Dissent

This book examines a wide range of dissident practices, from street protests to political poetry, in an attempt to demonstrate that they are becoming an increasingly important aspect of global politics. The author draws on several case studies, including an analysis of the events that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The theoretical discussions focus on how people influence the course of politics at a time when boundaries between domestic and international spheres are blurring.

A panel discussion featuring Professor Ian Loveland (City University), Catharine MacMillan (QMUL), Chris Monaghan (BPP), Neal Geach (University of Hertfordshire) and chaired by Professor Peter Crisp (BPP). The panellists explored the importance of dissent from both a domestic and a comparative perspective.  The panel discussion followed the publication of Dissenting Judgments in the Law (Wildy, Simmonds and Hill publishing: 2012), which was the first book dedicated to dissent within this jurisdiction.

""In an age of proliferating media and news sources, who has the power to define reality? When the dominant media declared the existence of WMDs in Iraq, did that make it a fact? Today, the "social web" (sometimes known as Web 2.0, groupware, or the participatory Web)—epitomized by blogs, viral videos, and YouTube—creates new pathways for truths to emerge and makes possible new tactics for media activism. In Digital Media and Democracy, leading scholars in media and communication studies, media activists, journalists, and artists explore the contradiction at the heart of the relationship between truth and power today: the fact that the radical democratization of knowledge and multiplication of sources and voices made possible by digital media coexists with the blatant falsification of information by political and corporate powers.

The book maps a new digital media landscape that features citizen journalism, The Daily Show, blogging, and alternative media. The contributors discuss broad questions of media and politics, offer nuanced analyses of change in journalism, and undertake detailed examinations of the use of Web-based media in shaping political and social movements. The chapters include not only essays by noted media scholars but also interviews with such journalists and media activists as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Media Matters host Robert McChesney, and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera.

Contributors and Interviewees:
Shaina Anand, Chris Atton, Megan Boler, Axel Bruns, Jodi Dean, Ron J. Deibert, Deepa Fernandes, Amy Goodman, Brian Holmes, Hassan Ibrahim, Geert Lovink, Nathalie Magnan, Robert McChesney, Graham Meikle, Susan D. Moeller, Alessandra Renzi, Ricardo Rosas, Andréa Schmidt, Trebor Scholz, D. Travers Scott, R. Sophie Statzel, Stephen Turpin.

About the Editor

Megan Boler is a Professor in Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and a graduate of the History of Consciouness Program, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her other books include Feeling Power: Emotions and Education and Democratic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, Disturbing Silence. Her essays are published in such journals as New Media and Society, Cultural Studies, and Women's Studies Quarterly.""

Cultural historians of the volatile early eighteenth century have described the period in various terms: a growing public sphere with new freedoms of expression markedly influencing social discourse; a new culture of social interaction, termed ‘polite society’; religious contention that was first redefined and then resolved within a convention of tolerance; or a politics of party that suffused social and intellectual as well as political debate. These various discourses are frequently mapped against the published works of the period but this paper examines how they played out in reality by exploring the social and intellectual universe of a young diarist. It demonstrates how multiple rhetorics could interact within an individual’s worldview to provide a personal stance which re-interpreted each discourse in turn.

This report is a reflection upon the experiences of taking part in the preparation and presentation of a multidisciplinary research proposal on the topic of dissent. It is a summative write-up on how my group (group C1) worked together to propose ‘The poppy uproar: a cross-cultural analysis of the poppy and its relationship with national identity’. In addition to providing a definition of key terms such as multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary; this report will also explain how the group understood, approached and analysed the topic of dissent through a multicultural and multidisciplinary perspective, as well as commenting on group synergies, dynamics and strengths and weaknesses to the approach.

While the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission sparked a heated debate about its potential impact on American elections, the text of the decision itself has been less studied. This paper seeks to examine the Citizens United decision from the perspective of rhetorical theory. That is, it treats the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions as examples of texts created by rhetors engaged in a debate over the proper application of precedents and their underlying reasoning, each attempting to make the most persuasive case that its reading of the facts of the case and the legal principles at stake is more accurate and appropriate than that of its interlocutors. The rhetorical element of judicial decisions is most apparent in dissenting opinions, where we find the continued assertion of legal readings and principles that do not carry the force of law, but persist as inventional resources for jurists in future cases. A rhetorical reading of Citizens United can thus provide an understanding of how dissenting opinions function in legal argument. But it can also illuminate the rhetorical dimension of majority opinions, offering answers as to how the text portrays its author, situation, and audience in the manner most likely to garner assent to its reading of the law. A more complete picture of legal reasoning thus emerges: one that accounts for the confluence of multiple, conflicting interpretations of the law, some of which may persist for many years as purely rhetorical doctrines before they gain the full force of binding precedent.

People are more resistant to criticisms of their group when those criticisms are made by an outgroup rather than an ingroup member, a phenomenon referred to as the intergroup sensitivity effect (ISE). The current study compared 4 competing models of how argument quality would moderate the ISE, with a view to establishing the complex interrelationships between source and message effects in group-directed criticism. Quality of the argument affected responses to ingroup critics, but not to outgroup critics. For outsiders who wish to promote positive change and reform in a group culture, this leads to a somewhat depressing conclusion: their message is likely to be rejected regardless of whether it is objectively “right”, well-considered, well-justified, or well-argued.

This article argues that the use of sexual infiltration by police and criminal collaborators represents a strategic deployment of surveillance technology by the state with the aim of creating Foucault’s “docile bodies” through the development of totalising omnipresence. The insertion of police into the private sphere of activists’ sexual relationships – a site presumed to be outside of state gaze – serves to not only disrupt the target communities but also to reverberate throughout social networks and create inactivity. By exposing informants from within one’s own “family”, the state is able to collect intelligence, spread insecurity and display totalising disciplinary power to the social movement under observation.

Legalistic discourse, lawyers and lawyering had minor representation during the 2011 summer protest events in Israel. In this paper we explore and analyze this phenomena by employing content analysis on various primary and secondary sources, among them structured personal interviews with leaders and major activists involved in the protest, flyers, video recordings made by demonstrators and songs written by them. Our findings show that participants cumulatively produced a pyramid-like structure of social power that is anchored in the enterprise of organizing the protest. Our findings explicate how the non-legalistic and even anti-legalistic discourse of the protest was formed, shaped and generated within the power relations of the protest, and how a pyramid of power produced a new poetics of protest that rejected the traditional poetics of state law. The power relations that generated the discourse regarding state law were embedded in socioeconomic stratification along the divide of center and periphery in Israel.

The US national response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks accelerated the adoption and refinement of a new repertoire of protest policing we call ‘strategic incapacitation’ now employed by law enforcement agencies nationwide to police protest demonstrations. The occupation movement which formally began 17 September 2011 was the most significant social movement to utilise transgressive protest tactics in the United States in the last 40 years and posed a substantial challenge to law enforcement agencies. This research seeks to better understand the implementation of strategic incapacitation tactics through a detailed analysis of the policing of the first 2 months of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests in New York City. Original data for this study are derived from 2-week-long field observations made in New York City during the first and second month anniversaries of the OWS occupation in Zuccotti Park. These are supplemented by activist interviews, activist accounts posted on OWS websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds as well as news reports, official police documents, press releases and interviews with legal observers.