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From Counterpublics to Contentious Publicness: Tracing the Temporal, Spatial, and Material Articulations of Popular Protest Through Social Media

A Research Paper by Anastasia Kavada and Thomas Poell, published by Communication Theory

This article presents a new approach to the study of public contestation through social media. Developing this approach, we make three conceptual moves. First, to capture the dynamic character of contemporary contestation, we shift attention from publics to publicness as an interactive process. Second, we turn the focus from the “counter,” as a public or space distinct from the dominant sphere, towards distributed forms of contention. Finally, instead of considering media as arenas of claims, we investigate how media are constitutive of contentious publicness, which can be studied along its material, spatial, and temporal dimensions. These moves lead to an analytical framework through which trajectories of contentious publicness can be systematically traced and evaluated. Through case studies on the 2011 Egyptian uprising and the Occupy protests, we demonstrate how this framework can be employed to examine the construction of new contentious actors and evaluate their democratic legitimacy as claim-makers.

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Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash

Anastasia Kavada

About

Anastasia Kavada is a Reader in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. She is Co-Leader of the Arts, Communication and Culture Research Community (ACC), and Co-leader of the MA in Media, Campaigning and Social Change. Her research focuses on the links between online tools and decentralized organising practices, democratic decision-making, and the development of solidarity among participants in collective action. Her work has appeared in a variety of edited books and academic journals, including Media, Culture & Society and Information, Communication & Society. She is currently working on a monograph with the provisional title ‘Experiments in Democracy: Digital Communication and Social Movements’.

Details

Date
3 November 2020
Published By
Communication Theory
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CAMRI | From Counterpublics to Contentious Publicness: Tracing the Temporal, Spatial, and Material Articulations of Popular Protest Through Social Media - CAMRI
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