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Modern protest movements rely on digital activism on social media, which serves as a conduit for mobilization. In the social media landscape, internet memes have emerged as a popular practice of expressing political protest. Although it is known that social media facilitates mobilization, researchers have neglected how distinct types of content affect mobilization. Moreover, research regarding users’ perspectives on mobilization through memes is lacking. To close these research gaps, this study investigates memes in the context of climate protest mobilization. Based on the four-step model of mobilization, a survey of users who create and share memes related to the Fridays for Future movement on social media (N = 325) revealed that the prosumption of climate crisis memes increases users’ issue involvement and strengthens their online networks. These factors serve as crucial mediators in the relationship between users’ prosumption of climate crisis memes and political participation. The results suggest that mobilization through memes is effective at raising awareness of political issues and strengthening online discussion networks, which means that it has strategic potential for protest movements. By looking at memes from the perspective of their creators and examining a specific type of social media content, this study contributes to the literature on digital mobilization.

[pt] Para Jacques Rancière, o político é um encontro de dois processos heterogêneos: a polícia, que é uma lei implícita que determina a distribuição hierárquica dos lugares e das funções dentro de uma sociedade; e a política, um processo de emancipação que consiste em uma ruptura com a lógica policial. O conflito político surge a partir da manifestação de uma nova proposta de divisão do sensível que quer redefinir aqueles que são vistos e aqueles que são invisíveis, aqueles que tem direito a palavra e aqueles que só alcançam o ruído dentro do comum. Nesse sentido, esta é uma disputa pela partilha do sensível, a estética própria da política que se manifesta nos atos de subjetivação que redefinem a organização do comum. À luz dessas ideias, o objetivo deste trabalho será analisar o que ocorreu nas manifestações de junho de 2013 no Brasil e tentar entender em que medida a política se manifestou neste processo. Duas narrativas surgem a partir destes eventos: a narrativa da mídia tradicional e a narrativa dos manifestantes. Elas representam ficções, que, na definição de Rancière, são construções do comum que determinam o dizível, o factível e o possível. Como será argumentado, a ficção da lógica policial é representada pela narrativa da mídia tradicional, enquanto a ficção política é representada pela narrativa dos manifestantes. Assim, o presente trabalho irá contrastar essas duas narrativas, explicitando como cada uma delas aponta para uma proposta específica da partilha do sensível e de que forma o processo político ocorre a partir dessa disputa. / [en] According to Jacques Rancière, the political is the encounter of two distinct process: the police, an implicit law that determines the hierarchical distribution of places and functions inside a society; and the politics, an emancipation process that consists in a rupture with the logic of the police. The political conflict appears through the manifestation of a new proposal of the distribution of the sensible that aims to redefine those visible and those invisible, those that have the right to speak and those that have not. In that sense, this is a dispute about the distribution of the sensible, which is the aesthetics of politics that manifests itself through the acts of subjectivation that redefine the organization of the common. In light of the above, the objective of this dissertation is to analyze the events that took place during the 2013 protests in Brazil and try to comprehend in what ways this can be understood as a political moment. Two narratives appear from those events: the traditional media s narrative and the narrative of the protesters. They represent fictions that, according to Rancière s definition, are conceptions of the common that define the speakable, the feasible and the possible. The argument here supported is that the fiction of the police s logic is represented in the narrative of the traditional media; meanwhile, the protesters narrative corresponds to the politics fiction. In conclusion, this dissertation will contrast these two narratives, highlighting the ways in which each of then points towards a different proposal for the distribution of the sensible, and how the political process occurs from this dispute.

This multiphasic study explored the narratives of five first-time Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrating during the historic confluence of conflicts in 2020 America. After positioning the liminal 2020 circumstances within an antiracist research lens, the author analyzed, first through grounded theory and then secondarily through poetic inquiry, how these five participants described their protest experiences. The grounded theory phase yielded an overarching theory that first-time protestors experienced a dual process of unsuturing and of calling-out, with three subthemes categorized within each of these two processes. The author moved into analysis with the poetic inquiry phase, crafting poems guided by six subthemes of empathy, silence, permission-seeking, identity, story uncertainty, and direct action, and yielding six total poems produced from participant words. The author concluded that poetic inquiry has promise as a tool toward a functioning antiracist identity, while advising on reflexive antiracist future directions for such work.

This dissertation is a study of artistic projects that, in response to Spain’s transition into a neoliberal economy, renew the disruptive gesture of the avant-garde, from the country’s 1986 entry into the European Union, to the post-15M uprisings. To do so, I argue that Iberian artists revived strategies of sabotage typical of the 19th-century worker’s struggle, including power cuts, political infiltration, misappropriation of funds, and the destruction of property, to wield the art world’s contradictions against itself. Institutions sponsored these interventions precisely because in attempting to sabotage the art system, museums were able to marshal the idea of the artist’s freedom as a stand-in for Spain’s democratic identity, while also promoting art that fit the regime of spectacle driving the art market. Combining archival research and interviews with visual and cultural analyses of primarily conceptual art projects, each chapter focuses on a sociopolitical concern with Spain’s neoliberalization with which these artworks wrestle. The first chapter centers on imaginaries of technology given the country’s EU-imposed deindustrialization. One of the cases I examine is Catalan sound artist TRES Blackout (2000-16) concerts where he disconnected buildings from the grid, aestheticizing a pre- and post-industrial experience. The second chapter considers how the promotion of contemporary art was crucial for the State’s shift toward financialization, helping tourism and real estate markets’ development. These conditions, I argue, led to a new wave of institutional critique, questioning the museum’s social role. Among the works I analyze is Andalusian-Catalan visual artist Luz Broto’s architectural piece, Abrir un agujero permanente (2015), in which she bored a hole in the façade of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona and ran a workshop to change the museum’s bylaws for the hole to remain, without authorization, rendering institution making an artistic process in the vein of institutional critique. The third chapter addresses how artists found ways to counter the institution’s capture of cultural labor, such as Núria Güell’s manual, Cómo expropiar a los bancos (2013) —alongside others—on how to obtain bank loans and default on them. Through the lens of sabotage, we can see how artists pry open, in both symbolic and concrete ways, the increasingly nebulous relationship between labor and capital.

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Urban space is a product of power relations and negotiations in society. Who gets represented and monumentalised in it, you? One is being formed and deformed by the environment they are placed into through the way it functions and suggests certain actions in a particular sequence, through the power distribution in its spatial equivalent. Cities, consciously or not, dictate and proclaim “norms” encoded into their visible and invisible fences by those in majority, those in power, systematically failing the misfits. Yet rebellious minorities coming out of oppressive systems refuse to be silenced and “normalised”, their dissent practices carry critical potential, highlighting systematic obstacles, testing response measures and prototyping alternative futures. For my research I define:Social sustainability as constant renewal of the system and social contract, adapting to the newly occurring challenges of the time.Dissent as expressing opinions, demanding conditions and carrying lifestyles, at variance with those hegemonic or officially held. Working in Stockholm’s suburban area of Tensta I concentrate on local postcolonial dissident practices. I want to take a look at how they can inform urban planning, making the system more flexible and adaptable to constant changes. I decode the disciplining choreography of the city and examine roles of such dissent actors as planner, civic educator, warrior and builder. In my design proposal I try toset a new civic urban stage with shifting borders, multilayered visibility, entrance and escape points, with mobilisation, education, commoning and retreat backstage able a) of making global, national and communal politics a local and tangible affair, b) of enhancing and empowering individuals and minorities in their role as civic actors, building peaceful urban voice; and create flexible local ecosystems c) facilitating new grassroots societies prototyping.