Social Movements In Spain Research Articles

Contesting Housing Inequality: Housing Rights and Social Movements

This article engages with a leading contemporary criticism of social and economic human rights, namely that because such rights are organised around sufficiency norms, they are ill‐equipped to challenge and overturn forms of material inequality. The sufficiency thesis raises issues around the nature of social rights and their capacity to deliver transformative change, and lays a direct challenge to social movements employing human rights talk and practices in campaigns for social justice. This article breaks new ground by taking the right to housing as a case study for assessing the sufficiency thesis. It is argued that while there is some support for the sufficiency thesis in dominant institutionalised legal forms of the right to housing, the wider claim of the thesis, that social rights are incapable of challenging forms of material inequality, does not hold water. This argument is supported by a broad approach to housing rights that engages with the work of the UN Special Rapporteurs on housing and which takes seriously the way in which contemporary social movements in Spain and Scotland employ housing rights in their struggles for housing justice.

Leaving a Mark and Passing the Torch: Intended Legacies of Older Lesbian and Gay Spanish Activists

ABSTRACT Aging paradigms should entail all individuals. More research on older LGBT+ adults is needed since the literature has been mainly built on heteronormative and cisgender standards. The creation and shaping of the kind of legacy an individual would like to leave behind when he/she dies is key in aging well. This study explores the intended legacies of older lesbian and gay adults (50+ years old) who were activists in social movements in Spain. Eighteen participants (12 gay men) participated in a semi-structured interview on their intended legacies. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the interviews. The main findings showed that all participants reported intended legacies: i) personal, to transmit their lived knowledge and to be remembered as good and committed persons; ii) broader, to contribute to LGBT+ rights, and to a better society; iii) composite, the desire that younger generations recognize their contributions, and to know they helped to protect new generations. The participants in this study lived a life of intense involvement in social movements, and currently their intended legacies involve leaving a mark and passing the torch to younger generations. This understanding will help us to develop adequate practices that promote well-being in older LGBT+ adults.

The politics of neighbouring: assembly politics, urban citizenship and regimes of visibility in post-crisis Madrid

ABSTRACT Social movements in Spain have employed the figure of the neighbour to reimagine the limits of citizenship. In this article, I engage with conflict and tension around the figure of the neighbour to explore some of the complexities of emerging frameworks of urban citizenship. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Madrid, I explore how social movements intervene on a contested field of visibilities. These interventions occur in a context in which the presence of certain neighbours is continually placed in question, while dynamic neighbourhood initiatives are seen as a potential tool for growth. Government treatment of grassroots neighbourhood initiatives is contradictory and sometimes instrumental. Initiatives are criminalised, made visible and even staged, constructing particular regimes of visibility around the figure of the neighbour.

Presentación del debate: Las consecuencias de los movimientos sociales: Capacidad de agencia y organización social, razones para un debate

The aim of this text is to introduce the debate on the consequences of social movements, its power of agency, and its implications on social organization, in the framework of the Spanish Sociology. This debate is shaped by three articles that we briefly present here, together with some hints about the current state of the debate in the sociology of social movements in Spain.

From state fetish to community fetish: a spatial analysis of 15M and Podemos in Spain

PurposeOver the last four years in Spain, a strong autonomist movement (15M), based on radical democracy and mistrust of any kind of instituted politics, seems to be turning toward statist and institutionalized politics. The purpose of this paper is to answer the following questions: Can we speak of a community fetishism, as opposed to State fetishism? Do autonomist social movements have a spatial project as opposed to a State spatial project? Why do horizontal and self-management-oriented social movements turn to the conquest of the State in the current framework?Design/methodology/approachThe empirical evidence for this study stems from a qualitative methodological approach. The authors used two different types of sources. First, direct observations from the authors’ own engagement in social movements in Spain from 2011 to the present are used. Second, this work is part of a systematic research on spatial dynamics and the evolution of collective action in Spain. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with activists involved in social movements from 2012 to 2015, in which time informal interviews were conducted, and documents and observational notes were also collected.FindingsSocial movements have tended to develop alternatives to state spatial projects, partially as a result of an institutional setting that has been progressively closed to political alternatives to the neoliberal state. This last point leads to the posing of politics as completely independent of the political arena of the State (community fetish). From the first square occupations to the subsequent organization in local meetings, the 15M movement was the last expression of this tendency in Spain, while the turn on State political institutions responds to the obvious limitations of community fetishism in the context of the social and political tensions of the Spanish crisis.Originality/valueThis analysis contributes to the current debates on social movements in two ways. First, the authors investigate a usually neglected agent in the production of spatial political projects and strategies such as social movements. Second, the specific case of the 15M movement in Spain strongly shows the contradictions and limitations of the movements, which supposedly do not aspire to replace the State’s sovereign power through the idea of community fetishism.

LEADERSHIP IN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF OJO CON TU OJO

Leadership has been a topic of much interest in the analysis of social movements. Drawing from qualitative fieldwork, this article analyzes the leadership that was developed by Ester Quintana, who was the last victim to be injured by a rubber bullet during a demonstration in Barcelona (Spain). Together with her friends and other people, Quintana created the Ojo con tu ojo movement (Watch out for your eye). Specifically, the article explores the relevance of Quintana’s prior experiences in participatory and dialogic movements and identifies the way that she transferred this knowledge to Ojo con tu ojo as the key to the success of the movement. In only 12 months, Ojo con tu ojo achieved something that other similar social movements in Spain had not achieved in the past: a legislation change that bans the use of rubber bullets by the police.

More than a Copy Paste: The Spread of Spanish Frames and Events to Portugal

ABSTRACTThe article contributes to the literature on diffusion by focusing on two recent cases of social movements in Spain and in Portugal, identifying different stages of cooperation and diffusion. Our specific contribution to the diffusion literature is the temporal perspective: Processes were observed over several years. This allows for an in-depth analysis of factors of success and failures of diffusion and how activists deal with such processes over time. We further ask how activists deal with a lack of success in some processes of diffusion and why this was no obstacle of further diffusion processes.

Etnografías de empoderamiento en Europa y América: diseñando futuro con las comunidades

In this article we propose integrate experiences in research and intervention at the confluence between digital and material approaches on stage in Europe-Spain and Latin American countries-Ecuador. As for digital, we present a balance of the processes of receiving a series of ethnographic documentaries with communities to transform the social reality in a model that we have been called ethnographies of empowerment (Martinez and Camas, 2014, Camas and Martinez 2015; Trueba and Delgado, 1991). This embodiment of ethnographic documentaries from participatory research (Pereda and Prada, 2014) has been allowing us to establish learning communities (Elboj, 2002) and local knowledge or communities of practice (Betancourt, Mertens and Parra, 2016) in the currently in Ecuadorian society. At the end of the previous material we bring reflection on contemporary social movements in Spain to apply what they learned in the School of qualitative sociology of Madrid in order to generate a critical and reflective perspective of social sciences in Latin America. Our proposal involves the creation of audiovisual productions, the generation and dissemination of knowledge in Mode 3 (Acosta and Carreno, 2013), the answer to the forms of power through participation and horizontality and eventually allow the change from a form of research and social intervention focused on the design of future communities. We propose an epistemological reflection for an anthropological knowledge from an ethnography focused on the future designed and planned by people, and not only with academia. We return to this idea of a new way of doing ethnography as a commitment to the future which would be an applied one, as shown in the documentary we made in 2002, The rhythm of our dreams and in 2014, Acolítame Ñanon, the first in Cordoba, Spain, the second in Cayambe, Ecuador. All this interweaving takes a turn in the days that follow the disastrous earthquake in Ecuador's coast on April 16, 2016 when this text was being drafted. The analysis of how we are reviewing our way of designing the future with communities from community mental health (Cohen, 2009) since that day is in these pages.

New social movements in spain

new social movements in spain

Social Features of Online Networks: The Strength of Intermediary Ties in Online Social Media

An increasing fraction of today's social interactions occur using online social media as communication channels. Recent worldwide events, such as social movements in Spain or revolts in the Middle East, highlight their capacity to boost people's coordination. Online networks display in general a rich internal structure where users can choose among different types and intensity of interactions. Despite this, there are still open questions regarding the social value of online interactions. For example, the existence of users with millions of online friends sheds doubts on the relevance of these relations. In this work, we focus on Twitter, one of the most popular online social networks, and find that the network formed by the basic type of connections is organized in groups. The activity of the users conforms to the landscape determined by such groups. Furthermore, Twitter's distinction between different types of interactions allows us to establish a parallelism between online and offline social networks: personal interactions are more likely to occur on internal links to the groups (the weakness of strong ties); events transmitting new information go preferentially through links connecting different groups (the strength of weak ties) or even more through links connecting to users belonging to several groups that act as brokers (the strength of intermediary ties).

Key Issues in the Study of New and Alternative Social Movements in Spain: The Left, Identity and Globalizing Processes

This article supports the view that the 2004, unexpected, electoral victory by the Spanish socialists signifies the end of a protest cycle and a change in the available structure of political opportunities. In aid of this claim, it proceeds by offering an evaluation of Spanish exceptionality, a qualification of the impact of the Francoist regime in the development of post-industrial movements and a presentation of developments in three New Social Movements during the 1980s. Finally, it suggests that the study of Spanish new and alternative social movements should move beyond the emphasis on exceptionality by focusing more on the available political opportunities and the identity of social movement actors.

Post-Fordist Labor, Feminine Precariousness, and Reinvention of Civic Engagement: Within the Circuits of New Social Movements in Spain

Monika Szumilak is an Assistant Professor of Spa nish in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Utah. She specializes in recent narrative, film, and Internet production. She is currently working on a book project that explores the conver gence of new forms of politi cal engagement, technology, and art in Spain of the new millennium. She takes inspiration from science studies and similar cross disciplinary theoretical approaches. The politics of difference that feminists need to articulate must be rooted in a politics of experience that searches for specificity, heterogeneity, and connection through struggle, not through psychologistic, liberal appeals to each her own endless difference. Feminism is collective and

Social Movements in Spain

Until recent years, the term "movement" had a peculiar meaning in Spain since it referred to an aggregate of political forces that supported the military coup against the Republic and got the victory after three years of Civil War in 1939. The "Movimiento Nacional" does not fit into most current conceptions of social movements, and was mainly a political instrument for the unification of these forces under the rule of general Franco (Tusell 1992). Its authoritarian principles were the legal basis for the Regime until 1975, when the former died and a peaceful process of democratic transition took place.