Narratives of Insurrection, Conceptualisations of Rage: Accounts of the Riots of December 14 in the Self-Produced Media of the Italian Student Movement

Riots are often defining moments in the history of a movement. The conceptualization of an event as a riot or an insurrection can influence the career of a movement, strengthen some actors, and even determine the outcomes of a mobilization. How does this conceptualization happen? What actors are involved? How does the abundance of self-produced media change the role and the weight of the movement in this process? On December 14th 2011, a hundred thousand Italian students, after two months of mobilization against the new university law proposed by the government, demonstrated in Rome, during the parliamentary debate on the vote of confidence in Berlusconi''s cabinet. The demonstration was supposed to end with an assembly, but after the government won the vote, some demonstrators attacked the police guarding the “red zone” of the city centre. In a few minutes'' time, hundreds of people had become involved in the riot, actively supported by a significant part of the demonstrators. During the following weeks, every website and Facebook page linked to the movement gave its account of what happened on December 14th, framing the event from different points of view: the exaltation of the insurrection, the condemnation of the violence, the conceptualization of the rage, and so on. The analysis of these texts could be useful in understanding how the different narratives proposed by different actors compete in conceptualizing a violent event in order to shape the identity and the future of a social movement. The abundance and plurality of accounts are the results of the abundance and plurality of the media autonomously produced by the movement. These enable the researcher to directly observe the processes through which the collective memory of a contentious event is discussed, negotiated and socially produced.