Contentious Branding. Occupy and Anonymous between the Connective and Collective

This conceptual paper wishes to contribute to the sociological debate on protest movements by developing the notion of ‘contentious branding’, as a reflection emerging from the digital exploration of two empirical cases that challenge social movement theory: Occupy and Anonymous. The empirical research has followed the Occupy and Anonymous hashtags around popular social media, letting their appropriation to delimit the boundaries of the research objects. Network analysis and computer-assisted content analysis techniques have been employed to trace and unfold these complex assemblages. Adopting branding perspective on contentious politics is aimed at highlighting the diverse and sometimes contradictory appropriations of the ‘semiotic repertoires’ of protest movements; this aspect, in the analyzed cases, is so evident and pervasive to problematize the application of current definitions of social movements to the traced ‘assemblages’. Contentious brands such as Occupy and Anonymous are thus understood as affective devices, capable to catalyse and refract diverse mobilizations. This calls for a recognition of the analytical autonomy of branding and assessing its relation with the current conceptual toolbox of social movement studies. Whereas the paper argues that the materiality of digital media is involved is re-mediating the dynamics and relevance of contentious branding, it opens the question of whether even traditional, pre-digital mobilizations could be re-thought in terms of ‘contentious brands’. A branding perspective on social movements, indeed, not only tries to fit these specific cases better: it intends to provide an epistemological and methodological device to sustain a non-essentialist understanding of social movements, between (or beyond?) their connective and collective dimensions.