Nicole Doerr

Translating democracy: how activists in the European Social Forum practice multilingual deliberation

Linguistic barriers may pose problems for politicians trying to communicate delicate decisions to a European-wide public, as well as for citizens wishing to protest at the European level. In this article I present a counter-intuitive position on the language question, one that explores how grassroots activists in social movements use translation as a novel practice to debate political alternatives in the European Unions (EU) multilingual public sphere. In recent years, new cross-European protest movements have created the multilingual discursive democracy arena known as the European Social Forum (ESF). I compare deliberative practices in the multilingual ESF preparatory meetings with those in monolingual national Social Forum meetings in three Western European countries. My comparison shows that multilingualism does not reduce the inclusivity of democratic deliberation as compared to the national context. In the ESF, grassroots deliberators work using a novel practice of translation that has the potential to include marginalized groups. It is, however, a distinct kind of translation that activists use. Translation, compared to EU-official practices of multilingualism, affects a change in institutionalized habits and norms of deliberation. Addressing democratic theorists, my findings suggest that translation could be a way to think about difference not as a hindrance but as a resource for democracy in linguistically heterogeneous societies and public spaces, without presupposing a shared language or lingua franca , nor a national identity.

Toward a Visual Analysis of Social Movements, Conflict, and Political Mobilization

The news of recent mobilizations in Arab, European, and North-American countries quickly spread across the globe. Well before written reports analyzing the unfolding mobilizations, images of protests circulated widely through television channels, print newspapers, internet websites, and social media platforms. Pictures and videos of squares full of people protesting against their governments became the symbols of a new wave of contention that quickly spread from Tunisia to many other countries. Pictures and videos showing the gathering of people in Tahrir square (Egypt), Puerta del Sol (Spain), and Zuccotti Park (United States) quickly became vivid tools of “countervisuality” (Mirzoeff, 2011) that opposed the roaring grassroots political participation of hundreds of thousands people to the silent decisions taken in government and corporation buildings by small groups of politicians and managers. The presence, and relevance, of images in mobilizations of social movements is no novelty. Encounters with social movements have always been intrinsically tied to the visual sense. Activists articulate visual messages, their activities are represented in photos and video sequences, and they are ultimately rendered visible, or invisible, in the public sphere. Social movements produce and evoke images, either as a result of a planned, explicit, and strategic effort, or accidentally, in an unintended or undesired manner. At the same time, social movements are perceived by external actors and dispersed audiences via images which are produced both by themselves and others.

Memory and Culture in Social Movements

When telling alternative stories on the Internet and in street protest, activists publicize memories excluded from national history books and mainstream media audiences. At the same time, officials also publicize claims for apology and repair in official public commemorations created for reconciliation. How do social movements construct and use memory, and how does the politics of memory shape cultural meaning-making in movements? To begin answering this question, my contribution brings together a cultural sociology of social movements with an interdisciplinary analysis of memory drawing on psychoanalytical, visual, and historical approaches. Movement scholars who focused on narrative, discourse, framing, and performance show how activists actively construct and mobilize collective memory. We know much less, however, about interactions between multiple layers and forms of remembering stored in images, stories, or performances, or discursive forms. How do conflicting or contradictory memories about the past inside movement groups condition activists’ ability to speak, write, and even think about the future? While previous work conceived of memory in movements as a subcategory of narrative, discourse, and framing, my central point is to understand how memory itself structures these forms of meaning-making — as an independent and multidimensional category of cultural analysis.

The Imagery of Power Facing the Power of Imagery: Toward a Visual Analysis of Social Movements

An athletic body holds aloft a hammer in one hand, ready to strike the sword held in the other. A red circle frames this blue icon, surrounded by a biblical quotation in black lettering that reads “Swords into Ploughshares” (see figure 3.1). East Germans wore cloth patches bearing this symbol in the early 1980s as a call for peace between the Eastern and Western blocs.1 The patch was modeled on a statue by the decorated representative of Soviet Realism Yevgeny Vuchetich. The Soviet Union donated the statue to the United Nations in 1959. Warsaw Pact countries used the icon as a positive reference point in their apology for the Soviet world as a stronghold of world peace. However, when the patch was distributed throughout the Protestant Church during protests against the military training of East German students in the early 1980s, the government forbade wearing the symbol in order to prevent its “misuse.” In reaction, peace activists cut out the print and continued to wear the patch with a hole in the center, thereby highlighting the absence of the image.

How right-wing versus cosmopolitan political actors mobilize and translate images of immigrants in transnational contexts:

This article examines visual posters and symbols constructed and circulated transnationally by various political actors to mobilize contentious politics on the issues of immigration and citizenship. Following right-wing mobilizations focusing on the Syrian refugee crisis, immigration has become one of the most contentious political issues in Western Europe. Right-wing populist political parties have used provocative visual posters depicting immigrants or refugees as ‘criminal foreigners’ or a ‘threat to the nation’, in some countries and contexts conflating the image of the immigrant with that of the Islamist terrorist. This article explores the transnational dynamics of visual mobilization by comparing the translation of right-wing nationalist with left-wing, cosmopolitan visual campaigns on the issue of immigration in Western Europe. The author first traces the crosscultural translation and sharing of an anti-immigrant poster created by the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), a right-wing political party, inspiring different extremist as well as populist right-wing parties and grassroots activists in several other European countries. She then explores how left-libertarian social movements try to break racist stereotypes of immigrants. While right-wing political activists create a shared stereotypical image of immigrants as foes of an imaginary ethnonationalist citizenship, left-wing counter-images construct a more complex and nuanced imagery of citizenship and cultural diversity in Europe. The findings show the challenges of progressive activists’ attempts to translate cosmopolitan images of citizenship across different national and linguistic contexts in contrast to the right wing’s rapid and effective instrumentalizing and translating of denigrating images of minorities in different contexts.