Funded, by Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, the Project Team includes Selen A. Ercan, Ricardo F. Mendonca and Umut Ozguc

Project Description

One particularly important event of the beginning of the 21st century has been undoubtedly the cycle of protests crossing frontiers throughout the globe. From Iceland to Hong Kong, and including Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Greece, the USA, Turkey and Brazil, the recent protest movements were widely noticed due to their size, their transnational dimension and organizational logic. This project aims to study these protest movements with a particular focus on the way they were organized and carried out in Turkey and Brazil in 2013. By drawing on various streams of contemporary democratic theory, the project will investigate: i) the deliberative capacity of these protests; ii) the interplay between conflict and consensus both in theory and practice ; iii) the role of social media and online engagement in the context of recent protests; iv) the symbolic disputes triggered by these protests and the discursive repertoires mobilized in protest performances; v) the type of collective and ‘connective’ action protests generate and their implications in terms of the constitution of political communities.