Protest Strategies Research Articles

Care workers, collectivisation and protest: a case for feminist and anti-capitalist resistance against the state

Nation-wide organised protests by Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), arguably the backbone of India's fragmented healthcare system, form a watershed moment in feminist protest in India by centring demands for the regularisation of their ‘voluntary’ and undercompensated work. This distinct subaltern group (the ASHAs) engages with the state through dynamic political protest. This article critically explores the protest strategies adopted by ASHAs to better understand feminist protest on the Indian political landscape. It adopts a reflexive method of inquiry by unpacking how ASHA policy perpetuates institutional patterns of gender-based occupational segregation and how ASHAs, in turn, navigate and respond to these challenges. Somewhere between victimhood and agency, ASHA workers have reclaimed a site of struggle and resistance. Indeed, in the face of gender-based discrimination, ASHA workers are agitating on their own terms. A postcolonial feminist lens allows us to explore the axes of resistance adopted by ASHAs, including their medium of protest, which offers a space for different performative strategies: the self-sustained and self-contained leadership and mobilisation in which ASHAs reject gender-based stereotypes, exclusion, disadvantage and discrimination; and the use of protest to build sites of resistance, solidarity and negotiation. This theoretical framework offers valuable insight by shifting focus away from judicial strategies and towards ASHA workers as ‘protesters’ and as authors of their own narrative.

Protecting jobs and lives: Teachers’ passive resistance and subtle protest to curriculum policy in Lesotho, South Africa and Zimbabwe

Most studies on teacher resistance to curriculum policy and reform implementation focus on teacher activism and visible acts of resistance. But there is growing interest in teachers’ passive resistance and covert protest in the face of intimidating state power. This paper theorises subtleties of teacher protest in three Southern African states – Lesotho, South Africa and Zimbabwe. In these countries, teacher strikes, class boycotts and sit-ins have received heavy handed reaction from the government, resulting in psychological intimidation, physical assaults and incarceration. The key question driving this paper, therefore, is: Faced with shrinking democratic space, how are teachers in Lesotho, South Africa and Zimbabwe recalibrating protest strategies? This paper argues that state repression pushes teachers to retreat from active protest and resort to subtle protest, to protect their jobs and lives. The unique contributions of this paper are that it borrows James Scott’s typology of ‘everyday invisible acts of resistance’, developed from an anthropological study of peasants struggle in a Malay village, to theorise teacher resistance in pseudo-democratic spaces. It also generates novel insights on how teachers continue to resist curriculum policy while sending false signals of compliance to repressive state power.

The National Federation of Labor Youth and the Candy Bar Kids

Thousands of children and youth across the country took to the streets for two weeks in spring 1947 to protest a three-cent increase in the price of chocolate bars. The protest initially generated enthusiastic press coverage and had widespread popular support, but when the National Federation of Labor Youth (nfly), the Communist Party’s youth organization, announced its support, anti-communists in the press and the community red-baited the protesters. The campaign quickly lost momentum, which anti-communists attributed to the presence of Communists but was more likely due to their own red-baiting attacks in the press. Some of these protests were spontaneous reactions to a 40 per cent increase in the price of candy bars, while others were led or inspired by nfly. Either way, the countrywide mobilization of thousands of children and youth marks a turning point in the history of Canada’s left. Erupting in tandem with a nationwide strike of industrial workers and protests of activist consumers demanding greater economic security and a more responsive state, the children’s chocolate bar protest provides a window on this critical moment in the class struggle. The attacks on this popular protest at the moment that the long run of community-based militancy was about to be demonized, delegitimated, and silenced by red-baiting marks a significant milestone in Canada’s Cold War. In addition to adding the youngsters’ challenge to capital and the state to the history of the popular left, the event contributes to the growing literature on children and youth engaged in political protest, while their creative protest strategies offer a youthful dimension to the study of performance activism.

The social construction of anti-tourism protest in tourist cities: a case study of Barcelona

PurposeFocusing on critical discourse analysis, this paper aims to propose a framework for analysing the way activist anti-tourism groups construct their social action of protest. The authors argue that activist groups use different narrative strategies to construct and legitimise their discourse of protest to convey social meanings for social action practices. This study represents an attempt to explain how anti-tourism activist groups have the agency to build different paradigms of protest rooted in particular views of tourism.Design/methodology/approachAs a result of the lack of research in this area, this study used a comparative case study methodology drawn on four case studies in the field of anti-tourism protest. Case study is deemed adequate to explore a complex social phenomenon, how activist groups differ from each other, in a specific socio-economic context. A critical discourse analysis method is used to study primary (interviews) and secondary sources (reports, websites and online campaigns documents) of information, which express the activist group motivations and objectives to protest against tourism.FindingsThis study’s findings provide evidence in how discourse differs among the protest groups. Three narrative paradigms of protest are identified, which guide their agency: scepticism, based on a global and ecological approach; non-interventionist transformation, rooted in local community issues; and direct transformation, based on a sectoral problem-solving approach. These differences are interpreted as the consequences of the emergence and the development of different paths of protest according to specific social contexts and power relations in which anti-tourism groups are embedded.Originality/valueThis paper provides a contemporary approach to anti-tourism activism within the context of social movements. This case study may be of interest to practitioners and international destination managers interested in gaining a better understanding of anti-tourism protest strategies, new anti-tourism narratives following COVID-19 and the opportunities and challenges for opening a dialogue with those involved in activism and social urban movements as part of sustainable tourism governance. Our results can also help activists to rethink how they integrate differences and particular strategic positions to avoid hindering collective action. This knowledge is especially useful for managers and authorities seeking to develop more accurate collaborative governance practices with local activists, and especially those interested in fostering participative action without marginalising the diverse range of local community perspectives.

Odzyskać Noc: Revisiting the 1990-2000s Anarcho-feminist Protests in Poland as a Strike against Gender-based Violence

The article analyzes the Polish anarcho-feminist idea of protest against gender-based violence during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Examining the oral history interviews with activists and grassroots cultural productions dating from the period of political transformation, such as zines, leaflets, and graphic images, the article focuses on various strategies and concepts of a feminist strike. These different historical sources emphasize multiple inspirations for the protest strategies employed by the analyzed collectives, including the tradition of women’s strikes during the socialist era, youth demonstrations of the 1960s, and Anglo-American feminism. They also enable revisiting the emotional dynamics and meanings of violence that emerged from the anarcho-feminist archival materials and memories of individual activists.

A dilemma of visibility: discursive opportunities, audiences, and anti-migrant protest strategy

ABSTRACT Why do collective actors sometimes choose not to expand their audiences, despite opportunities to do so? Combining Erving Goffman’s micro-sociological concept of audience segregation with social movement theory’s discussions of discursive opportunity, the article suggests that collective actors face a persistent dilemma between the benefits of growing audience reach and the difficulties of maintaining a coherent and credible front vis-à-vis an increasingly diverse audience. The argument is applied to a qualitative analysis of three different cases of anti-migrant protest from Sweden and from the wider EU. The cases consider how local protest campaigns respond to opportunities to reach national audiences, how the right-wing populist party Sweden Democrats (SD) chooses to engage or not engage with local campaigns, and how the pan-European Generation Identity (GI) decides to temporarily expand its communication toward a transnational audience. The analysis shows how actors’ responses to the dilemma generate very different effects out of similar and supposedly favorable discursive opportunities. The results contribute to the literature on anti-migrant protest specifically, and to the discussion of discursive opportunities generally.

African feminist activism and democracy: Social media publics and Zimbabwean women in politics online

“We need to begin our questioning, activism and theorising from the spaces from which we are dying,” Funmi Olonisakin. The political landscape in Zimbabwe is largely a post-colonial hetero-patriarchal domain that pushes women politicians to the border of politics. Constraints in civic engagement and political participation that is characteristic of a shrinking democracy and exclusionary public sphere subsist. The 2023 election and its campaign period has shown that the socio-economic and political landscape is unpredictable with serious threats to women’s participation in politics. The lives of Zimbabwean women in politics are continually subjected to multiple forms of violence online and offline. Meanwhile, African feminist activism in the country has seemingly taken several steps back. Zimbabwean feminist activists risk being co-opted into the hetero-patriarchal socio-political structures. There is evidence of a considerable disconnect between feminist/gender activists and women in politics that needs to be addressed. In Senegal and South Africa among other countries, protests by younger generations of feminists have addressed this divide through innovations in protest strategies resulting in the re-formation of radical politics (Dieng, 2023; Hassim, 2023). With social media at the disposal of the younger generation of women politicians the movement is set on a revolutionary trajectory. The sustained social media presence of the new crop of women politicians has created active intimate and counter-publics who engage in vital Zimbabwean political dialogue. The new crop of women politicians referred to here are younger women politicians who unlike their predecessors are very active on social media and have no liberation war experience. The study locates social media as a provenance for Zimbabwean feminist activist revolutionising and democracy initiatives. Theoretically, I posit that the contentions around women’s political participation and violations against Zimbabwean women in politics are revealing of intricacies in African feminism and the coloniality of gender and how these, together with theories of the public sphere can further feminist activism. The study will utilise online ethnography of purposively selected Facebook posts and Tweets by Zimbabwean women in politics, feminist activists and/or gender organisations.

I’m Angry! Disability Protests in Post-Communist Poland

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to analyse the disability protests that took place in Poland in the 2010s in relation to the American tradition of disability protest as a reference point in the global history of disability. The similarity of means and the difference of outcomes between American and Polish protests reveal the role of social, political and economic contexts of post-communist states in the use of disability protest strategies. This paper also explores how the hidden transcript of deaf and disabled resilience was transformed into a public one, reshaping the general public’s mental framework in relation to disability.

Editor’s Note: Special Issue: Gender and Social Change in Myanmar

Editor’s NoteSpecial Issue: Gender and Social Change in Myanmar Jane M. Ferguson The Myanmar military’s 1 February 2021 coup d’etat of the elected government quickly provoked widespread protests, namely the Civil Disobedience Movement and the Spring Revolution. During the earliest days of these manifestations, people of various gender identities were at the forefront of the demands for political change. They made use of numerous creative tactics to fight the military’s political imposition and to bring their grievances to the public sphere. Following the government’s brutal suppression of the nonviolent protests emerged the organization of People’s Defense Forces. In the years since, fighting, repression, and resistance continue. Now, as ever, it is imperative to interrogate how gender—as produced, experienced, and mobilized—operates across cultural fields, and relates to social transformation in Myanmar. Using nuanced, dynamic methodologies, the four research articles in this special issue of The Journal of Burma Studies take up that challenge. They reconsider gender in varied contexts of social activism, everyday practices, identity politics, and religious histories. Gender discourses in Myanmar are reforged through the work of many different agents, from renunciants to punks, to revolutionaries, and to keyboard warriors. Powerful ideologies are confirmed, [End Page 1] reinvented, and modified in complex and often contradictory ways. Superstitious Fabrications? The Revolution’s Secret Weapon Two articles in this special issue foreground a seemingly anomalous protest strategy: using some pieces of cloth to fight an armed-to-the-hilt military. Through their creative use of women’s htamein (sarong-like skirts), protesters have drawn attention to—even weaponized—a specific gender taboo, a taboo which is sometimes considered particular to the region. In their article for this special issue, “Our Htamein, Our Flag, Our Victory: The Role of Young Women in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution,” Marlar, Justine Chambers, and Elena use an intersectional approach to explore how status is interrogated by other types of difference, namely those of gender, age, and class. They argue that during past decade, Myanmar has witnessed important shifts in gender roles, and these present new vistas for solidarity and ways to imagine a more democratic political future. As they argue, the movement’s use of htamein and menstrual pads were part of a public rallying strategy. Through these methods, protesters stand in defiance of the patriarchal and misogynist ideologies of the military. On a related vein, Aye Lei Tun’s article in this issue, “Deconstructing and Reinforcing Gender Norms and Cultural Taboos in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution,” offers experiential accounts from the movement and explores the use of htamein in the Spring Revolution. The article also pivots to analyze how some of the activists’ symbolic attacks mobilized a repertoire that included sexist ideologies as part of their strategies to shame high-status members of the government, as well [End Page 2] as their families and associates. In sum, social transformations are inextricably gendered, and these times of tremendous upheaval demand further questioning. Let’s not skirt the issue raised by both articles: what is special about these items of women’s clothing and absorbent plastic pads in Myanmar, and what makes them so powerful? The general explanation is as follows: mainstream culture in Myanmar, as with that of other societies in the region, treats women’s genitalia and menstrual blood as dirty and polluting. They are therefore considered disgusting, off-limits, and treated with disdain. By contact or even mere association, women’s skirts, nether garments, and menstrual pads carry this taboo as well. In Buddhist temple compounds’ stupa enclosures, posted signs explicitly prohibit women from entering; their bodies are deemed to have the nefarious power to harm sacred relics. Menstrual blood has a contemporary enemy vivant: men. Any contact with a man is perceived to obliterate his hpon, or his special masculine energy. According to anthropologist Melford Spiro (1991), Burmese society locates presence of hpon specifically on a combination of the “sexual anatomy” and a “psycho-spiritual entity”; in short, as argued, the penis is a noble golden flower whereas the vagina is an ignoble polluting organ (Spiro 1991:534). Floral stigma notwithstanding, ideas about hpon and its threats have a profound impact on everyday life...

National Development and News Media: Constrained Frames of Labour Relations in India

This article narrates the conditions with which industrial workers in India have to contend with when bargaining for labour rights. It trains attention on restructuring of automobile manufacturing processes in India in the neoliberal phase and the erosion of labour rights through the recently introduced labour codes. The framing of labour action and protests as law and order problems in the public sphere, primarily through the news media, aided delegitimisation of unions and securitisation of labour relations, which, in turn, mounts steep challenges for workers’ strategies to start a social dialogue and force negotiation around labour rights and social security. The article scrutinises the political economy of media attention and the impact this has on the politics of protest. It argues that neoliberal processes and the discourse of national industrial development have inscribed tensions into the choice of protest strategies, making collective bargaining ineffectual.

Framing women’s indignation: news coverage on women’s mobilization in Mexico, 2019–2021

ABSTRACT Women’s mobilizations in Mexico have caused controversy due to violent protest strategies. Also, the government discredited them as being manipulated by the conservative opposition. This study analyzes press coverage of women's mobilizations from 2019 to 2021 in three Mexican newspapers with different ideological orientations, applying frame analysis. The findings point to the predominant frames in the three newspapers as legitimizing the mobilization. However, although the ideological orientation of a newspaper is relevant, it does not automatically define a preference for specific frames, suggesting that the novelty of a phenomenon translates into a more significant interaction between the creators and receivers of the frames.

Local–Digital Activism: Place, Social Media, Body, and Violence in Changing Urban Politics

Recent studies demonstrate how violence, social media, and protest intertwine. This article complements this body of knowledge and indicates how social media enables new modes of small-scale protest events and how it is being used by right-wing and middle-class groups to influence urban politics. The article conceptualizes local-digital activism as a particular form of protest that is based on a hybrid framework of action that entangles physical actions in public space with virtual acts of dissent, creating embodied digital activism in specific locales. The key arguments are threefold: (1) local–digital activism initiates a particular framework of action that is embedded in digital culture and can be used by different ideological groups. (2) The approach to place in this type of dissent is central and manifold, with physical and virtual spaces codefining one another. (3) Triggering violent encounters and using violent representations in place is strategic and intentional, a means to expand visibility on digital platforms. Empirically the article analyses two groups in South Tel Aviv, presenting their protest strategies and tactical use of place, digitization, violence, and the body in creating the iconography of the “other in the place.” The study is based on geographic and ethnographic work, in-depth interviews ( N = 24) with various actors, and social media content analysis (videos = 72, posts = 210). The final discussion addresses the characteristics of local-digital activism and its role in urban political struggles and offers paths for future research.

Nudity as Strategy: Examining Femen Sextremism Ideology to Weaponize Women’s Body

In the age of the new wave feminism movement, Femen stood out to be one of the heavily discussed topics of women's movements due to its controversial protest strategy. They are one of few feminist movements that utilize, or in their terms, weaponize, the naked body to deliver a political message. It generates various backlash, upon which they are accused of perpetuating western biased standards of beauty and marginalizing non-white women's experience. Despite the controversy, they gained international recognition from the birth of the movement in 2009 until recently. We explore the matters by examining the enabling factors supporting the global movement to endure the controversy over the last decade. We conclude that two factors play a crucial role in the movement's sustainability. First, how they encapsulate and translate the sextremism ideology into firm action. Second, Femen has developed a firm, organized, yet fluid social movement by establishing strong informal ties through soldier-like training.

‘You Call Us Goons! Have You Seen How <i>Their</i> Women Act?’: Gendering as a Protest Strategy among Hindu Nationalist Students in New Delhi

Founded in 1949, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) is the largest political student organisation in the world. ABVP fights university elections, helps students navigate university bureaucracy, and conducts extra-curricular activities for students. It is one of the strongest arms of the largest and most influential coalition of Hindu nationalist organisations called the Sangh Family (<i>Sangh Parivar</i>) in promoting Hindu nationalist ideology to an extremely influential demographic: the young, university-educated, and urban populace. As a member of the largest Hindu nationalist organisation in the world, what does it mean to protest in the present political moment – with the knowledge that there is state and institutional support on your side? Ethnographic data and interviews show that gender plays a key role in how protests are organised and performed. In this article, the sites of the ABVP protest are deconstructed to illustrate two objectives: first, to lay out the preparations that go into ‘doing’ protest. Second, the strategies, micro-politics and navigations that show how protests are gendered. Gendering emerges as a strategy of assertion against women of the left and progressive groups.

From Yewwu Yewwi to #FreeSenegal: Class, Gender and Generational Dynamics of Radical Feminist Activism in Senegal

Feminists protesting gender-based violence and state violence have been instrumental to contesting the status quo and the shifting discourses, modes of organizing, and registers of protest in Senegal. Some 40 years after the emergence of Yewwu Yewwi, a major feminist movement, Senegalese feminists have returned to radical feminist organizing, despite increasing anti-gender backlash. In this essay, I draw on interviews with feminist activists and politicians between 2013 and 2022 to analyze the March 2021 protests in Senegal in light of previous protests. I argue that the intertwined dynamics of class, gender, and generation are critical to understanding the protests. I do this following the example of some feminist academics who have used intersectionality as a method, theory, and research agenda (Collins and Bilge 2016; Mohammed 2022). Innovations in protest strategies have allowed activists to overcome generational and ideological divides between feminist and women’s rights organizations, as well as within feminist movements, and to resist strategic alliances between patriarchal and political powers.

METANARRATIVE REPRESENTATIONS IN THE IRAQI POSTMODERN NOVEL AFTER 2003

The metanarrative technique is one of the novelistic methods that appeared in the late twentieth century, which relies on "textual overlapping" to achieve the basics of interdependence between the "narrative perspective" and the different "narrative accents" of starting points, manifestation and conclusion. The Iraqi novelist used these techniques in many literary productions, whether before Change in 2003 or after, and the dialogue of creativity and contemporary was present in quantity and quality in the production of the Iraqi novelist. The metanarrative formed focal dimensions that clearly stand out for the writer Hussein Rahim in the novel "The Storyteller's Curse", in which he transformed metanarrative techniques into fortified strategies of protest and revolution against reality, when he melted the traditional distance that separates the reader from the text And transform the reader into a skillful partner in cognitive and intellectual imagination, as he made the reader part of the creative work industry, assuming the availability of a historical and realistic culture in building the event. The events of the novel take place in an environment in which reality mixes with imagination, and contradiction is injected into the journey of the characters of the novel in a skillful manner. Along with the realistic narration of the event, although this technique was not used by the narrator to escape from the determinants of reality, but rather used it to erase the distance between reality and imagination. Meditation was one of the most important forms of fictional discourse, by transforming the fictional act from direct transmission to a method of participation in making the event. This difficult method is one of the achievements of the novelist Hussein Rahim, and he is credited with analyzing the fictional text of the novel "The Storyteller's Curse".

Agradecimentos em teses e dissertações da área de Educação: um pouco de mim, um pouco de nós

ABSTRACT In this paper, we discuss the writing of acknowledgments in thesis and dissertations in education. We selected a sample of texts from five postgraduate programs at public universities, one in each region of Brazil. We read them using an evidential method, starting from the autobiographical and narrative character of this type of writing. We found aspects related to religiosity; affective and family relationships; coexistence with the supervisor, professors, and university employees; bonds of friendship and collegiality; and support from development agencies. We also pointed to recognition of difficulties and persistence in research and writing; thanksgiving as a formality, irony, or protest strategy; the reflection of the journey and; the perception of the formative process itself. We conclude with the political character of the acknowledgment writing, on social commitment to the production of knowledge, as well as the collective and humanizing process of investigative work in education.

استراتيجيات الفعل الاحتجاجي لمقاومة السياسة الحضرية بالمغرب

This article aims to address the act of social urban protest. The light is shed on the protest strategy deployed by the dwellers of marginal neighbourhoods to decry the interference of the state in their lives. In order to address such a problem, we rely on observations and interviews to build up the corpus for such an exploratory survey. As for the theoretical framework we use theories and concepts deployed by the social studies concerned with marginal areas. Accordingly, the site and the infrastructure of “Bloc Mkhaznia” display a moral standard that instigates the protest which emphasises the institutional framework and a feeling of superiority as a strategy to decline the project of rehousing in the suburban site of ENNASSER in Casablanca.

Between Protest and Counter-Expertise: User Knowledge, Activism, and the Making of Urban Cycling Networks in the Netherlands Since the 1970s

Around 1970, high numbers of traffic casualties among cyclists led to the creation of numerous local protest movements in the Netherlands. While activists employed protest strategies, their main interest lie in the way they exemplify a highly successful instance of “lay expertise”; the idea that users of a technology have a fundamentally different and valuable perspective on a technology than experts or system-builders. Specifically, cyclists claimed to be more knowledgeable about cycling conditions and safety than the state-employed engineers and traffic experts who built the roads and cycling path network. A key actor in this story is the Dutch Cyclists’ Union (Fietsersbond), a national platform of local action groups formed in 1975. These activists used the cycling experience of everyday utilitarian cyclists to compile maps and blacklists of locations where cycling was dangerous, unpleasant, uncomfortable, or otherwise discouraging. In doing so, they successfully claimed legitimacy as a valuable knowledge partner for local engineers and policymakers. As a result, they gained some level of influence within local governments, a relation which in the intervening years has only grown stronger. This case study shows how users can shape socio-technical systems bottom-up, and can therefore to an extent be seen as a successful example of co-construction of technology.

The greening of human rights in Iran: Lake Orumiyeh, human rights, and environmental justice

In the mid-2000s, a social movement emerged in northwestern Iran to demand increased environmental protections for Lake Orumiyeh. Once among the largest saltwater lakes in the world, Lake Orumiyeh has undergone rapid desiccation, losing nearly 90 per cent of its surface area over the past two decades. Conceptually, the aim of this article is to examine how protesters in Orumiyeh used environmental justice, both as a concept and political strategy, to make human rights claims against the Iranian state. I posit that environmental justice functions as a coded language in this political context, where it is challenging to speak openly about human rights. Drawing from environmental justice and critical human rights literature in geography, combined with an empirical and visual analysis of protests to save Lake Orumiyeh, I analyze how protesters strategically ‘greened’ the language of human rights to protect themselves from state violence. I compare two protests organized in 2010 and 2011 to demonstrate how the site of the lake was used to signify broader grievances against the state. Through a comparison of the affective tone and state response to the protests, I explicate both the importance and the limits of ‘greening’ human rights as a protest strategy. Taken together, these case studies illustrate how limiting activism to binary frameworks of the environmental or political renders invisible the multidimensional claims of protesters. My study demonstrates the importance of widening our analytical gaze to incorporate protests that register rights claims outside of the normative framework of human rights, thereby accounting for political contexts where alternative rights narratives are both strategic and necessary.