Exploding iconography: The Mindbomb Project

The Mindbomb project was started by a group of young artists, journalists and writers, rich in creative resources. Together they created the social poster. It became a means to hack into the dominant discourse of mainstream politics, the mass media and the advertising industry. This paper will attempt to give an answer to the question: how to localize this critique in a non-differentiated global consumer culture? The argument in this paper centers around the idea that the Mindbomb project started as a challenge to the consumer culture. However, it later developed into a broader critique of contemporary Romanian society. A set of theoretical filters in the literature on aesthetic movements and culture jamming were used to map out the Mindbomb project. The present discussion of a single case may be a relevant addition to existing theoretical debates

Towards a conceptualization of casual protest participation: Parsing a case from the Save Roşia Montană campaign

There is currently an empirical gap in the literature on protest participation in liberal democracies which has overwhelmingly focused on Western Europe and North America at the expense of Eastern Europe. To contribute to closing that gap, this article reviews findings from a multi-method field study conducted at FânFest, the environmental protest festival designed to boost participation in Save Roşia Montană, the most prominent environmental campaign in Romania. By contrast to its Western counterparts, Romania has seen markedly lower levels of involvement in voluntary organizations that are a key setting for mobilization into collective action. Concurrently, experience with participation in physical protests is limited amongst Romanians. Specifically, the article probes recent indications that social network sites provide new impetus to protest participation as an instrumental means of mobilization. Dwelling on a distinction between experienced and newcomers to protest, results indicate that social network site usage may make possible the casual participation of individuals with prior protest experience who are not activists in a voluntary organization. Whilst this finding may signal a new participatory mode hinging on digitally networked communication which is beginning to be theorized, it confounds expectations pertaining to a net contribution of social network site usage to the participation of newcomers to protest

Probing the Implications of Facebook use for the organizational form of social movement organizations

This article examines the use of Facebook by social movement organizations (SMOs) and the ramifications from that usage for their organizational form. Organizational forms have been viewed to be in flux as networked communication becomes embedded in mobilization repertoires. In what follows, it is shown that the utilization of Facebook by networked heterarchical organizations is seen to grant them access to a hitherto untapped demographic for the purpose of mobilization. Concurrently, questions are raised pertaining to organizational form, particularly in relation to the role the Facebook audience plays in movement organizations. Communication on Facebook may catalyze deliberation, information sharing and mobilization. Moreover, evidence was found pointing to its use for the self-organization of protest participation. Yet, engagement between SMOs and their Facebook audience bore little on decision-making within the organizations. Although limited in scope, the emerging contribution of such communication may be by way of channelling items into decision-making agendas

Making sense of democratic institutions intertextually: Communication on social media as a civic literacy event preceding collective action

Communication on social media preceding coordinated street demonstrations is assayed for evidence of practice-based informal civic learning about conventional politics and mainstream media. This is done to offset a mounting interest in activist self-organization and self-reflexivity with a scrutiny of networked communication as a civic literacy event. The article proposes that skepticism and criticality directed at media and political institutions provide fertile justification for their challenge, thereby rendering intertextual informal learning an expedient to collective action

Digital prefigurative participation: the entwinement of online communication and offline participation in protest events

This article reviews the main findings of a three-year empirical study that examined the possible contribution of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to participation in offline social movement protest events. Participation was examined as manifest in mobilization, identity building and organizational transformation. Digital prefigurative participation is a tentative construct that attempts to capture the CMC aspect of engagement in the three processes. The participatory processes were probed in the contrasting circumstances of high- and low-risk protest events. This distinction has revealed some important differences in the structural factors that foster participation, primary among which has been organizational affiliation. Yet, it has remained largely unexplored in studies of internet use in protest politics. Findings from two case studies of environmental protests in Romania and the UK suggest that digital prefigurative participation may be extensive among unaffiliated participants at a low-risk event and the affiliated at a high-risk one

Media, Participation, and Social Change

Introduction to special issue

The Activist Chroniclers of Occupy Gezi: Counterposing Visibility to Injustice

With the benefit of hindsight, this chapter casts another glance at Occupy Gezi, a landmark protest in contemporary Turkey. We reflect on the pursuit of visibility by activists on Twitter as a means to garner the attention of the Turkish and the global public to the heavy-handed police crackdown of the popular mobilization. We interpret their quest for visibility as a subaltern tactic employed to reverse an asymmetry of power through an aesthetics of indignation at the injustice perpetrated against peaceful demonstrators. In the longer run, however, such visibility poses an important dilemma when, as in the case of Turkey, it becomes the basis for reflexive state surveillance

Chiral ‘Frustrated Lewis Pair’ systems for practical enantioselective hydrogenation and hydrosilylation

The chemistry of ‘Frustrated Lewis Pairs’ (FLPs) has been the subject of intense investigation for over a decade now, this activity following the seminal report of Stephan et al. concerning the use of a system capable of reversibly binding hydrogen gas in the absence of a transition metal.1 The explosive development in the field was marked by the discovery of numerous systems which display FLP reactivity and engage in small molecule activation and catalytic reactivity, most notably hydrogenation. To a lesser extent, enantioselective versions of such transformations have also been reported. Perhaps the major limitation which deterred extensive investigation in this area has been the challenging synthesis required to assemble chiral catalysts. This thesis presents efforts towards the development of practical FLP systems for enantioselective hydrogenation and hydrosilylation as follows: Chapter 1 surveys the development of the FLP field, with notable developments in terms of structure, reactivity, and mechanistic understanding being covered. Particular attention is given to enantioselective FLP catalysts and to the work carried out for elucidating mechanisms of chirality transfer. Chapter 2 describes the development of NHC-stabilised borenium ions as catalysts for the FLP hydrogenation and hydrosilylation of N-alkyl ketimines, a poorly explored substrate class. Chapter 3 describes the synthesis of a chiral stannylium ion equivalent and investigations into its catalytic ability in the hydrogenation reaction. Chapter 4 describes the use of BINOL-derived phosphate salts as Lewis bases in FLP hydrogenation.Open Acces

The social media overture of the pan-European Stop-ACTA protest: An empirical examination of participatory coordination in connective action

As the latest instalments of protest from the Arab Spring to Occupy and beyond are digested in scholarly work, they point to a scalable, informal structure that develops as an impermanent framework for performing coordinational tasks formerly associated with collective organisations. Whilst a substitution of this nature appears a distinct possibility with social media, the participatory dynamics at the heart of such connective action remain largely uncharted. This paper scrutinizes the scope for the participatory development of motivations and resources to undertake collective action. For the purpose, it reviews an empirical study of public Facebook and Twitter communication associated with the panEuropean protest against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Ensuing results point to a rational, resource-oriented mode of communication figuring prominently on both platforms. Moreover, the time-distribution of motivational and resource-driven talk confound earlier claims about patterns of social media usage in collective action. Finally, despite their smaller number, motivational posts had a higher impact than resource-oriented talk on both platforms – an apparent sign of their particularly positive reception