Poland as Gilead. Pop culture fiction and performative protests in the era of the pandemic

The use of iconic popular culture symbols is an increasingly common strategy applied by social protest organizers. The Guy Fawkes mask from the ‘V for Vendetta' comic book became a symbol of the Anonymous group, and later of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Salvador Dalí mask, popularized in the ‘La casa de papel' Netflix series, was used in street protests in Spain and Italy. Motifs taken from the HBO adaptation of ‘The Handmaid's Tale' novel gained high visibility in thousands of women's protests against the introduction of the de facto abortion ban in Poland. Basing on images documenting the Polish protests published in social media, we demonstrate how popular culture symbols are transformed into cultural codes which bridge on-street and online protest actions. This connection has become crucial in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using qualitative visual content analysis, we prepared a classification of the symbols employed. Our contribution to the theory of performative protests is to reveal the importance of analogies with the political series that Polish protesters have used by means of the general connotation: Poland is Gilead. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Media, Culture & Society is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Relay activism and the flows of contentious publicness on WeChat: a case study of COVID-19 in China

This paper explores a case of public contention against the censoring of a feature article about a COVID-19 whistleblower on the Chinese social media, WeChat. Moving beyond the normative theory of the public sphere and publics, we draw on Kavada and Poell's theory of 'contentious publicness' which is flexible enough to capture the complexity, diversity and hybridity of digital contention in the context of China. Through a combination of textual analysis and participatory observation, this article analyses how citizens challenged the censorship system and attempted to keep Dr Fen's story online through what we call 'relay activism'. Informed by the three dimensions of 'contentious publicness', we analyse the materiality of the communication infrastructure of WeChat and the temporal and spatial relations of the public contention (focusing primarily on WeChat and GitHub). In doing this, the paper contributes a more comprehensive approach to examining the social, structural and participatory characteristics of the contestation of censorship in China.

DEMOCRACY AMID CRISES: Polarization, Pandemic, Protests, and Persuasion

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. Democracy amid Crises explains how these forces and the media messaging through which they were filtered shaped the election and post-election dialogue, as well as voter perceptions of both, with worrisome potential consequences for democracy. The book spotlights not one but several electorates, each embedded in a distinctive informational environment. The four crises affected these electorates differently, partly because the unique constellations of media in which they were advertently and inadvertently enmeshed contained dissimilar messages from the campaigns and other sources of influence. Awash in distinctive message streams, the various electorates adopted divergent perspectives on the crises, candidates, and state of the country. As a result, understanding voting behavior and attitudes about the events that followed requires an analysis of both the distinctive electorates and the informational environments that enveloped them. Importantly, our findings raise fundamental questions about the nation's future, occasioned by the contest over whether the 2020 presidential election was fairly and freely decided and by worrisome responses to the reality that the country's citizenry is becoming more multiracial, multiethnic, and, on matters religious, agnostic. © Oxford University Press 2023.

Youth participation in environmental sustainability: insights from the Lisbon participatory budget

PurposeThis article poses the question on whether and how youth participation in environmental sustainability makes a difference within participatory budgets (PBs). This is a question worth asking because PBs have pursued, from the very beginning, goals of social sustainability through the inclusion of social groups that struggle to make their voices heard, as in the case of the youth. As young people show an increasing capacity to self-organise around environmental issues, a knowledge gap emerges as to the contribution that youth can give to environmental sustainability within PBs.Design/methodology/approachThe 2021 edition of the Lisbon PB (2021PB) has been analysed through desk research - document analysis using the city council's website as the main source of information, and fieldwork - an organisation of one two-day workshop with 20 young students through a partnership between the local authority and the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon. Methods were applied to retrieve findings on youth participation in environmental sustainability in the 2021PB.FindingsThe youth show a relative increase of participation in the 2021PB and emerge as a key target group in funded proposals. Convergence with student proposals suggest shared awareness on the role of youth in the pursuit of social sustainability. The success of health-related proposals confirms ownership of (young) citizens over the concept of environmental sustainability, which further relies on the various scopes of funded proposals at both city and neighbourhood levels. In the workshop, students did not stick to specific themes and struggled to connect present criticalities and future imaginaries.Research limitations/implicationsFocus on one case study necessarily limits the generalisation of findings. Nevertheless, the 2021PB illuminates pathways of research on youth participation in environmental sustainability through participatory budgeting that are worth clearing in the future, such as the role of digital participation, dynamics induced by extreme events as the COVID-19 pandemic and PBs' capacity to intercept environmental activism.Practical implicationsDecision-makers and practitioners can take advantage of findings to acknowledge the potential of youth participation in PBs to reframe the take of environmental sustainability.Social implicationsThe article provides new inputs for future developments in the operationalisation of social and environmental sustainability through participatory budgeting.Originality/valueThis article examines original data retrieved from the 2021PB. Data analysis is backed by the literature review of key democratic challenges in social and environmental sustainability within participatory budgeting.

The politics of hate. Infection anxiety and defense

The article approaches the attraction of hate politics via reflections on the dilemmas and resistances that get in the way of its analysis. Sociopsychological investigation of the new political movements that seek communality by way of highly negative affects (such as the protests against measures designed to contain the COVID pandemic) is impeded by the emotional involvement displayed by researchers. Encounters with hostility and hate are invasive in their impact, jeopardize psychic integrity, and spell the demise of curiosity and empathy. Equally threatening is the normative proximity to central topic of these movements: the idealization of criticism, resistance, and autonomy. The regressive temptations held out by hate politics may arouse feelings of envy. Defense operations are undertaken to counteract contamination, involuntary proximity, and envy. These include leaving the field, cathexis withdrawal, and the adoption of the logic of splitting and devaluation. Maneuvers of this kind are also discernible in research on the subject. Keeping one's distance means not learning anything new;letting oneself be drawn in means becoming a part of the very dynamic one is investigating. In research, this leads to a moralizing implementation of defense against anxiety and powerlessness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (French) Le texte evoque l'attrait de la haine en politique et etudie les dilemmes et les resistances qui en compliquent l'analyse. L'etude sociopsychologique des nouveaux mouvements politiques qui forment des communautes par le biais de puissants affects negatifs (comme les protestations contre les mesures visant a endiguer la pandemie de Corona) est rendue difficile par l'implication emotionnelle des chercheurs. La rencontre avec l'hostilite et la haine a un effet invasif, met en danger l'integrite psychique et fait disparaitre la curiosite et la disposition a l'empathie. La proximite normative avec les topoi centraux de ces mouvements-l'idealisation de la critique, de la resistance et de l'autonomie-est egalement menacante. L'offre regressive de la haine peut eveiller des sentiments d'envie. On cherche a contrecarrer la contamination, la proximite non souhaitee et l'envie par des manoeuvres de defense : evitement et retrait de l'investissement, adoption d'une logique de clivage et de devalorisation. La recherche est egalement tentee par de telles manoeuvres. Celui qui prend ses distances n'apprend rien de nouveau. Celui qui se laisse atteindre devient lui-meme partie prenante de la dynamique qu'il veut etudier et sa recherche aboutit a des actions moralisatrices de defense contre l'angoisse et l'impuissance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (German) Der Text nahert sich der Attraktion von Hasspolitik uber eine Reflexion der Dilemmata und Widerstande, die sich ihrer Analyse in den Weg stellen. Die sozialpsychologische Untersuchung der neuen politischen Bewegungen, die sich uber starke negative Affekte vergemeinschaften (wie die Proteste gegen die Masnahmen zur Eindammung der Corona-Pandemie), werden durch die emotionale Beteiligung von Forschern erschwert. Die Begegnung mit Feindseligkeit und Hass wirkt invasiv, gefahrdet die psychische Integritat und lasst Neugier und Empathiebereitschaft schwinden. Bedrohlich wirkt auch die normative Nahe zu zentralen Topoi dieser Bewegungen-der Idealisierung von Kritik, Widerstand und Autonomie. Das regressive Angebot von Hasspolitik kann Gefuhle von Neid wecken. Der Kontamination, der ungewollten Nahe und dem Neid sucht man durch Abwehroperationen gegenzusteuern: Aus-dem-Felde-Gehen und Besetzungsentzug, Ubernahme der Spaltungs- und Entwertungslogik. Zu solchen Manovern ist man auch in der Forschung versucht. Wer sich distanziert, erfahrt nichts Neues. Wer sich erreichen lasst, wird selber Teil der Dynamik, die er untersuchen will, und gerat in seiner Forschung in moralisierendes Agieren der Abwehr von Angst und Ohnmacht. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Lockdown of expression: civic space restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic as a response to mass protests

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across the globe implemented severe restrictions of civic freedoms to contain the spread of the virus. The global health emergency posed the risk of governments seizing the pandemic as a window of opportunity to curb (potential) challenges to their power, thereby reinforcing the ongoing, worldwide trend of shrinking civic spaces. In this article, we investigate whether and how governments used the pandemic as a justification to impose restrictions of freedom of expression. Drawing on the scholarship on the causes of civic space restrictions, we argue that governments responded to COVID-19 by curtailing the freedom of expression when they had faced significant contentious political challenges before the pandemic. Our results from a quantitative analysis indeed show that countries who experienced high levels of pro-democracy mobilization before the onset of the pandemic were more likely to see restrictions of the freedom of expression relative to countries with no or low levels of mobilization. Additional three brief case studies (Algeria, Bolivia and India) illustrate the process of how pre-pandemic mass protests fostered the im-position of restrictions on the freedom of expression during the pandemic. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The social value of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: Willingness to pay estimates from four western countries.

SARS-CoV-2 vaccines give rise to positive externalities on population health, society and the economy in addition to protecting the health of vaccinated individuals. Hence, the social value of such a vaccine exceeds its market value. This paper estimates the willingness to pay (WTP) for a hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (or shadow prices), in four countries, namely the United States (US), the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy during the first wave of the pandemic when COVID-19 vaccines were in development but not yet approved. WTP estimates are elicited using a payment card method to avoid "yea saying" biases, and we study the effect of protest responses, sample selection bias, as well as the influence of trust in government and risk exposure when estimating the WTP. Our estimates suggest evidence of an average value of a hypothetical vaccine of 100-200 US dollars once adjusted for purchasing power parity. Estimates are robust to a number of checks.

Revulsive Art against Touristification

The rapid and intense touristification of city centres emerged before the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2. It consolidated itself as a global phenomenon that affected both established and emerging global tourist destinations. Its ramifications managed to disrupt local ecol- ogy and forced the residents to face various challenges such as loss of identity, social inequality and the demographic emptying of urban centres. In this scenario, the subversive potential of the hybrid practices that link art and activism assume its social commitment to the prob- lems and demands arising from an oversized model of tourist travel. This article explores descriptive case studies that, in their respective transcultural spaces of production, share a common critical perspective on the resulting tourism model. Specifically, the profiles and sen- sitizing reflections of Left Hand Rotation in Lisbon, Banksy in Venice and Alejandro Villen in Malaga are examined, as well as the collective exhibition Alicantropo in Alicante.<br />responsibility.

Signifying dissent: The sensory semiotics of protest

Public protests need to communicate their aims to an audience, and the audience must make sense of the message. Initially this article was planned as a visual analysis of protest signs and placards. But to avoid ‘reproduc[ing] the privileged position of sight and vision over other ways of knowing', we attend to the contested relations between signification, power, and all the senses. The sounds, smells, sights, tastes, and textures found at protests by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, Occupy, and the gilets jaunes, and on issues including women's rights, nuclear power, immigration detention, Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccination mandates. Through ethnographic documentation of protests and the ‘live' coverage broadcast in social and news media, our investigation of activities, scenes, signs, and participants reveals, firstly, that public dissent communicates through multiple sensory dimensions, and, secondly, that the senses of street-based protests are inextricably intertwined with sensory control tactics used against protesters in the policing of events. © The Author(s) 2023.

One voice or multi-issue movement? Exploring the role of bonding and bridging social capital within the COVID-19 antivax movement

Activism represents a prominent and growing body of knowledge in public relations scholarship and practice. Most of the extant studies focus on progressive and prosocial activism, understanding activism as a form of communication that aims to further social justice and equality. However, arguably, activism is a polylithic concept and not all movements are progressive in nature or seek to further issues in a given society's best interest. One such example is the so-called antivax protest movement that emerged in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast to its depiction as a large, single-issue protest movement, the authors highlight it as a movement that brings together multiple issues, agendas, and worldviews. Drawing on Putnam's notions of bridging and bonding social capital, the authors argue that a movement's lack of ability to convert bridging into bonding social capital limits its longevity and impact. They suggest that public relations professionals need to avoid the temptation to apply convenient umbrella labels to multi-issue movements, emphasising the need to adopt a critical awareness of a movement's underlying issues and motivators, which may be varied, to develop nuanced and effective messaging. • The COVID-19 antivax movement is a multi-issue movement, which has been uncritically presented as a single-issue group • Activism is a polylithic concept deserving further critical attention beyond the extant focus on progressive movements • Bridging social capital may temporarily increase the impact, reach, and visibility of a social movement or activist group • A single-issue focus can strengthen bonding social capital, enhancing a social movement's potential longevity and impact • Multi-issue responses require active listening and consideration of different types of social capital & diverse objectives [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Public Relations Review is the property of Elsevier B.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

#fighteverycrisis: Pandemic Shifts in Fridays for Future's Protest Communication Frames

This qualitative social media framing analysis captures the discursive engagement with COVID-19 in Fridays for Future's (FFF) digital protest communication on Facebook. In offering comparative insights from 457 posts across 29 public pages from FFF collectives in the European Union, this study offers the first analysis of social movement frames employed by FFF during the pandemic. By coding all Corona-related messages across collectives, we chart three framing processes: adaptation (compliance, solidarity), reframing (reclaiming the crisis, nexus between climate and health), and mobilization (sustained involvement, digital protest alternatives). We discuss our findings alongside social movement framing theory, including frame bridging and scope enlargement to accommodate the pandemic topicality into FFF's environmental master frame, and frame development by FFF movement leaders. This study thus provides key insights into discursive shifts in social movements brought on by external crises that threaten to marginalize the cause and demobilize adherents.

Canada is No Exception: The 2022 Freedom Convoy, Political Entanglement, and Identity-Driven Protest

Canada has been relatively immune to grassroots-driven populist political forces in recent years despite global shifts toward a mainstreaming of nationalist identity-driven politics. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic coupled with other shifts in the Canadian and international political landscapes, have changed this dynamic. This article takes interest in the 2022 Freedom Convoy—also known as Convoi de la liberté in French—through the lens of Canadian political as well as science and health-based communication. The protesters' actions, and the subsequent political response, suggest an increased political entanglement with both protest movements and identity-driven political communications and messaging. © 2023 SAGE Publications.

Examining the effects of the killing of George Floyd by police in the United States on attitudes of Black Londoners: a replication

High-profile incidents of police misconduct can have serious consequences for public trust in the police. A recent study in the British Journal of Political Science found that Eric Garner's death in NYC lead to more negative attitudes towards the police in London among Black residents compared to White and Asian residents. The current study aimed to replicate this transnational effect by assessing the impact of George Floyd's death on Londoners' perceptions of police. Using the same data and methodological approach, we did not replicate the immediate effect on Black Londoners' attitudes. We did find that attitudes across ethnic groups became more negative when using a wider temporal bandwidth. However, we discovered violations to the excludability assumption, meaning we cannot be certain that the effect is solely due to the murder of George Floyd, or at least partly due to different dynamics, like the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying policies. This means that while it is possible that police killings in other contexts play a role in shaping attitudes towards local police, these effects are difficult to disentangle from other global and local factors. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Protest against Covid-19 containment policies in European countries

Protests against coronavirus policies have occurred in all European countries. The intensity of protest varies strongly, however. We explain this variation by strategic choices that protest organizers make to maintain the protest movement. Specifically, we argue that protest organizers pay heed to the dynamics of the pandemic in their country: the number of protest events is higher when and where mortality rates are lower and containment policies are more stringent. At the same time, the number of protest events is influenced by political factors. Despite the fact that civil liberties facilitate trust in government, these two variables exert opposite effects: while higher trust in government and public administration reduces the number of protest events, stronger civil liberties increase the number of protest events. We find evidence for these hypotheses in an analysis of the number of monthly protest events based on information from ACLED, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, in 28 European countries between March 2020 and August 2021. © The Author(s) 2023.

Hippies Next to Right-Wing Extremists?: Identifying Subgroups of Antilockdown Protesters in Germany Using Latent Profile Analysis

To reduce the spread of COVID-19, adherence to protective measures was crucial around the world. While most complied with these measures, a vocal minority protested against them. Early reports emphasized the unusual heterogeneity of these protests: Hippies and esoterics marched alongside conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazis. We examined what these protestors might (and might not) have in common. A large study with antilockdown protestors in Germany (N = 1,700) revealed four subgroups: centrists, politically undifferentiated, left-wingers, and right-wingers. Beyond that, these subgroups demonstrated striking similarities: All endorsed conspiracy beliefs, misinformation, esotericism, and vaccine hesitancy to a similar extent. These beliefs share that they are scientifically unfounded and epistemically unwarranted. They may unite individuals from diverse political backgrounds in the antilockdown protests. © 2023 The Author(s).

Protest in unlikely times: dynamics of collective mobilization in Europe during the COVID-19 crisis

Based on an original protest event analysis (PEA) dataset covering 30 European countries, this paper provides three sets of results. Despite its unlikeliness due to lockdowns and social distancing measures, protest during COVID-19 has hardly been put to a halt even if, as a result of the restrictions imposed by the lockdown measures on the opportunities of public collective actions, protest occurred at significantly lower levels compared to pre-COVID-19 times, in terms of number of events and, above all, in terms of the number of participants. Moreover, protest was refocused on COVID-19-related issues, in particular on protest against the restrictions imposed by the government lockdowns, while non-COVID-19 issues, in particular economic issues, were crowded out. In addition, protest during the COVID-19-crisis also responded to highly contingent national context conditions which varied between the different regions of Europe. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of European Public Policy is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Activism in the time of COVID-19

In many countries, COVID-19 has amplified the health, economic and social inequities that motivate group-based collective action. We draw upon the SIRDE/IDEAS model of social change to explore how the pandemic might have affected complex reactions to social injustices. We argue that the virus elicits widespread negative emotions which are spread contagiously through social media due to increased social isolation caused by shelter-in-place directives. When an incident occurs which highlights systemic injustices, the prevailing negative emotional climate intensifies anger at these injustices as well as other emotions, which motivates participation in protest actions despite the obvious risk. We discuss how the pandemic might shape both normative and non-normative protests, including radical violent and destructive collective actions. We also discuss how separatism is being encouraged in some countries due to a lack of effective national leadership and speculate that this is partially the result of different patterns of social identification. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Social media e pandemia. Il Movimento inconsapevole

The massive diffusion of social media has produced disintermediation and it has changed the way in which users inform themselves and participate in public debate. On the other hand, users show a tendency to interact with information that adheres to personal choices and previous opinions. This propensity is "exploited” by algorithms that manage and sort communication on social media, increasingly producing a polarized audience. The essay shows the outcomes of these dynamics by focusing on the communications structure related to the pandemic. In this sense, social media constitute a risk because they convey out-of-control access to unreliable information and because they can result in the absence of correct information, if not in a problem for democracy. On the technical level, at least three complex reticular structures are identified that evolve following different directions, emerged from three sequentially monitored lemmas (no-mask, covid-19, greenpass). Further considerations concern the increasingly dense interweaving between online communication and the genesis of protest movements with evanescent, single-issue structures.

El meme como ágora digital del lenguaje político contemporáneo. El caso del movimiento 21N y 11S en Colombia

On November 21st, 2019 (21N), Colombia experienced one of the most shocking social mobilizations in history. The effervescence of the mobilization was neutralized by the social isolation generated by COVID-19 and challenged on September 11th, 2020 (9S), after the murder of a citizen due to excessive use of force by law enforcement. However, civil society resisted the coercive measures of the pandemic and the state violence with viral memes as a synthetic, hyperbolic, and ironic expression of reality. In this regard, the objective of the article is to analyze how memes, from iconic, semantic, and humorous perspectives, catalyze the understanding of social protests and mobilize a global trend to reinforce criticism of political and economic power, from digital activism. The methodology of multimodal analysis is worked with a corpus of 201 memes. The results show how the meme transforms an instant message, into discursive practices that criticize the action or inertia of state and private institutions. In conclusion, it is proposed that although memes are not a guarantee of a transformation of reality, they do revitalize traditional social mobilizations that seek social empathy from the public sphere. © 2022 Universidad Nacional de Colombia. All rights reserved.

German Corona Protest Mobilizers on Telegram and Their Relations to the Far Right: A Network and Topic Analysis

The Querdenken movement, the leading force behind German corona protests, is suspected of being a gateway to far-right attitudes due to radicalizing inward-oriented communication on Telegram. To investigate potential connections of this movement to the far right and alternative media—and to explore key topics of the Querdenken network over time—we analyzed 6,294,955 messages from 578 public Telegram channels via network analysis and structural topic modeling. This analysis revealed that Querdenken's subcommunities preferably forward content from far-right and QAnon communities, while far-right and conspiracy theorist alternative media channels act as content distributors for the movement. Four main topics appeared in the Querdenken network with varying prevalence over time and across different communities: promotion, QAnon, right-wing populism, and COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Our results highlight potential directions for future research and practical implications, for example, that political decision makers should account for the increasing influence of the QAnon movement on Querdenken mobilizers' Telegram activity. © The Author(s) 2023.