Making Space for Protest: Creative Ways of Claiming and Exploring

The first year of the Covid-19 pandemic saw a convergence across global cities of large-scale, highly visible anti-state protests that received mainstream media attention and gathered swift momentum. Notable examples include the global iterations of the Black Lives Matter protests (re)triggered in 2020 by the murder of George Floyd by police; nationwide protests against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (2019–2020); the UK movements for Kill the Bill and feminist anti–police protests after Sarah Everard’s murder by a police officer (2020); Delhi’s Farmers Protest against corporatisation of agricultural markets (2020); anti-SARS protests in Nigerian cities against police violence (2020); and the ramping up of global environmental protests by Extinction Rebellion (since 2018).

These are just some of the recent protests embodied in visceral, spatially visible, and performative (Butler, 2011) ways that offer varied examples of how urban space is contested, (re)claimed, and embattled to enable a “politics of the streets” (Bayat, 2012). As the state and the courts are dictating the legality of protesting in public spaces globally, it becomes vital to understand an alternate means of occupying and reclaiming space in an age of “shrinking democracy” (Hou & Knierbein, 2017). Such times thus call for creative and contextual ways of staking claims over spaces and resisting ever-increasing spatial and technological surveillance, policing, and repression.

In this thematic issue we seek to mobilise narratives around intersectional rights to the city—as a space of assembly and protest—and infrastructural justice. We call for papers exploring ways of resisting, claiming, and staking urban space for protest against oppression and creative research methodologies of understanding such processes. Going beyond urban protests for urban space we seek to understand how the city itself can be mobilised as a platform for wider protests and solidarities.

References:

Bayat, A. (2012). Politics in the city‐inside‐out. City & Society, 24(2), 110–128.

Butler, J. (2011). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. Routledge.

Hou, J., & Knierbein, S. (2017). City unsilenced: Urban resistance and public space in the age of shrinking democracy. Routledge.

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