"Joe Annie Street"

A short critical fiction, derived from my experience of the demolition of my studio & home on Joe Annie Street, Houston, TX, placed in the context of a political/philosophical reflection on the "destructive character" (Benjamin) and the performative illusions or self delusions of street protest and street art in times of war

The symbol of social media in contemporary protest: Twitter and the Gezi Park movement

This article explores how Twitter has emerged as a signifier of contemporary protest. Using the concept of ‘social media imaginaries’, a derivative of the broader field of ‘media imaginaries’, our analysis seeks to offer new insights into activists’ relation to and conceptualisation of social media and how it shapes their digital media practices. Extending the concept of media imaginaries to include analysis of protestors’ use of aesthetics, it aims to unpick how a particular ‘social media imaginary’ is constructed and informs their collective identity. Using the Gezi Park protest of 2013 as a case study, it illustrates how social media became a symbolic part of the protest movement by providing the visualised possibility of imagining the movement. In previous research, the main emphasis has been given to the functionality of social media as a means of information sharing and a tool for protest organisation. This article seeks to redress this by directing our attention to the role of visual communication in online protest expressions and thus also illustrates the role of visual analysis in social movement studies

Assessing Gezi Park movement’s transformative dynamics : the women and the football fans

This paper traces the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul and analyses the protests within the realm of what is referred to as ‘contentious politics’. In its examination of the protests it aims to contribute to contextualising contentious politics in Turkey, a country located on the cross-roads of Europe and Asia and along the heated region of the Middle East, which has been transformed radically through contentious politics since 2011. By assessing the Gezi Park movement within its historical and sociological context I aim to pursue a textual analysis of contentious politics in the form of the cries uttered and voices heard in Istanbul and beyond during this social protest

Assessing creativity in TV studio production

This paper will seek to gauge how media production can be taught within Higher Educational Institutions to inspire the next generation of programme makers to create original student led productions, rather than replicating content. Brown and Duthie ask how media educators and teachers of film and television production courses assess creativity and discuss innovative approaches to learning, teaching and assessment in the academy and ask how we can encourage risk taking in a risk averse environment. This paper considers whether contemporary global TV formats can be the catalyst for new ideas and content and how to encourage students to be film and TV making pioneers

The Aesthetics of Global Protest

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative

Doing Tolerance: Urban Interventions and Forms of Participation

How is tolerance reflected in urban space? Which urban actors are involved in the practices and narratives of tolerance? What are the limits of tolerance? The edited volume answers these questions by considering different forms of urban in/exclusion and participatory citizenship. By drawing together disparate yet critical writings, Doing Tolerance examines the production of space, urban struggles and tactics of power from an interdisciplinary perspective. Illustrating the paradoxes within diverse interactions, the authors focus on the conflict between heterogeneous groups of the governed, on the one hand, and the governing in urban spaces, on the other. Above all, the volume explores the divergences and convergences of participatory citizenship, as they are revealed in urban space through political, socio-economic and cultural conditions and the entanglements of social mobilities

Online Participation and Dissent in Turkey: From the Gezi Protests to the 15 July Coup Attempt

How do people use smartphones and online social networks to participate in social movements? The role of online social networks in political participation has previously been made light of with concepts like ‘clicktivism’ and ‘slacktivism’ which emphasise the authenticity of all offline activity over online practices. This thesis challenges the concepts and terminologies that reflect the dichotomous understandings of the online vs. offline worlds by questioning the scientific validity of the exaltation of street over online participation. The project proposes a more integrated understanding of participation in politics through an overlapping of online and offline actions and consequences with the help of two case studies concerning the recent political history of Turkey, namely, the 2013 Gezi protests and the 2016 attempted coup. Video posts created by participants in each case have been analysed to understand videocapturing and posting strategies and how different content has been created in anti-and pro-government political situations. The findings from these studies are interpreted with reference to the legal trajectory of Internet technologies and online social networks in Turkey and reveal how this changing online landscape acts both as a perpetrator and a product of certain political participation strategies. By proposing the concept of ‘meta-activism’ as key to understanding the inevitable role of online actions in political participation in the contemporary world, this thesis aims to demystify the purist notion of activism as a street-based practice. This thesis also contributes to discussions about online vs. offline participation under unusual political circumstances by presenting a specifically non-Eurocentric perspective on the practices and consequences of online participation in politics as well as bringing together findings from two very distinct cases of political upheaval in Turkey’s recent history