"This Space Belongs to Us!" : Protest Spaces in Times of Accelerating Capitalism

Open Access

Abstract

Protest movements are fundamentally about the production and control of space. Whether in a discursive or physically sense protesters aim to carve out spaces that give room to their political causes. The negotiation and contestation of the production of space has potentially changed in the context of social media that connect activists over vast distances and in real time. In line with that, media scholars, urban geographers and sociologists have attributed changes in the production and perception of space to emerging media technologies that are extending the human body (McLuhan 1964), contributing to deterritorialization (Tomlinson 1999) and space-time compression (Harvey 1990). What are then the strategies of protest movements that are actively challenging the hegemonic logic of the production of space and how are the strategies relating to communication technologies? What are the consequences of changes in the production of protest spaces for activism in terms of temporality? This chapter investigates the changes in the production of space of protest movements in the context of advancing capitalism that is increasingly based on digital communication technologies. In that sense it contributes to the discussion of how contentious politics and the production of space are changing with social media while contextualizing these changes historically by putting current protests into dialogue with previous movements and their media practices.