Selected pages from "The Protest and The Recuperation"

culture of rage and hope. The social theorist James Jasper has noted, “Tactics are rarely, if ever, neutral means about which protestors do not care. Tactics represent important routines, emotionally andmorally salient in these peoples’ lives.” 5 New performative aesthetics operate within the twin economic drivers—digital social technologies and experience culture— that have spawned a new formof protest as a resistance event. These civilian-generated events of limited duration are designed to disrupt the norms of public space by bodily display through amarch, a rally, a parade, blocking traffic on a highway, or creating human protective barriers when in conflict with law enforcement. The event spills into the personal spaces of bystanders and those on the fringes of the event such as shopkeepers. In the digital realm, bodies seeking justice generate content andmessaging for themediated infosphere, activating attention culture to look in its direction. The corporeality of street protest is amplified through the visual mechanisms of lens-basedmedia dominating the digital communicative field. Considering examples of the choreographies of bodies in activist interventions in the civic sphere and the incorporation of care andwell-being into demands centers corporeality in reimagining amore just world. In an age of digital dominance, the claiming of public space is also an act of resistance to the

5. James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 237.

22 The Lure of Protest

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