Upcoming Talks
Protest Walls: Co-authoring Contentious Repertoires
Date: December 6, 2024
Time: 6 am Hong Kong Time (Dec 7); 4 pm Central Time; 5 pm Eastern Time; 2 pm Pacific Time
Speaker: Yao-Tai Li, University of New South Wales
Discussant: Jonathan Pinckney, University of Texas, Dallas
Registration Required
Protest walls have played an important role in movement communication and mobilizing the public. We focus on contentious performances and the way diverse actors co-authored spaces into the protest walls that were seen in Hong Kong and other countries including Lebanon, Iraq, and Taiwan. We examine two research questions: 1) What, if any, social, political and material elements connect these contentious performances? Do these performances constitute what Charles Tilly would call a “modular performance”? 2) How can protest walls be understood to transcend their materiality in contentious politics and their meanings as sites of dissent across space, time, actors, targets, and issues (in Takeshi Wada’s term: modularity and transferability of contentious repertoires)?
Through a series of comparative case studies, we trace universal and localized aspects of the material and digital form of protest walls, political opportunity structures in place when they emerged, collaborative practices adopted by individuals to co-author a narrative of resistance in physical and discursive space, and the ritualized responses to protest walls including opposition. We argue that once created, protest walls become sites of dissent. They exist as a lexicon—a complex language of symbols and spatial practices. We connect social semiotics to the literature on symbolic objects and the /transferability of modular performances. We conclude that contentious performances through and in the protest walls, present a relationship between activists that does not exist in other types of performance such as petitions, marches, and occupations.
Speaker
Yao-Tai Li is a Senior Lecturer of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at University of New South Wales, Australia. His research interests include migration, race and ethnicity, identity politics, and social movements. His work has been published in several scholarly journals including British Journal of Sociology, International Affairs, The China Quarterly, World Development, Urban Studies, New Media and Society, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Discourse & Society, Social Movement Studies, Information, Communication & Society, Identities, among others. He is currently completing the book on protest walls with Katherine Whitworth.
Discussant
Jonathan Pinckney is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research focuses on nonviolent civil resistance, democratization, and peacebuilding. He was previously the Director of Applied Research on democratic backsliding for the Horizons Project, and a Senior Researcher on Nonviolent Action for the United States Institute of Peace. He is the author of the book “From Dissent to Democracy: The Promise and Peril of Civil Resistance Transitions,” published by Oxford University Press, as well as numerous articles in leading academic and popular publications. Dr. Pinckney received his PhD in 2018 from the University of Denver.
More to Come
To Be Announced.