Space Of Protest 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.

Praying against abortion: the re-publicisation of religion in Croatia

ABSTRACT In the post-Yugoslav context, anti-abortion activism has only recently transitioned from the institutional to the protest arena. Amid these evolving dynamics, continuous and strong ties persist between anti-abortion activism and Catholicism, with religion now operating through civil society and in physical public space, blurring the boundaries between religious and secular. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted during two ‘40 Days for Life’ prayer campaigns in 2021 at six distinct protest locations within Croatia, this study examines how anti-abortion clinic activism re-publicises religion. We show how the anti-abortion protests have re-publicised religion through the civil society sphere in three acts: (1) the establishment of religious protest spaces; (2) the utilisation of religious symbols and artefacts as meaning-making tools for materialising the protest as religious and political; (3) the enactment of performative prayers as ritualised protest performances. These acts collectively culminate in the construction of a sacred space, serving as a manifestation of the re-publicisation of religion. Contrary to other findings, we have also found that anti-abortion clinic activists use religious abortion framing.

Direct Action at Home: Performative Spaces of Tenant Resistance in Los Angeles

AbstractGiven the rising number of evictions in the United States, self‐organised and housing‐insecure tenants actively fight back against their harassment and displacement. Because of the high rate of informal evictions, housing struggles between tenants and landlords are not only fought in courts; they often take place at the homes that they themselves and their landlords occupy. How do precariously housed tenants resist their displacement, and turn domestic spaces into spaces of tenant protest and resistance? This article examines the performative capacity of residential buildings in tenant direct actions in Los Angeles. By protesting at their own homes and those of their landlords, tenant groups claim control over their domestic spaces and establish a direct correlation between the lavish lifestyles of their landlords and their own unliveable conditions. The performativity of residential buildings during actions emphasises the violence of landlord harassment and forced evictions, turns personal experiences of housing insecurity into public spectacles, and enacts corrections to power imbalances in rental arrangements. More than sites of collective actions, residential spaces provide material evidence of tenant exploitation and a means of visualising tenant power.

Becoming response-able with a protest placard: white under(-)standing in encounters with the Black German Other

Abstract This paper emerged from an encounter with the Black Lives Matter placard I understand that I will never understand but I stand with you in Leipzig, Germany, and it centers white understanding as a constitutive practice of whiteness. This is mainly a theoretical contribution (learning towards the philosophical), although it includes some interview data and observations from protest participation. I contribute to raciolinguistics by reading the concept of the white listening subject through Barad’s new materialist notion of apparatuses, asking what exactly constitutes white understanding. This allows me to bring out the potentials and pitfalls (i.e. the counter/productivity) of white understanding as a reflective practice, which I put into conversation with my embodied practice of under-standing (i.e. standing under) the placard at a BLM protest in Berlin. I show how the white body is measured by a Black norm in the protest space, producing a productive discomfort filled with opportunities for becoming response-able towards the Black Other, but also towards whiteness. Considering the ethico-esthetic framing of this collection, I pursue an aesthethics of wor(l)ding that inter-rupts, dis/entangles, and walks around with and in words. It gestures towards what we usually leave out when pursuing one analytical avenue over another.

Disability, Space, and Racial Injustice: Life Writing at Angel Island Immigration Station, 1910–1940

Abstract This study integrates race and disability into a literary-historical analysis of the mostly anonymous poetry composed by Chinese migrants and inscribed onto the walls of the men's barracks of the US Immigration Station at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, 1910–1940. Scholarship in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies has approached this body of work as a modern reinvention of traditional Chinese poetic forms within a US context. This study considers the men's barracks a protest space created under disabling conditions of confinement, and it demonstrates how Angel Island detainees critiqued the racialized and ableist systems of social control that operated at the station. The poets attest to undergoing invasive imperial regimes of bodily inspection and medicalized racial exclusion, and they document lived experiences of chronic illness, depression, and the anguished temporality of detention space. As corpus of disabled life writing by early Asian American and Asian diaspora writers, Angel Island poetry offers wider access to non-English historical vocabularies of disability as well as environmental and holistic understandings of embodied conditions beyond Western diagnostic models. As a built environmental archive and a National Historic Landmark, Angel Island is a significant cultural site for exploring how race and disability operate concurrently as social constructions.

Memoryscapes: The Evolution of Sri Lanka’s Aragala Bhoomiya as a People’s Space of Protest

Abstract The ‘aragalaya’ or the ‘people’s struggle’ was perhaps one of the most important and successful movements of Sri Lanka’s long history of democracy. In 2015, democracy prevailed, unexpectedly and against all odds, when Sri Lankans, unsatisfied with their political representation, ‘voted out’ a government. In 2022, just as unexpectedly and for the first time in its history, the people of Sri Lanka ousted a government through mass protest and uprising. The protesters, cutting across socio-economic class and arguably many other barriers, came together and marched to Colombo’s Galle Face Green, in parallel to each other and to each other’s goals. This time, they came to do more than simply oust a government but for an idea of justice, equity, democracy, and system change. This article explores the memories and perspectives of those who ‘lived’ on the protest site and the relationship between memory, place, and the social construction of space, as they reconvened for a memory-mapping exercise in co-creating public histories of the aragalaya (struggle) and the aragala bhoomiya (site of struggle).

Evolving role of place management organisations in bold placemaking

Placemaking has become ever more critical in re-establishing and reactivating urban commercial districts. Being bold in placemaking now means expanding place management’s role in economic development, reshaping physical spaces for social and economic recovery and reclaiming public spaces for people. With downtown conditions changing faster than ever before, this paper examines how urban place management organisations are supporting local businesses, expanding the night-time economy, engaging residents, pedestrianising streets and memorialising public space for civic protest and healing. The future of placemaking includes an imperative of social and cultural connection and context.

Defending a Vulnerable yet Resilient Democracy: Civil Society Activism in Jokowi's Indonesia

For the first two decades after the end of the authoritarian New Order regime, Indonesian civil society was widely hailed as a bulwark against elite attempts to roll back the country's democratic achievements. More recent assessments, however, have highlighted how polarisation, socio-religious conservatism and growing state repression have increasingly restricted civil society's ability to defend Indonesian democracy against further backsliding. In the face of these growing pressures, political activists have nonetheless demonstrated adaptability, resourcefulness and resilience, and, despite the narrowing space for dissent and protest, occasionally succeeded in halting and even reversing anti-democratic trends. In this article, we focus on two segments of civil society – women's rights groups and environmental activists – to illustrate under what circumstances progressive political activism in contemporary Indonesia can still be effective in upholding diagonal accountability and defending human rights.

Unity through separation: spatial divisions and intra-movement relations in Lebanon’s October Uprising

ABSTRACT Within the field of social movement studies, scholars have devoted increasing attention to how protesters reclaim and organize public spaces. Case studies reveal that protesters often split up larger reclaimed spaces by drawing internal, sometimes invisible, boundaries. So far, however, the subdivision of protest spaces remains an under-theorized phenomenon. Through a case study of Lebanon’s 2019 October Uprising, this article contributes to disentangling how spatial subdivisions emerge and shape relations between protesters. The study relies on fieldwork observations and interviews with 51 protesters from Lebanon’s second-largest city, Tripoli, where the protest space was divided into three main zones, reflecting social, ideological, and tactical fault lines in the city’s uprising. By employing Löw’s concepts of spacing and synthesis, it analyzes how Tripoli’s protesters came to associate these three zones with diverging identities, ideologies, and tactical orientations, while also connecting them together as functional parts of the larger movement. Although the separation of Tripoli’s protest space did not alleviate disagreements and conflicts, the article finds that subdivisions facilitated a thin form of order and helped protesters make sense of their internal differences.

Dancing with Anthems, Godzilla and Laser Pointers: Performance as Protest in the Post-Umbrella Movement Era and the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement in Hong Kong

In this paper, I explore public performances in protest as a form of civic participation, especially for performances that aim to challenge and critique two controversial laws in Hong Kong, the Anthem Law and the Anti-Extradition Law. I focus on how arguments presented in the protest are performed in public, particularly on how participants make use of their voices and bodies in improvised and choreographed ways. I focus on two examples. The first is a series of “flash mob” events organized by the pro-democracy political party, Demosistō, who performed and parodied the national anthem, “March of the Volunteers”. The second example is a public assembly during the Anti-Extradition Law movement, where protestors used laser pointers to transform a protest space into a disco-like dance floor. I read these cases in dialogue with scholarship on performativity by Judith Butler, Richard Schechner, Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga. I focus on how protestors navigate identity through performing with music in public space, where civic engagement manifests as bodily movements, sound and voices.

“Hum Kaagaz Nahi Dikhayenge” (“We won’t show our papers”): The Narratives of Bodies and Belongings at the Anti-CAA Shaheen Bagh Protests 2019-20

The Shaheen Bagh protests of 2019-20 were a nation-wide performance of dissent against the Indian citizenship laws CAA, NRC and NPR that would religiously discriminate against Muslims. Began and led by Muslim women from the neighbourhood of Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, the protests engendered critical conversations around the nation, the gendered body, space, history, and legal citizenship. The essay is a critical exploration of the counter-narratives the protestors performed against the State’s discriminatory, divisive and violent narratives, through the lens of performance studies. The bodies of the protestors became spaces of dissent and the bearers of the multiplicities of the nation, the corporeality of the individual, the domestic space, the Muslim neighbourhood, and the protest space expanded, encompassing, and even creating, the nation itself. The essay, thus, argues that as the protest site became a space of multiplicities, the protestors built the nation(s) of their secular imagination and their disidentifications presented the excess that the State could never fully regulate.

Sexual Governmentality and the Woman at/as Risk in Revolutionary Egypt

How can a collective sexual assault that took place in the mid-1990s in front of a private school in a middle-class neighborhood of Cairo help us reconsider the “circles of hell” that proliferated in protests during the Egyptian January 25 Revolution? This article weaves together three past and contemporary instances of sexual harassment and assault in educational settings to counter the social/political dichotomy that has dominated scholarly discussions about public sexual violence in Egypt and to situate these forms of violence in relation to broader historical processes, including the development of women’s education and mass public transportation and the emergence of the modern city in the late nineteenth century. Building on the work of Michel Foucault and Fatima Mernissi, the essay regards public sexual violence as a mechanism of sexual governmentality aimed at shaping and managing women’s conduct through the conceptualization of women as simultaneously at risk and a risk in public space. Drawing on research conducted in Cairo in 2014–15, I examine the ways in which the activist initiatives OpAntiSH and HarassMap subverted these notions through projects of direct action and community intervention that challenged notions of feminine vulnerability and masculine protection while creating horizontal structures of care in the spaces of protest and in the neighborhood. I conclude by discussing how these approaches can contribute to decolonizing feminism and reinvigorate anti-sexual-violence organizing in the current #MeToo moment.

The tinku dance as “choreopolitical” action in street protests in Santiago de Chile

This article discusses the musical-choreographic phenomenon of the “tinku” within the context of recent social demonstrations in Santiago de Chile. My hypothesis is that the tinku, a folkloric dance of Bolivian origin, takes on new meaning as it becomes part of the protest repertoire in the Chilean capital. In the early 2000s, a collective of dancers identified that the body movements in this performative genre, characterized by the simulation of kicks and punches, empower those who practice it. From this perspective, I seek to demonstrate how this dance operates within the protest repertoire as “choreopolitical” action, as defined by André Lepecki. My reading is based on a review of videos, interviews with key actors, and my own ethnographic experience as a dancer and protester. Finally, this article concludes that the tinku mirrors the energies produced in spaces of protest where police repression is present.

Spaces of Protest: Seydina Issa Sow's Campus Graphic Novel Sidy

ABSTRACT Seydina Issa Sow's comic Sidy (2019) depicts a young man from the countryside who travels to Dakar, Senegal to study law at Université Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD). When the eponymous character arrives, he is disappointed to find overcrowded dormitories and lecture halls. As students protest these conditions, Sidy's friend Abdou supports him and leads a fight against injustice. Although protest has been portrayed negatively in earlier comics such as Goorgoorlou and can lead to violence and harm, Sow's text suggests the generative possibilities of protest under certain conditions. In recent decades, scholars have examined UCAD students’ attempts to create spaces of belonging on campus, whether through protest or other means. Sow uses French with occasional Wolof, as well as recognisable campus iconography, to differentiate the university from the rest of the city, thus distinguishing between students and other groups of young people. Shifts in the comic's panel transition strategies indicate that protest can alter students’ relationships to space. This article examines the text's representation of language, iconic structures, and movement through campus and urban locations to insist that protest creates productive but limited spaces of inclusion.

Becoming ‘Mother-Activists’: Deconstructing the Boundaries of the ‘Ghar’ and ‘Bahir’ in Shaheen Bagh, India

This article examines the motivations of first-time women protestors participating in the Shaheen Bagh resistance against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act. It highlights women’s experiences of protesting for their and their children’s citizenship rights, and the impact that women’s presence in this struggle has made to it. We argue the role these first-time women protestors played in protests made them express and grow their political subjectivities as activists. The article reflects on how they brought their caring roles, hitherto carried out in the personal space of their ‘ghar’ (home), into the public space of protests, or the ‘bahir’ (outside the home) — thereby impacting the very form of the struggle. The case of Shaheen Bagh shows how public space of protest can, and must, co-exist within and in conjunction with the private realm of women’s everyday lives for their sustained participation in struggles. Thereby, the article proposes that women protestors personified and lived out a composite identity as ‘mother-activists’ and erasing and deconstructing the binaries between the ‘ghar’, and the ‘bahir’.

Fashioning Gender in Asia and Beyond

Fashioning Gender in Asia and Beyond

The militarization of digital surveillance in post-coup Zimbabwe: ‘Just don’t tell them what we do’

While a large body of research has documented and theorized digital surveillance practices in various political contexts, little has been done to investigate the growing trend of military-driven digital surveillance practices in semi-authoritarian regimes. In this article, I use the case of the surveillance practices of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces to argue that scholarship needs to (re)evaluate this emerging trend. The article has three aims: first, it explores military-driven surveillance capabilities, the circulation of such capabilities and the surveillance tactics emerging in the semi-authoritarian context of Zimbabwe. Second, it examines the interface of factionalism and politics within the Zimbabwe Defence Forces and how this influences quotidian military-driven digital surveillance practices. Third, it locates military-driven surveillance practices within a growing and complex global political economy of trade in surveillance technologies that is centred on China. In doing so, the article helps locate a largely neglected but increasing practice of military-driven surveillance that is incrementally reconfiguring surveillance practices and architectures in semi-authoritarian regimes. Such a form of surveillance provides gateways for human rights abuses and shrinks the civilian spaces of protest and engagement, leading to digital authoritarianism. The article therefore calls for greater scrutiny of the emerging practice of military-driven digital surveillance in semi-authoritarian political contexts.

The frictions of highway protests in U.S. cities and the legislative backlash

ABSTRACT Spaces of protest have long been of interest to scholars because of their transgressive and highly visible uses of urban space. However, the increased visibility such spaces bring also puts protestors at greater risk of a backlash from others who expect to be able to keep moving at their own pace. Starting in 2015, a series of protests in the U.S. began using large-scale transportation infrastructure in urban areas, especially Black Lives Matter activists. Shortly thereafter, in 2017, a series of bills were introduced in state legislatures across the U.S. to limit or criminalize this activity. This paper analyzes the arguments made by legislative sponsors and supporters of these bills, using the theoretical lenses of friction and the shoal to argue that in the highly mobile society of the U.S., fear of delay or disruption becomes even more powerful when combined with racialized fears of the city.

Spatial dynamics of protest: Themes and trajectories

AbstractIn this article, I discuss some ongoing and emerging debates on spatial dynamics of protest and examine different approaches in studying spaces of protest. With a thematic approach, I first discuss studies that engage with space from a bird's eye view perspective. These studies generally focus on relational dynamics of space and examine how socioeconomic, political, and cultural elements of spatially bounded entities provide spatial contexts for mobilization and protest. I then turn to space/movement relations through revisiting dynamics of social movements as they unfold in space. Three main lines of research help in structuring these scholarly conversations: claim making; policing and control of space; and meaning making and cultural production. Finally, I discuss some new and evolving themes and trajectories, including virtual spaces and their interactions with the physical space. I conclude by discussing how these approaches intersect and shape our knowledge of spatial dynamics of protest.

Open for All: How Are Federal and Municipal Land Management Agencies Adapting to the COVID-19 Pandemic Alongside Increased Societal Recognition of Racial Injustice

In addition to impacts on human health and the economy, COVID-19 is changing the way humans interact with open space. Across urban to rural settings, public lands–including forests and parks – experienced increases and shifts in recreational use. At the same time, certain public lands have become protest spaces as part of the public uprisings around racial injustice throughout the country. Land managers are adapting in real-time to compound disturbances. In this study, we explore the role of the public land manager during this time across municipal and federal lands and an urban-rural gradient. We ask: How adaptable are public land managers and agencies in their recreation management, collaborative partnerships, and public engagement to social disturbances such as COVID-19 and the co-occurring crisis of systemic racial injustice brought to light by the BLM uprisings and protests? This paper applies qualitative data drawn from a sample of land managers across the northeastern United States. We explore management in terms of partnership arrangements, recreational and educational programs, and stakeholder engagement practices and refine an existing model of organizational resilience. The study finds abiding: reports of increased public lands usership; calls for investment in maintenance; and need for diversity, equity, and inclusion in both organizational settings and landscapes themselves; and the need for workforce capacity. We discover effective ways to respond to compound disturbances that include open and reflective communication, transforming organizational cultures, and transboundary partnerships that are valued as critical assets.