Politicizing Precarity, Producing Visual Dialogues on Migration: Transnational Public Spaces in Social Movements

Authors

  • Nicole Doerr University of California, Irvine

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-11.2.1485

Keywords:

transnational public spaces, visual analysis, political deliberation, social movements

Abstract

In a period characterized by weak public consent over European integration, the purpose of this article is to analyze images created by transnational activists who aim to politicize the social question and migrants' subjectivity in the European Union (EU). I will explore the content of posters and images produced by social movement activists for their local and joint European protest actions, and shared on blogs and homepages. I suspect that the underexplored visual dimension of emerging transnational public spaces created by activists offers a promising field of analysis. My aim is to give an empirical example of how we can study potential "visual dialogues" in transnational public spaces created within social movements. An interesting case for visual analysis is the grassroots network of local activist groups that created a joint "EuroMayday" against precarity and which mobilized protest parades across Europe. I will first discuss the relevance of "visual dialogues" in the EuroMayday protests from the perspective of discursive theories of democracy and social movements studies. Then I discuss activists' transnational sharing of visual images as a potentially innovative cultural practice aimed at politicizing and re-interpreting official imaginaries of citizenship, labor flexibility and free mobility in Europe. I also discuss the limits on emerging transnational "visual dialogues" posed by place-specific visual cultures. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1002308

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Author Biography

Nicole Doerr, University of California, Irvine

Nicole DOERR is a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at UC Irvine. She holds a Ph.D. of the European University Institute and an M.A. in Political and Social Sciences of the IEP Paris. Her papers appeared in Mobilization, Social Movement Studies, Feminist Review, and the Journal of International Women's Studies. Her theoretical research combines a discursive sociology of democracy and political deliberation with a cultural perspective of transnational relations and public spaces in social movements. Empirically, the author's research interests concentrate on the comparison of face-to-face deliberative democracy experiments and multilingual media practices (with a particular interest in the role of translation, gender and diffusion) in Europe, North America, and South Africa.

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Published

2010-05-29

How to Cite

Doerr, N. (2010). Politicizing Precarity, Producing Visual Dialogues on Migration: Transnational Public Spaces in Social Movements. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-11.2.1485