Barriers, Shifts and Flows: Protests and Structures of the Communicative Spaces

Previous research on governance of communicative spaces (authors 2014, 2016) has shown that the relational space of interaction composed by the communication flows during protests is uneven. However, it is uneasy to proceed with the analysis of the complex integrated circuit formed by online communication all over the social media sometimes generated from mobile devices in situ, the physical spaces and places that channel the information flows, the media coverage of the conflicting voices of protestors, security bodies and other political actors involved in the event. Our contribution to this workshop is to grow a little further an already existing model designed for the understanding of this complexity of the communicative spaces that pays particular attention to the conditions that define it. To this point, research has provided tools and strategies to understand the role of the representations of place; but the same findings have also shown that they are not sufficient to critically approach these configurations. This is why in this case, we tackle the notion of structures of space that establish the conditions for the flow of information defining centres and peripheries, criteria of access and boundaries. We have already identified three subcategories that help the analysis of structures: barriers, shifts and flows; but it is time to test the reliability and the opportunity of this first insight. We intend to use and share data collected in multiple demonstrations across Europe, including the Indignados in Madrid in 2012, the Akademikerball demonstrations in Vienna in 2014 and the French demonstrations against the Loi du Travail in March-June 2016 in order to test the conceptual and empirical relevance of the analysis of the structures of space for the understanding of the governance of communicative spaces.