Articulating Dissent: Protest and the Public Sphere

233 Pages·2014·3.38 MB·English

by  Pollyanna Ruiz

Articulating Dissent
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Articulating
Dissent
Protest and the Public Sphere
Pollyanna Ruiz
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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
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This book is dedicated with much love to my parents,
Elizabeth and Tony.
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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
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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.
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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
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