All posts by Kevin Gillan

Technology, Media and Social Movements

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Flesher Fominaya & Gillan (2018) Technology, Media and Movements. Book cover.This book offers an interdisciplinary set of contributions from leading scholars, and explores the complex relationship between media, technology and social movements. It provides a valuable resource for scholars and students working in this rapidly developing field.
Providing theoretical engagement with contemporary debates in the field of social movements and new media, the book also includes a theoretical overview of central contemporary debates, a re-evaluation of theories of social movement communication, and a critical overview of media ecology and media approaches in social movement scholarship. The theoretical contributions are also developed though empirical case studies from around the world, including the use of Facebook in student protests in the UK, the way power operates in Anonymous, the “politics of mundanity” in China, the emotional dynamics on Twitter of India’s Nirbhaya protest, and analysis of Twitter networks in the transnational feminist campaign ‘Take Back The Tech!’. This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.

This book was first published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies. Full details and ebook purchase available via Routledge.

Cite: Flesher Fominaya, Cristina & Kevin Gillan, eds. 2018. Technology, Media and Social Movements. London: Routledge.

The Human Rights Framework Offers a Chance for Ordinary People to Call the Powerful to Account

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Re-blogging: this piece was first published at RightsInfo, as part of a series celebrating 20 years of the Human Rights Act. Original (with pictures) here: https://rightsinfo.org/the-human-rights-framework-offers-a-chance-for-ordinary-people-to-call-the-powerful-to-account/

In September 2003 I was subject to a stop and search by police while on my way to a demonstration against the DSEi arms fair in London’s Docklands. I was told I was being searched under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act and later Continue reading The Human Rights Framework Offers a Chance for Ordinary People to Call the Powerful to Account →

Temporality in social movement theory

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Gillan, K. (2018). Temporality in social movement theory: vectors and events in the neoliberal timescape. Social Movement Studies, (latest articles).
This article is available open access from: https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2018.1548965
Abstract: Existing theories of social movements have a weak conception of temporality, which is generally tied to truncated protest waves or else to micro-scale sequences of interaction. Neither approach enables an understanding of continuity and change in the content and form of social movements over longer periods. This article develops a new conceptual terminology intended to bring temporal sensitivity to our understanding of the interplay between movements and their socio-political environments. Vectors highlight evolving patterns of interaction that carry ideas and action orientations into a range of social settings over a period of decades. Examining the interplay of different vectors, and accounting also for the unfolding character of historic events, enables the apprehension of an overarching timescape within which movements move. This theoretical approach is illustrated with an examination of three significant periods of transnational contention associated with the Alter-Globalization, Anti-War, and Occupy movements. Analysis of vectors that shape discourses of conflict, organizational preferences, and practices of individual autonomy explain dynamics of continuity and change across different movements, each of which is shaped by a dynamic neoliberal timescape.

Infographic: SMS in review

Web Projects Archive,

SMS 2017 Review - infographic screen grabMy latest hacky hobby project relates to my editorial work at Social Movement Studies. I’ve been exploring other ways of presenting the excellent content we publish in the journal, and trying to give a sense of the over coherence of the journal’s development. My initial attempts in this direction are presented in an infographic reviewing SMS 2017 content. (Now updated for a review of 2018.) Lessons learned from this exercise:

  • The Scopus database is a good source for downloadable data. I found the API rather complex though (especially given licensing issues for different datasets), so haven’t ventured into making a more dynamic website for this.
  • The Google Maps javascript API really does make it rather straightforward to present custom markers on a map. I found it useful to borrow this Overlapping Marker Spidifier to deal with multiple markers on single locations.
  • Jason Davies’ word cloud generator does a marvellous job of layout, although I ended up recoding the resulting svg by hand to make it interactive.

Navigating the Technology-Media-Movements Complex

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Flesher Fominaya, Cristina and Kevin Gillan. 2017. ‘Navigating the Technology-Media-Movements Complex’. Social Movement Studies 16(4):383–402.
Abstract: In this article we develop the notion of the technology-media-movements complex (TMMC) as a field-definition statement for ongoing inquiry into the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in social and political movements. We consider the definitions and boundaries of the TMMC, arguing particularly for a historically rooted conception of technological development that allows better integration of the different intellectual traditions that are currently focused on the same set of empirical phenomena. We then delineate two recurrent debates in the literature highlighting their contributions to emerging knowledge. The first debate concerns the divide between scholars who privilege media technologies, and see them as driving forces of movement dynamics, and those who privilege media practices over affordances. The second debate broadly opposes theorists who believe in the emancipatory potential of ICTs and those who highlight the ways they are used to repress social movements and grassroots mobilization. By mapping positions in these debates to the TMMC we identify and provide direction to three broad research areas which demand further consideration: (i) questions of power and agency in social movements; (ii) the relationships between, on the one hand, social movements and technology and media as politics (i.e. cyberpolitics and technopolitics), and on the other, the quotidian and ubiquitous use of digital tools in a digital age; and (iii) the significance of digital divides that cut across and beyond social movements, particularly in the way such divisions may overlay existing power relations in movements. In conclusion, we delineate six challenges for profitable further research on the TMMC.
An open access version will be available once copyright allows, via University of Manchester.

2010+: The rejuvenation of new social movement theory?

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Review essay:

  • della Porta, Donatella. 2015. Social Movements in Times of Austerity: Bringing Capitalism Back into Protest Analysis. Cambridge: Polity.
  • Castells, Manuel. 2015. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Second Edition. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

The first half of this decade has seen a tremendous wave of protest. The universally recognised spark of the Arab Spring was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010. Since then we’ve seen the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, protests turn to civil wars in Syria and Libya, the uprisings of the indignadas of Spain and the Occupiers of Wall Street (and passim), the Umbrella Movement of Hong Kong, a range of new movements in Brazil, Chile and Mexico, and much else besides. If we understand this ‘movement of the streets and the squares’ as a coherent global wave of protest, what exactly does it signify? The two books under review offer interpretations of the most recent wave of protest that may help answer this most central question.

Open access version available at University of Manchester.

Original, definitive version: Gillan, Kevin. 2017. ‘2010+: The Rejuvenation of New Social Movement Theory?’ Organization 24(2):271–74.

Special Issue: Technology, Media and Social Movements.

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Published in 2017 as Social Movement Studies 16(4). Editors: Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Kevin Gillan.

Table of Contents:

You’re not digital natives, you’re settlers

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First posted at Medium.

Oh no — I’ve just come across the phrase ‘digital immigrant’ in opposition to ‘digital native’. The implication is that those born into the internet age are naturals at navigating its byways and cultural mores. I don’t think the term ‘digital immigrant’ is supposed to bring the foul right-wing political discourses of migration into play — but even if you  Continue reading You’re not digital natives, you’re settlers →

Reflections on ‘The Problem with Democracy’

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[NB Re-post. First published at movements@manchester.]

Parliamentary Affairs has just published an interesting public lecture by Matthew Flinders, along with responses by Jack Corbett and Ian Marsh. The lecture brings together a whole host of complaints that have been targeted at advanced liberal democracies in trying to understand nose-diving levels of trust in politicians and voter turnout among young citizens. It is a systematic and insightful piece that ultimately Continue reading Reflections on ‘The Problem with Democracy’ →

Occupy! A global movement

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Cover: Occupy! A Global MovementThis book is an urgent and compelling account of the Occupy movements: from the M15 movement in Spain, to the wave of Occupations flooding across cities in American, Europe and Australia, to the harsh reality of evictions as corporations and governments attempted to reassert exclusive control over public space. Across a vast range of international examples over twenty authors analyse, explain and helps us understand the movement. These movements were a novel and noisy intervention into the recent capitalist crisis in developed economies, developing an exceptionally broad identity through a call to arms addressed to ‘the 99%’, and emphasizing the importance of public space in the creation and maintenance of opposition. The novelties of these movements, along with their radical positioning and the urgency of their claims all demand analysis. This book investigates the crucial questions of how and why this form of action spread so rapidly and so widely, how the inclusive discourse of ‘the 99%’ matched up to the reality of the practice. It is vital to understand not just the choice of tactics and the vitality of protest camps in public spaces, but also how the myriad of challenges and problems were negotiated.

This book was first published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies. Full details and ebook purchase available via Routledge.

Cite: Pickerill, Jenny, John Krinsky, Graeme Hayes, Kevin Gillan, and Brian Doherty, eds. 2015. Occupy! A Global Movement. London: Routledge.