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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 503

Part of Session 141: Taking over the squares (Other abstracts in this session)

New movements, new linguistic practices

Authors: Veloso Larraz, David
Submitted by: Veloso Larraz, David (Univesidade de Coimbra, Spain)

In this paper we present some results of the research project “ALICE:   Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons: Leading Europe to a new way of sharing the world experiences”, financed by the European Research Council and coordinated by Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Specifically, we will comparatively analyze the discourses and practices of the new social movements that have emerged worldwide since 2010, considering the singularities and shared assumptions, both in the North as in the Global South, and the possibilities of dialogues and intercultural translations they offer to reactivate processes of social emancipation/regulation (Santos, 2003 and 2009). The discourses focus on the fundamental issues of social justice and democracy, understood as alternative way to make politics.

The cases studies of Madrid, Lisbon, Atenas, New York and London will show how the discourses and dynamics merge in the construction of a subaltern cosmopolitanism, based on diversity and expanded through shared imaginaries.

For this purpose, we will approach or the discursive construction of this cosmopolitanism from a sociological analysis discourses perspective (Conde 2010, Alonso 1998, Maingueneau 1984). This approach will deepen our understanding over the interrelations created in the use of languages, situated practices and the social context where they are produced, and their effects and intertextualities. Regarding the innovations that the emergence of this new linguistic practices represent, the camps and occupation of public squares will be further considered, since they have been the social spaces for the enunciation of multilinguistic practices. These practices represent a new symbolic appropriation to recreate politics and to develop new self-organizing models for direct democracy. In fact, the cases studied so far, show how their discourses and practices are referential to each other mutually feeding and how the power of languages are translated into constitutive practices. This is quite evident in the case of the new yorker square Liberty, where the demonstrators used the same speeches shouted in Madrid in their banners, images, digital productions, or used Tahir as symbol “From Tahir Square to Times Square”.

Finally, once the innovations and commonalties among the different case studies are examined, the aim of the paper is to reach a better understanding of the subjectivity of these new movements, from an approach that departs from linguistic practices to establish the differences with the cycle of collective action that began in the mid-nineties with the altergobalization movements, and to explore the key features of a emergent subaltern cosmopolitanism. The data used for this analysis is based on interviews with people engaged with the movements, activists ethnographies, transcripts of meetings and public documents that these movements have disseminated in the networks (research, interviews, workshops, etc.. ).