Visual activism in a digital era: Mobilisation through images in the Gezi Movement and the Anti-Coup Resistance

Abstract

This dissertation examines contesting practices of visual activism in the social movement environment of today that is largely shaped by digitality. Despite the substantial amount of research on the role of the Internet and social media in the emergence and trajectory of social movements, little is known about how mobilisations with incompatible political goals influence each other on digital platforms and in visual terms in particular. Addressing the ways in which online visuals mobilise people in contemporary social movements across political divides, this study shows that political imageries developed on different sides of a social conflict can be remarkably similar in form and content despite their diverging viewpoints. At the same time, the study argues that the possibilities of developing a perennial character of images online is a crucial factor in configuring the interaction between political divides and that leads to the rise of common and anonymous people as icons that mark social movements in digital societies.

Accordingly, the dissertation offers a comparative analysis of still images collected in relation to Turkey’s 2013 Gezi Movement and 2016 Anti-Coup Resistance, two popular mobilisations that had diverse political goals. In order to address both the images produced and disseminated online during the peak times of the mobilizations as well as the extended low-level activism that continued beyond these peaks, data collection covers a five-year period between 2013 and 2018. Photographs and illustrations found on social media platforms, blogs, and digital news portals are analysed through grounded visual analysis, an original model combining the qualitative approaches of grounded theory with established visual research methods. Following a sociological methodology but at the same time drawing from Art History, Cultural Studies, and Media and Communications, this dissertation also makes an interdisciplinary methodological contribution to the study of social movements.

Furthermore, in order to interpret the findings, the project combines framing, a much- used theoretical approach in social movements research borrowed from Goffman, with everybody, a concept that can be found in the work of de Certeau and, to some extent, in the growing literature after Deleuze and Guattari’s work on affect. The results of the study show that photographs establish similar visual frames, yet with certain differences, across political divides, while illustrations contribute to these frames in diverse ways. Some of the illustrations consolidate them, and others, particularly those that remediate photographs, promote certain figures that sharpen, deepen, and layer the initial frames, paving the way for the iconisation of images.

Ultimately, the study highlights the convergence and struggle over the symbolic dimension of social movements with incompatible political goals and situates the mobilising role of ordinary figures as the main focus of visual activism today.