonstrably Desbiolles herself, embarked on a project of revisiting a real-life event: the 1983 Marche pour l'égalité et contre le racisme. This protest march, the first of its kind in France, took place October-December of 1983: a 1200-kilometer trajectory from Marseille to Paris. The proximal cause of the march was a rise in unprovoked violence against French citizens of Maghrebi origin; more generally, it questioned the role of immigrants within contemporary French society. The artistry of Charbons ardents—what differentiates it from a work of history or sociology—lies in the creative juxtaposition of two timelines: the 1983 March, and the author's own moment of 2020, as she attempts to track down and interview surviving marchers, set against a backdrop of the COVID lockdown and the psychic stress it caused ("la pandémie me scie les pattes," laments the narrator, 13). The mobility of the marchers contrasts vividly with the claustrophobia and discouragement engendered by the lockdown. Time, for Desbiolles, is not a linear forward movement, but rather "un paysage où aller et venir, déambuler, errer, se perdre" (122). Indeed, there are subtle shifts in the first-person narrative voice, as the je of Desbiolles gives way (without punctuation or other markers) to the je of various marchers who agreed to an interview: among them, Djamel Atallah, Christian Delorme, Fatimah Mehallel. In this way, Desbiolles demonstrates a conscientious effort to foreground the marchers' opinions of their own experience, both in the moment and in thirty-seven years' hindsight (for example, Farid L'Haoua's sense of disaffection and disappointment with the March's lack of concrete achievements). At the same time, revisiting the March entails revisiting Desbiolles's own past, although she admits having been unaware of the event as it unfolded ("Je ne l'ai pas entendu en 1983. Qu'est-ce que je n'entends pas aujourd'hui?" 53). Desbiolles constantly seeks connections between the marchers' experience and her own (the age of Élisabeth's daughter and Desbiolles's own daughter; the marchers' music tastes in the 1980s and her own, etc.). This impulse to make connections occasionally leads Desbiolles to odd moments of speculative numerology, of identifying emblematic meaning in the roots of words or in names (the activist priest Christian Delorme becomes "un arbre," 103). Clearly, one of the main focal points of the work is Desbiolles's quest to understand her own positionality as an aging baby boomer and soixante-huitarde coming to grips with what she terms "les traumatismes de l'histoire de France" (87): colonization; the Algerian War for Independence, the 1980s rise in racist violence. Recent tragic events—the deaths of George Floyd, Adama Traoré, and Samuel Paty, all of which claim space in Chardons ardents—demonstrate the depressingly persistent cycle of racism: "Le [End Page 228] temps ne passe pas" writes Desbiolles (63). Less predictably, in the same line, she also observes: "Les temps se chevauchent, s'empilent, s'interpénètrent:" a fitting image for this rambling, provocative, and moving work. [End Page 229] Kate M. Bonin Arcadia University (PA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Siberia, protest, and politics

Abstract After a spiritual epiphany, the Sakha shaman Alexander Gabyshev became prominent in 2018–2020 by calling Vladimir Putin an authoritarian demon. Critiquing Russia's corrupt society through the internet and a protest march, Alexander rose to civic society leadership with multiethnic sympathizers. This article explains why Alexander became popular, and how he became a threat to Russia's authorities, especially influential Russian Orthodox elites. Alexander's repression is placed in comparative contexts: Robin Hood, Amerindian religious movements, Russia's politicized abuse of psychiatric hospitalization. It examines the relationship among indigeneity, dissidence, and the state in times of trouble, highlighting the ethical need for anthropologists, through long-term and in-depth fieldwork, to expose human rights violations interpreted as changeable. The author views Alexander's potential martyrdom as an indicator of Russia's political and social fragility.

From protest march to digital campaign: women’s movement and critical literacies in Indonesia

ABSTRACT By employing a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper examines the issues of women’s movement and empowerment by exploring the literacy practices of feminist activists. The narratives of literacy and its impact on women’s empowerment have been dominated by economic approaches. Freire’s notion of consciousness-raising has provided insight into the importance of women’s agency and their ideological struggle in fighting patriarchal ideologies through critical literacy practices. By taking the case of Women’s March Serang (WMS), we explore alternative stories of critical literacies and women’s empowerment and argue that critical literacies serve as a valuable mediating tool by which the women’s movement group could both transform themselves and engage in wider social activism. More specifically, WMS employs critical literacies to advocate gender equality and social inclusion in order to mobilize resources in a relatively patriarchal culture. From marching on the street to digital campaigns in social media, WMS has challenged the dominant discourse of functional literacy and women’s empowerment and demonstrated the adaptability of critical literacy practices in ongoing ways to support social activism and advocacy.

Social Movement Sustainability on Social Media: An Analysis of the Women’s March Movement on Twitter

Social media has emerged as a powerful medium to organize and mobilize social movements. In particular, the connective action of social media builds associations and allows for the continuity of social movements. Yet there is a lack of research on how connective action emergent from social media messages sustains long-term social movements. Accordingly, in this study, we concentrate on Twitter messages related to Women’s March protests held in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Using an interpretive analysis followed by the topic modeling approach, we analyzed the tweets to identify the different types of messages associated with the movement. These messages were classified using a set of categories and subcategories. Furthermore, we conducted a temporal analysis of the message (sub)categories to understand how distinct messages allow movement continuity beyond a specific protest march. Results suggest that while most of the messages are used to motivate and mobilize individuals, the connective action tactics employed through messages sent before, during, and after the marches allowed Women’s March to become a broader and more persistent movement. We advance theoretical propositions to explain the sustainability of a long-term social movement on social media, exemplified through large-scale connective action that persists over time. In doing so, this study contributes to connective action research by providing message categorization that synthesizes the meaning of message content. The findings could help social movement organizers learn different ways to frame messages that resonate with broader social media users. Moreover, our approach to analyzing a large set of tweets might interest other qualitative researchers.

Little Amal’s New York Journey: The Big Puppet in the Big Apple

Little Amal’s New York Journey: The Big Puppet in the Big Apple

The Road to Blair Mountain: Saving a Mine Wars Battlefield from King Coal

The Road to Blair Mountain: Saving a Mine Wars Battlefield from King Coal

Hiriira Spatiotemporalities: Mapping Oromo Women’s Liberation in Post‐Imperial Berlin

AbstractIn September 2020, Oromo women marched through the streets of Berlin, Germany, demanding recognition for their struggle. This protest march, called a Hiriira in the Oromo language, offers a case study into the entanglements between settler colonial Ethiopia, Germany’s post‐empire, and the forces of oppression which link them. This paper uses the spatiotemporal reckonings generated from the Hiriira perspective to understand violence and elucidate the practices of resistance that have emerged despite it. These contrasting ways of viewing space and time are expressed through the tension between imperial spatialising, a way of knowing the world that is imperial and oppressive in nature, and geography guraacha, a Black and Blackened way of knowing space with a particularly Oromo perspective. The result is a type of mapping, tracing the Hiriira route across Berlin while describing the histories that shadow these streets, and the pathways towards liberation that Oromo women are organising.

Ecological Wunderkind and heroic trollhunter: the celebrity saga of Greta Thunberg

ABSTRACT In December 2019, a Swedish climate activist was appointed Person of the Year by Time Magazine. Greta Thunberg was only 15 when she inspired a wave of school strikes and protest marches. She stole the media attention at a series of global summits, until public gatherings and international travels were interrupted by the pandemic. The aim of this article is to highlight a short but intense celebritisation process with culture-bound responses. First, I will establish Thunberg’s deep roots in a Nordic children’s culture, which defends bio-diversity with ‘superhoney’ and science. Then, I will compare the strong impact of an ecological Wunderkind in the EU with the polarised reactions in the US. In the conclusion, I will relate Thunberg’s activist strategy and persona to other types of eco-celebrities and discuss the significance of diverging time horizons.

Texts and contexts: the case of jàmá songs among the youth in Ghana

The upbeat, rock-like jàmá song genre has been ubiquitous in the popular culture of Ghana, especially over the last four decades. While the origin of the name ‘jàmá’ (also dzama, gyama or djama) remains a mystery, the music evokes characteristics of neo-traditional Ga music. The genre has become an official medium of musical expression for Ghanaian youths at present. Popular music artists like DJ Mic Smith and Gasmilla, the Ghanaian army and police, religious organisations such as Christian churches, and students in schools and colleges perform jàmá songs during social events, festivals, sports games, political rallies, marriage ceremonies, funerals and protest marches. The same jàmá song may be heard on different occasions, generating a myriad of meanings. This paper analyses selected jàmá songs, situates the song texts within their respective contexts, and illustrates the creative devices performers use to convey the meanings of songs in various settings.

The Power of Unwanted Presence

Presenting human bodies in public space against the will of the state is a well-known strategy to protest. Indeed the presence of the body as a materiality bears meaning. Furthermore if the body is doing an act for the eyes of the spectator it has an explanation therefore a performance happens. As Judith Butler claims the body is a manner of doing, dramatizing and reproducing a historical situation. Meanwhile it is subjectivated by culture, power structures and its social environment. In a public protest performing bodies(body) get connected to each other and form a resistant performativity. This enables the subject to vitalize possibilities for social transformation and objection with dominating power structures. However there are groups of humans who are not eligible to appear as subjects. When the subject is defined by elimination then performance is a kind of resistance that reclaims agency and power. Since the Islāmization of Iran revolution(1979), Iranian women have managed to protest in four particular mass gatherings to resist socio-political oppression related to their gender and compulsory hijab. The very first was A five-day protest march starting on March 8, 1979 to prevent legalization of compulsory hijab. The second one was a peaceful gathering of women's rights defenders in June 2006 in Tehran’s central business district that ended with violent objection from the state and the third is a solo performance of an Iranian woman known as the Girl of Enghelab Street on 27 December 2017. Aesthetics of these Performances vary according to different strategic and artistic choices. This Article tries to define and explain the surrounding environment and socio-political basis which lead to formation of these different constructions. It studies the performative strategies of these public gatherings of powerful subjects with a common object: social equality through a nonviolence subversive performance. It is essential to mention that by the time of this article's publication, the very last nationwide uprising against compulsory Hijab with the Manifest “Woman, Life, Freedom” is ongoing in Iran. It is ignited by the brutal murder of Jina 'Mahsa' Amini while in the custody of the moral police on 16th September 2022. This article has been submitted by May 2021, hence these developments have not been considered.

Toward learning dynamic origin-destination matrices from crowd density heatmaps

Knowing the origins and destinations of pedestrians’ paths is key to the initialization of crowd simulations. Unfortunately, they are difficult to measure in the real world. This is one major challenge for live predictions during events such as festivals, soccer games, protest marches, and many others. Sensor data can be used to feed real-world observations into simulations in real-time. As input data for this study, we use density heatmaps generated from real-world trajectory data obtained from stereo sensors. Density information is compact, of constant size, and in general easier to obtain than e.g., individual trajectories. Therefore, the information limitation improves the applicability to other scenarios. We include the absolute pedestrian trip counts from origins to destinations during a brief time interval in an OD matrix, including unknown destinations due to sensor errors. Our goal is to estimate these OD matrices from a series of density heatmaps for the same interval. For this, we compute the ground truth OD matrices and density heatmaps using real-world trajectory data from a train station. We employ linear regression as a statistical learning method for estimation. We observe that the linear share of the relationship between density and OD matrix is estimated successfully. Nevertheless, a portion of the data remains that cannot be explained. We attempt to overcome this difficulty with random forest as a nonlinear model. The results indicate that both a linear and a nonlinear model can estimate some features of the OD matrices. However, there is no clear winner in terms of the chosen metric, the R 2 score. Overall, our findings are a strong indicator that OD matrices can indeed be estimated from density heatmaps extracted automatically from sensors.

THE SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF POSTERS AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN JORDAN

This paper aims to define the role of the communication posters designed by feminist protesters in expressing the rejection of domestic violence against women in Jordan, since few studies address such topics. In response to a notorious incident in 2019 where a suburban woman in Jordan was physically abused by her husband in front of her children, Jordanian feminists staged a protest march in the heart of the capital city, Amman. The victim became permanently disabled due to this violence. Several female protesters joined the demonstration, carrying reflective visual and verbal posters to show their empathy towards the victim and repudiation of the victimization. Moreover, these posters have been circulated via Twitter, with users writing empathic comments on the images and using several hashtags such as #Jerash Crime and #Enough, which prove that these posters are effective in vindicating women's rights, besides claiming security and protection against violence. The research methodology involved conducting a semiotic analysis on the most explicit posters raised during the march and distributed via Twitter to show condemnation of the brutal physical violence against the Jordanian victim.

The Contested Right of Public Meeting in England from the Bill of Rights to the Public Order Acts

AbstractThe ‘right of public meeting’ has historically been a key demand of extra-parliamentary political movements in England. This paper examines how public assembly came to be perceived as a legally protected right, and how national and local authorities debated and policed political meetings. Whereas previous histories have suggested that a ‘liberal governance’ dominated urban government during the nineteenth century, this paper offers an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between people and the state. It points to rights paradoxes, whereby the right of free passage and to ‘air and recreation’ often conflicted with the demand for the right of political meeting in challenges to use of public spaces. Local authorities sought to defend the rights of property against political movements by using the common law offences of obstruction and ‘nuisance’. By the first half of the twentieth century, new threats of militant tactics and racial harassment by political groups necessitated specific public order legislation. Though twentieth-century legislation sought to protect certain types of assembly and protest marches, the implementation and policing of public order was spatially discriminatory, and the right of public meeting was left unresolved.

Democracy as Fetish, by Ralph Cintron, University Park: Penn State University Press

Democracy as Fetish, by Ralph Cintron, University Park: Penn State University Press

A Framework for Crowd Management during COVID-19 with Artificial Intelligence

COVID-19 requires crowded events to enforce restrictions, aimed to contain the spread of the virus. However, we have seen numerous events not observing these restrictions, thus becoming super spreader events. In order to contain the spread of a human to human communicable disease, a number of restrictions, including wearing face masks, maintaining social distancing, and adhering to regular cleaning and sanitization, are critical. These restrictions are absolutely essential for crowded events. Some crowded events can take place spontaneously, such as a political rally or a protest march or a funeral procession. Controlling spontaneous crowded events, like a protest march, political rally, celebration after a sporting event, or concert, can be quite difficult, especially during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we review some well-known crowded events that have taken place during the ongoing pandemic. Guided by our review, we provide a framework using machine learning to effectively organize crowded events during the ongoing and for future crises. We also provide details of metrics for the validation of some components in the proposed framework, and an extensive algorithm. Finally, we offer explanations of its various functions of the algorithm. The proposed framework can also be adapted in other crises.