activism in contemporary Spain. 1 My review of the intersections between the 15-M and the feminist movement in Spain, and the challenges that result, is built primarily from secondary literature on the Indignados camps. I was not directly involved in the 15-M encampments, though I visited the one established in Valencia a couple of times. As for the International Women’s Day Camp, I was more deeply involved as a participant, and I thus draw here on my observation data, together with informal interviews I carried out at the time. During 2021, I also conducted more
political circumstances, that no one had the first idea about how to enact. This vision of democracy, of participatory democracy, was something each of the camps around the world was putting into practice every day of their existence. Across the world, ordinary people, many with little political experience, created open, public spaces at the heart of their towns and cities; spaces where they experimented with new and innovative ways of making direct and participatory democracy a reality. All of the major movements that rose up in 2011 – Occupy, the 15M movement and the
-creating of sensible, meaningful content is consistent with a cybernetic position on self-organisation. Indeed, the importance of an ‘ontology of becoming’, as Pickering puts it, to second-order cybernetics (discussed in Chapter 3 ) is relevant here. Pink noise Let’s return to the discussion of noise, and to how certain forms of noise might be productive in the kind of conversational communication process described by Pask. Although I have often focused on the Occupy movement, and in particular Occupy Wall Street, in this book, the 15M movement in Spain is equally
identity and skills of the NUA and also cover the gap that the crises, and especially the neoliberal restructuring that has come with it, have left in public services and community development at the neighbourhood level. Both NUA and 15 May Mobilisations (hereafter referred to as 15M) had new features in relation to other more ‘traditional’ forms of collective action2 by urban social movements in the Mediterranean cites, which relate to Castells’ (1986) description of the right to the city as centering on issues of collective consumption (Castells, 1977) and
particular segments of society (whether class-based or pertaining to other social groups like immigrants, women and youth) suggests some forms of resistance were more systemic in nature (focused on structural transformation), and some were more opposed to one-off aspects of austerity reforms (like service deterioration or cuts to specific programmes). For large movements and organizations (like the 15-M Movement in Spain and the Maple Spring in Quebec, Canada), the perceived targets of resistance were often multiple. In all of the country cases presented here we
diluting it). These alliances often produce contradictions: feminists organising in neoliberal contexts face co-optation ( Eschle and Maiguashca, 2018 ), and even their involvement in radical democratic movements, such as 15M, implies internal differences and only partial successes in influencing the movements’ discourses and praxis ( Cruells and Ezquerra, 2015 ). These difficulties notwithstanding, coalition-building has become a common strategy for contemporary feminist movements, as they are increasingly embracing intersectional politics, both as an identity and as a
of interrelated groups united around events such as the World Social Forums and the Global Days of Action ( della Porta, 2007 ). The second wave is represented by the many ‘square protests’ that arose in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the 15M movement in Spain ( Prentoulis and Thomassen, 2013 ). These movements all followed a logic of occupation, in which the amalgamation of physical bodies in high-profile city squares was seen as an expression of resistance to the powers that be. These
and Anne Kumer ( Chapters 2 , 9 and 14 ), which together show how women, people of colour and queer and trans activists were sometimes subjected to physical and sexual violence, made to feel unsafe as well as unwelcome, in camp and online spaces. The chapters by Māhealani Ahia and Kahala Johnson on the Mauna Kea camp in Hawai’i, Chia-Ling Yang on the 3/18 Movement in Taiwan, Emma Gómez Nicolau on the Spanish 15-M movement, and Sara Motta et al on the camps of the Landless Movement (MST) in Brazil ( Chapters 3 , 5 , 7 , and 11 respectively), all reveal
different circumstance. In Quebec, for instance, the student strikes rooted their legitimacy in the decisions of student general assemblies. Yet the general assembly has also been the principle mode of organisational expression for events 180 K. Milburn and movement as diverse as the Arab Spring, the 15M and Occupy movements of 2011, the Brazilian Autumn and TurkishGezi park protests of 2013 and the Bosnian Spring of 2014.We could then see the assembly form as an expression of a common problematisation of representative democracy in the era of austerity.6 That
Bangladesh’ project , June. www.icccad.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Noapara-Dissemination-Brief-June-2020.pdf Lawrence , F. ( 2020 ) ‘UK hunger crisis: 1.5m people go whole day without food’. The Guardian , April 11. www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/11/uk-hunger-crisis-15m-people-go-whole-day-without-food Mackay , H. ( 2019 ) ‘Food sources and access strategies in Ugandan secondary cities: an intersectional analysis’. Environment and Urbanization , 31(2): 375–96 . Rahman , F. and Ruszczyk , H.A. ( 2020 ) ‘Coronavirus: how lockdown exposed food
