There have been many opportunities to study protest events over the last six years. From Occupy to the Arab Spring and 15M. After the financial crash, citizens of the world crafted their own original responses. What they shared – from New York to Cairo and Madrid – was a desire to take to the streets in political protest. In the UK the enemy was ‘austerity’. One of the first policies of this new era proposed a rise in Higher Education tuition fees. Students took to the streets in dissent. A host of political, institutional, technological and social transformations occurred. More specifically, it saw the birth of a digital platform designed to help protesters navigate during protests. It was called Sukey. This thesis interrogates the impact and legacy of the Sukey platform; over, and beyond, these tumultuous years. It does so through the lens of ‘disruptive cartography’, arguing that the platform was deployed to disrupt the smooth running of both so-called ‘A-to-B’ demonstrations, and police containment tactics colloquially referred to as ‘kettles’. I contend that the platform did so by providing up-to-date navigational information regarding active phenomena, such as police movements. In this thesis I undertake an aesthetic, interactive and mobile analysis to investigate the navigational dimensions of the project. I do so through an automobile metaphor in which I look ‘under the bonnet’, ‘through the windscreen’, and ‘on(to) the road’. In its absence, I argue that protesters have lacked the requisite navigational knowledges to perform unpredictable manoeuvres, during protest events. As a result, they have returned to using institutional forms that limit the navigational possibilities brought-into-being by the Sukey platform. I conclude by speculating on three possible ‘failures’ of the platform regarding its ability to faithfully ‘capture’ live events, provide a navigational ‘correspondence’ between cartographic ‘signposts’, and to protect participants from data-driven policing.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:720427 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Hind, Sam |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/89673/ |
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