A multimodal reading of public protests

Sarah Day, Mohamed Seedat, Josephine Cornell and Shahnaaz Suffla
Additional contact information
Sarah Day: Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa, South Africa; South African Medical Research Council – University of South Africa Violence, Injury and Peace Research Unit, South Africa
Mohamed Seedat: Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa, South Africa

Environment and Planning C, 2019, vol. 37, issue 6, 1005-1023

Abstract: Public protests in (un)democratic polities, reflective of discursive articulations of resistance and material expressions of struggle, seek to disrupt prevailing unjust societal, political and cultural practices. The insurrectionist purposes of protests are often in contravention of public order regimens, which seek to regulate enactments of public protests, minimise the disruptions inherent to protests and legitimise those defined as non-violent. This produces a non-violent–violent protest binary, which fails to account for the dynamic nature of protests. This study, critical of the non-violent–violent binary, assumed a multimodal analysis of unedited video footage of a selected authorised protest in the City of Cape Town, South Africa to understand the rapid discursive and kinaesthetic shifts that may occur within single protest events. The findings suggest that protests shift between moments of resistance and insurgency and moments of appeasement of official scripts. As such, protest enactments within a particular discursive space seem to be constitutive of resistance to power, insurgence and cooperation as well as actions defined either as legitimate or illegitimate by official discourse.

Keywords: Protest; non-violent–violent binary; South Africa; multimodal discourse analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2399654418818550 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:37:y:2019:i:6:p:1005-1023

DOI: 10.1177/2399654418818550

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().