To browse Academia. I argue that social movements use protest media strategically in creative and productive ways that go beyond representation. Based on a multi-sited and digital ethnography of the trans-urban EuroMayDay movement I show that protest media were constituent in its formation and central to its performativity.
Contrasting my own position between the fields of activism and academia with formats of participatory or un-biased research, I come up with the concept of 'reflexive activist scholarship'. Using complex media arrangements, activists circulated plurivocal imageries of precarity. Mediated repertoires of contention established credible political actors, and circulated struggles across regional and national borders.
Despite increasing interest for protest media in social movement- and media studies, their culturality had received little theoretical and methodological attention at the time of writing.
I reviewed approaches from social movement scholarship, critical anthropology, European ethnology, and cultural studies, as well as theories of practice, post-operaism, and governmentality. My research is based on a processual, flexible multi-sited ethnography, and grounded in micro-politics. I traced imageries circulating in the Euromayday network, and contextualised their historical and contemporary contexts through digital ethnography, participatant observation and, most importantly, formal and informal interviews with activists.
This enabled visual and textual analysis of selected media products, and a comparative study of the precarity frame in the global cities of Milan, London and Hamburg as well as from a network perspective. I found that media need to be aligned with specific cultural settings to unfold their performative power.
