Articulating Dissent: Protest and the Public Sphere PDF
Preview Articulating Dissent: Protest and the Public Sphere
Articulating Dissent Ruiz T02664 00 pre 1 06/05/2014 09:02 Ruiz T02664 00 pre 2 06/05/2014 09:02 Articulating Dissent Protest and the Public Sphere Pollyanna Ruiz Ruiz T02664 00 pre 3 06/05/2014 09:02 First published 2014 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Copyright © Pollyanna Ruiz 2014 The right of Pollyanna Ruiz to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3306 9 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3305 2 Paperback ISBN 978 1 8496 4885 1 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4887 5 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4886 8 EPUB eBook Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Text design by Melanie Patrick Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America Ruiz T02664 00 pre 4 06/05/2014 09:02 This book is dedicated with much love to my parents, Elizabeth and Tony. Ruiz T02664 00 pre 5 06/05/2014 09:02 Ruiz T02664 00 pre 6 06/05/2014 09:02 Contents Acknowledgments viii Preface ix Introduction 1 1. Unmasking Domination 8 2. The Paradox of the Frontier 39 3. Networked Uprisings 60 4. Into the Streets 86 5. Unsettling Spaces 118 6. Austerity Measures and National Narrative 149 Conclusion 174 Bibliography and Sources 187 Index 207 Ruiz T02664 00 pre 7 06/05/2014 09:02 Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the loving support of my immediate family; my partner David who has faithfully read every word I have ever written, and my children Benji, Mira and Chela who have joyfully distracted me from writing many more. And my extended family; Elizabeth, Tony, Mathew, Thomas and Katie who have cooked, shopped, cleaned and made tea with such constancy and care. I would also like to acknowledge the support of my friends who have provided encouragement and solace in equal measures. I’d particularly like to thank Janice, Kate, Caroline and Ben for their invaluable academic advice, Beck and Louise for their activist insights, and Iseult, AnneMarie and Kathy for their absolute confidence in my ability to carry on writing. Ruiz T02664 00 pre 8 06/05/2014 09:02 Preface As the daughter of politically active parents, much of my childhood was spent going to demonstrations, making human chains and holding candlelit vigils. These were hugely enjoyable events which usually culminated in a shared picnic. After each demonstration I would go to bed fully expecting to wake up to a brand new dawn. My faith in the democratic process was rooted in the belief that public opinion was a force capable of holding those in power to account. I presumed that my role, as a small but active citizen, was to inform the world in general and my government in particular, of previously unnoticed injustices and inequalities. The gradual realisation that the relationship between the will of the people and the actions of the state was far more complex led me to ask a number of interrelated questions. Firstly it has prompted me to ask whether the flow of information from my world to the wider world is somehow being impeded. As I grew older I began to think about why our demonstrations were so often ignored by the mainstream media. I thought about the ways in which the communication strategies of the protest organisations I knew seemed to be structured by ideological, rather than communicative considerations. I reflected upon our failure to adequately articulate our shared political ends. I asked myself whether these internal frictions contributed to the mainstream’s tendency to dismiss the radical left as unrepresentative, irrelevant or irrational. As time went by the single-issue campaigns which had characterised the late 1970s and early 1980s were gradually replaced by more fractured multi-issue campaigns. Class, which had for so many years been perceived to be the defining binary of radical politics, was unsettled by a plethora of alternative identity positions. There seemed to be a growing recognition that individuals’ ‘material interests’ were complicated by a far wider ‘sense of themselves and their place in the world’ (Gilbert, 2008, p. 153). This shift in radical politics was initially constructed around the politics of gender, race and sexuality but was soon further complicated by the rise in political groupings around issues such as environmentalism, global inequality, and the need to protect civil liberties. This proliferation of Ruiz T02664 00 pre 9 06/05/2014 09:02
Description:The list of books you might like
