ICTs in national and transnational mobilizations

This article deals with the use of ICTs in national and transnational mobilizations. The case study under investigation is the Euro Mayday Parade (EMP) against precarity, which occurred at both the national and transnational level. The articles focus on three aspects of social movement activities. First, organizational processes in which ICTs are used at both the national and transnational level of the EMP in combination with face-to-face interactions, which play an important role in sustaining protest planning. Second, identification processes in which ICTs have a more important impact at the transnational level than at the national level of the EMP. Third, ICTs are not only seen as opportunities but also as challenges that activist groups involved in the EMP had to deal with in the preparation of the EMP. In presenting these results, the article suggests that a comparison between the national and transnational level of the same protest campaign could highlight new aspects in the use of ICTs, which deserve further investigation

Serpica Naro and the Others. The Media Sociali Experience in Italian Struggles Against Precarity

Social movements are also producers of symbolic resources, since they construct new collective identities and provide alternative system of meanings to societies. This was particularly significant with regard to recent struggles against work insecurity in Italy. There, in a discursive context dominated by the so-called ‘flexibility political mantra’, activists raised their voice in order to identify a novel social problem, precarity, and a novel social subject, precarious workers. The paper starts from these premises in order to investigate the so-called media sociali, a particular kind of media practice that had been developed by Italian activists involved in the long protest campaign against precarity, namely the Euro Mayday Parade (EMP). Probably, the media sociali are the most evident attempt to construct a fresh imagery based on precarious workers living and working conditions and to provide an alternative cultural grammar able to speak about precarity. The paper gives back the most important mechanism on which the media sociali rests through the living voices of activists involved in their elaboration: the mechanism of political socialization and social networking as well as the mechanism of diffusion and mutual recognition. Moreover, the paper proposes further reflections about the way in which those activists involved in the EMP perceived the media sociali. In doing so, the paper presents different ways of interpreting political conflict in contemporary Italian social movements and argues that the media sociali are an interesting attempt to overcome both mainstream and independent media in the construction of precarious workers’ imagery and political socialization. Interviews with activists and social movement generated documents are the main data source, investigated according to a qualitative analysis approach

From Data Extraction to Data Leaking. Data-activism in Italian and Spanish anti-corruption campaigns

This article investigates how activists employ Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and engage with data-activism in grassroots struggles against corruption. Based on a comparative research design that triangulates three qualitative data sources — in-depth interviews, movements' documents and participatory platforms — the article analyses two campaigns: Riparte il Futuro in Italy and 15MpaRato in Spain. In so doing, the article casts light on how activists engage with digital data, revealing how their employment is connected to and consistent with the type of organizational structure and communication strategy of the campaign. Moreover, the article evaluates how activists engage with three specific digital data-related practices — digital data creation, data usage and data transformation. Finally, the article illustrates that grasping the features of digital data-related practices also reflects how activists perceive and enact distinct ideas of active citizenship and data transparency in their fight against corruption

From data extraction to data leaking: Data-activism in Italian and Spanish anti-corruption campaigns

This article investigates how activists employ Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and engage with data-activism in grassroots struggles against corruption. Based on a comparative research design that triangulates three qualitative data sources - in-depth interviews, movements' documents and participatory platforms - the article analyses two campaigns: Riparte il Futuro in Italy and 15MpaRato in Spain. In so doing, the article casts light on how activists engage with digital data, revealing how their employment is connected to and consistent with the type of organizational structure and communication strategy of the campaign. Moreover, the article evaluates how activists engage with three specific digital data-related practices - digital data creation, data usage and data transformation. Finally, the article illustrates that grasping the features of digital data-related practices also reflects how activists perceive and enact distinct ideas of active citizenship and data transparency in their fight against corruption

A Media-in-Practices Approach to Investigate the Nexus Between Digital Media and Activists’ Daily Political Engagement

In the past decade, literature flourished that investigated the nexus between social movements and media from a media practice perspective. The article draws on this body of work to show how we might apply practice theory following at least three different approaches on social movements and media: media-as-practices, media-related-practices, and media-in-practices approaches. Then, it proposes an operational definition of practice to investigate social movements and media from a media-in-practices approach, also introducing the method of media practices maps interviews. Finally, the article applies the media-in-practices approach at the analytical level focusing on the practice of coordinating the workflow in the daily grassroots political engagement of Greek, Italian, and Spanish activists

Comparing digital protest media imaginaries: anti-austerity movements in Greece, Italy & Spain

This article presents findings from an empirical study of repertoires of contention and communication engaged during anti-austerity protests by the Indignados in Spain, the precarious generation in Italy, and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece. Drawing on 60 semi­structured interviews with activists and independent media producers involved in the 2011 wave of contention, we bring together social movement and communications theoretical frameworks to present a comparative critical analysis of digital protest media imaginaries. After examining the different socio-political and protest media contexts of the three countries translocally, our critical analysis emphasizes the emergence of three different imaginaries: in Spain the digital protest media imaginary was technopolitical, grounded in the politics and political economies of communication technologies emerging from the free culture movement; in Italy this imaginary was techno-fragmented, lacking cohesion, and failed to bring together old and new protest media logics; and finally in Greece it was techno-pragmatic, envisioned according to practical objectives that reflected the diverse politics and desires of media makers rather than the strictly technological or political affordances of the digital media forms and platforms. This research reveals how pivotal the temporal and geographical dimensions are when analyzed using theoretical perspectives from both communications and social movement research; moreover it emphasizes the importance of studying translocal digital protest media imaginaries as they shape movement repertoires of contention and communication; both elements are crucial to better understanding the challenges, limitations, successes and opportunities for digital protest media

Tenth Anniversary Edition of Partecipazione e Conflitto.

PARTECIPAZIONE E CONFLITTO [Participation and Conflict] was created in 2008, the first journal in Italy to specialize in work analyzing political and social participation. The journal was to be open to interdisciplinary work, internationally oriented, and founded on rigorous criteria for review. 10 years later in 2018, we believe we have respected that aim. In Italy, PaCo is a touchstone for work on contentious politics, political participation and grassroots mobilization in Europe, and is steadily becoming more and more international. In the introduction to our first issue we described the journal as “an ambitious project born of the need to create an autonomous arena for debate dedicated to the study of the dynamics of transformation of contemporary political systems, with a specific focus on the analysis of participation and the political and social conflicts that characterize this. A journal not only about participation, but about political and social studies that place aspects of participation at their core, in all their intrinsic ambivalences, in their constitutive link to the dynamics of conflict”. We invited research and studies that focused on the transformations of politics and its principal actors: parties, interest groups, trade unions, social movements, associations, sub-cultural and counter-cultural communities, citizens’ committees and other forms of more or less formally organized actors “from below”. We sought work that investigated the processes of democratization and new forms of democratic participation in a participatory vein, but also on the ways in which spaces for collective action were being squeezed, and dynamics of identity closure; on spaces opening up or closing down, on new forms of governance at local, national or supranational level, without forgetting those forms of participation and conflict that challenge, in more or less radical ways, the political, social, economic and cultural foundations of contemporary societies

Digital Media, Activism, and Social Movements' Outcomes in the Policy Arena. The Case of Two Anti-Corruption Mobilizations in Brazil

This article investigates the role of digital media in mechanisms that sustain the achievement of social movement outcomes during key phases of mobilizations that aim to impact policymaking. It does so by comparing two anti-corruption initiatives in Brazil that became legislative bills through popular petition and included the employment of digital media to support them: the Ficha Limpa (or Clean State Law) and the Ten Measures Against Corruption (TMAC) campaigns. Based on in-depth interviews with key activists and secondary sources, including an analysis of the campaigns' digital media content, this study evaluates three types of outcomes in the political realm: access, agenda, and policy responsiveness. Although both anti-corruption initiatives elicited public preference and placed their legal inputs in the public agenda of the political system, they were not equally successful in converting their ideas into new legislation. The Ten Measures was a campaign that occurred when the digital affordances for civil society actors were considerably higher, but it did not achieve positive outcomes as the Ficha Limpa did. This article suggests that initiatives focusing more on online mobilization strategies without a clear advocacy approach to negotiate with (and pressure) public officials do not seem to be enough to promote policy changes

Voices of Dissent: Activists’ Engagements in the Creation of Alternative, Autonomous, Radical and Independent Media

In her seminal work on citizens’ media in Latin America, Clemencia Rodriguez points out the pivotal role that alternative media practices have in empowering citizens to develop new understandings and images of themselves outside the corporate space of mediation created by mainstream media channels and outlets. The expression “citizen media”, however, is only one of the many labels employed to speak about alternative media at large. For many years a marginal field of investigation, in recent decades many monographs, special journal issues and edited volumes have been devoted to alternative media. The emancipation of this subject, which is today considered a respectable academic topic across many disciplines, has gone hand in hand with the flourishing of terms and expressions related to those media messages, outlets and channels which are created and diffused outside commercial informational circuits (Atton 2007). In the academic literature, various labels are used to name the grassroots creation of channels and/or contents outside commercial media and/or opposing the dominant system of meanings. These range from “radical media” (Downing 2001) to “citizens media” (Rodriguez 2001) and from “critical media” (Fuchs 2010) to “social movement media” (Atton 2003). Hadl (2007) has addressed the epistemological reasons for such diversity and richness in the academic field. Each expression, obviously, has different connotations and implies a different explanation of the main qualities characterizing alternative media. Without dismissing these important differences and the theoretical debates revolving around them, here we employ the broad and encompassing label “alternative media”, which signals the existence of media that are alternative to corporate media in terms both of their production and their diffusion processes (Atton 2002)

Comparing Digital Protest Media Imaginaries: Anti-austerity Movements in Spain, Italy & Greece

This article presents findings from an empirical study of repertoires of contention and communication engaged during anti-austerity protests by the Indignados in Spain, the precarious generation in Italy, and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece. Drawing on 60 semi\uadstructured interviews with activists and independent media producers involved in the 2011 wave of contention, we bring together social movement and communications theoretical frameworks to present a comparative critical analysis of digital protest media imaginaries. After examining the different socio-political and protest media contexts of the three countries translocally, our critical analysis emphasizes the emergence of three different imaginaries: in Spain the digital protest media imaginary was technopolitical, grounded in the politics and political economies of communication technologies emerging from the free culture movement; in Italy this imaginary was techno-fragmented, lacking cohesion, and failed to bring together old and new protest media logics; and finally in Greece it was techno-pragmatic, envisioned according to practical objectives that reflected the diverse politics and desires of media makers rather than the strictly technological or political affordances of the digital media forms and platforms. This research reveals how pivotal the temporal and geographical dimensions are when analyzed using theoretical perspectives from both communications and social movement research; moreover it emphasizes the importance of studying translocal digital protest media imaginaries as they shape movement repertoires of contention and communication; both elements are crucial to better understanding the challenges, limitations, successes and opportunities for digital protest media