Historical events often carry an air of uncertainty, like a fog that veils their boundaries. Questions arise about when the historical process leading to a coup d’état, or in the case examined in this book, an attempted coup, truly begins. How is it orchestrated? What delineates its scope? Who are the involved actors, and what fields of study and knowledge are essential for comprehending it?

This book delves into the attempted coup that transpired on January 8, 2023, in Brasilia, Brazil, following the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro and the inauguration of his successor, President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. On that day, thousands of extremist Bolsonaro supporters invaded, sacked, and vandalized federal government buildings in Brasília with the aim of inciting a military coup against the Lula da Silva government and reinstating Jair Bolsonaro as the president of Brazil.

The essays and artistic interventions in this collection aim to unravel the various dimensions of this pivotal event. They discuss the origins, occurrence, and aftermath of anti-democratic Bolsonarist mobilizations, with a specific focus on the communicative and symbolic aspects of this historical occurrence.

From examining historical aspects to exploring aesthetic meanings, communication strategies, and the dynamics of a collective unconscious, “The Planalto Riots: Making and Unmaking a Failed Coup in Brazil” provides a critical perspective on the intricate process of how an attempted coup is both constructed and dismantled.

This text is based on a conversation between members in the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, a film producer and a media and communication researcher about the production process of the documentary Chão (Landless). Chão documents MST’s processes of land occupation and the battles to gain rights to land in the state of Goiás between 2014 and 2018. MST’s mobilization practices since the emergence of the Movement in 1984 have been much informed by Paulo Freire’s emancipatory pedagogy. The Movement’s historically situated social action constructs knowledge about reality at the same time that it changes reality. The documentary is an example of participatory media production in which the filmmaker and the militants constructed a narrative together from their different perspectives. This participatory process is used here as a departure point to discuss the experiential dynamics of the conscientization process from the different perspectives of research, media production, and militancy.

In the first datafied pandemic, the production of interactive Covid-19 data maps was intensified by state institutions and corporate media. Maps have been used by states and citizens to understand the advance and retreat of the contagion and monitor vaccine rates. However, the visualisations being used are often based on non-comparable data types across countries, leading to visual misrepresentations. Many pandemic data visualisations have consequently had a negative impact on public debate, contributing to an infodemic of disinformation that has stigmatised marginalised groups and detracted from social justice objectives. Counter to such hegemonic mapping, counter-data maps, produced by marginalised groups, have revealed hidden inequalities, supporting calls for intersectional health justice. This article investigates the ways in which various intersectional global communities have appropriated data, produced counter-data maps, unveiled hidden social realities, and generated more authentic social meanings through emergent counter-data mapping imaginaries. We use a comparative multi-case study, based on a multi case-study of three Covid-19 data mapping projects, namely Data for Black Lives (US), Indigenous Emergency (Brazil), and CityLab maps (global). Our findings indicate that counter-data mapping imaginaries are deeply embedded in community-oriented notions of spatiality and relationality. Moreover, the cartographic process tends to reflect alternative imaginaries through four key dimensions of data mapping practice—objectives, uses, production, and ownership. We argue that counter-data mapping is the new frontier of digital media activism and community communication, as it extends the projects of data justice and community media activism, generating new practices in the activist repertoire of communicative action.

This book maps complex ethical dilemmas in social justice research practices in media and communication. Contributors critically analyse power dynamics that arise when building equitable research relations with media activists, social movements, and cultural producers, considering issues of access, control, affective labour, reciprocal critiques, and movement pedagogies. Authors probe the ethical challenges faced when horizontal relations inadvertently create conflicts leading to oppressive communication; when affective demands generate non-reciprocal relations of care; and when participant anonymity has to be balanced with self-expression and voice. Chapters explore engagements with digital technologies in developing research relations, covering new research practices from horizontal collectives to dialogical auto-ethnography; from community scholarship and pedagogies to decolonising research. The book asks researchers to consider the complexities of ethical practices today in socially engaged global research within the neoliberal university.  

This study analyses potential vulnerabilities conditioned by the pressure of an ethics of care placed on a researcher to stay empathetic with the subjects of study in action research with subcultures consisting of male-dominated groups, including how 24/7 access to social media and digital technologies augments possibilities for abuse. The author, and the subject of this chapter, is a female researcher who has conducted action research in a community of Russian hip-hop activists for a period of two years, during which she has played the double role of both project manager and researcher. The starting point of this project was to establish a horizontal organisational structure that would allow greater agency on the part of community members to influence both cultural actions and research processes. Applying auto-ethnography, the author addresses the following research questions: What are the potential implications of the use of a feminist ethics of care by a female researcher in relation to a male-dominated community when attempting to equalise power dynamics between the university and community? What kinds of problems might arise when the subjects of research overstep their agency to influence decision-making processes? How can media channels for internal communication be used (and abused) and what are the ethical implications for the researcher and the subjects of the research?

Photographers use Instagram to display and share images of ruined cultural landmarks with the broader public. In Russia, where thousands of historical villas and churches are found in a state of decay and are in danger of complete destruction, creating awareness about the state of such cultural heritage has important political and societal implications. In the process of documenting the decay of cultural landmarks, the photographers, I argue, come out as civic activists who inform the public about the state of affairs in the field of heritage protection as well as engage in the discussion about the role of the state, the church and the citizens in this practice. By drawing on a case study of three Instagram accounts @deadokey, @krokhino and @samasyava and using qualitative visual content analysis of Instagram imagery, I frame, explore and interpret visual posts made in order to raise awareness about decaying cultural landmarks.

The growing sector of heritage industry and creative uses of the past in Russia illustrate that, besides the undeniable existence of restorative nostalgia, there are other, more progressive forms of nostalgia that address social change and the protection of heritage sites. To analyse these forms of nostalgia, I visited the Third Cultural Forum of the Regions of Russia, which opened on September 22, 2017, at the Public Chamber of Russian Federation in Moscow, and analysed discussions that took place. I have chosen to focus on the panels Sviaz’ Pokoleniy (The Link between the Generations) and Delovoy Klub Nasledie i Ekonomika (Business Club Heritage and Economics), as they best represent distinct attitudes towards past and the use of nostalgic sentiments as an impetus for change, and conducted discourse analysis of the discussions that took place at these panels.

Social movement scholarship has increasingly shown how continuous mobilization depends on collective memory construction. This article sets out to study this formative activity in a changing media landscape. It asks how activists navigate the temporal nexus of collective memory mediation. The empirical focus is on Brazil's Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST), a well-established organization that since the early 1980s has communicated its collective memories on several media platforms. This article also demonstrates, through a corpus analysis of MST's internal newspaper, Jornal Sem Terra (1984-2014), and its Facebook page (2014-2019), how collective memories of rural violence serve various functions in these different media. The empirical study verifies the formative implication of rural violence for Brazil's landless movement, but also unveils notable differences between the newspaper and Facebook in this regard. Whereas Jornal Sem Terra employed a horizontal collective memory construction through contemporary documentation of ongoing and upcoming events, the Facebook posts primarily engaged in the vertical extraction of already established memories. In other words, the print media produced a narrative around collective memories of rural violence, and these memories were re-produced through digital media platforms. These empirical findings implicate that renewed methodologies are needed in future studies of social movements.

Este artigo discute como a participação cidadã na política através da ação comunicativa pode ser analisada a partir de uma apreciação crítica do conceito de capitalismo comunicativo. Não obstante sua contribuição para a análise crítica da participação política em ambientes digitais, o capitalismo comunicativo tem um caráter midiacêntrico e um viés etnocêntrico. Essas características limitam a aplicabilidade do conceito em análises das possibilidades de ação cidadã no contexto da comodificação da comunicação. Propõe-se, então, a cidadania comunicativa como um conceito que complementa as limitações do capitalismo comunicativo.

This chapter addresses dilemmas and strategies in dealing with ethical risks in ethnographic research. Based on the authors’ research processes on social movement media in Brazil, we compare dilemmas arising from relationships—as Europe-based Brazilian researchers—with activists in Brazil. The widespread uses of digital media in political demonstrations and protests have created epistemological and methodological challenges to research on communication for development and social change. A key challenge lies in the relationship between the researchers and the researched. As Brazilian researchers in European institutions, we become mediators of knowledge about Brazil and Latin America among research communities in Europe, experiencing ethical dilemmas regarding how we represent the groups about which we do research. We compare our experiences researching the communicative processes and media practices in the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement and the trajectories in media activism of low-income youth in favelas of Rio de Janeiro, focusing on four different areas: (a) overcoming suspicion and resistance to researchers among activists; (b) justifying research to activists; (c) balance between science and advocacy; and (d) collaboration and dialogue. We conclude that by engaging in activist research, we become mediators between two realms of knowledge and action: academia and social movements.

In the first pandemic of the datafied society, interactive COVID-19 data maps have entered citizen media diets, as governments and media communicate COVID-19 case counts through cartographic data visualizations. These are used by state and citizens alike to understand how contagion advances and retreats, assess mobility patterns, and monitor vaccination numbers. However, they are often based on non-comparable data types across countries, including varied reporting criteria and timeframes, leading to visual misrepresentations. Moreover, many pandemic data visualizations have had a negative impact on public debate and action, contributing to the infodemic of disinformation, stigmatizing marginalized groups, and detracting from social justice objectives. Counter to hegemonic maps, spatial representations developed through grassroots data appropriation have been redrawn by marginalized groups to reveal hidden inequalities and support calls for intersectional health justice. This paper investigates the counter-mapping imaginaries of community activists who use data to unveil realities and shape social meanings, focusing on three counter-mapping case studies–City Lab, Data4BlackLives, and Indigenous Emergency. We find that counter-mapping data imaginaries are deeply embedded in notions of spatiality and relationality across four dimensions of analysis: objectives, uses, production, and ownership. These findings help us to better understand how counter-data maps construct new social realities, through not just the maps themselves but also the processes of creating them, with the potential to support self-determined communities through cartographies of resistance.

In this presentation we propose that solidarity networks in urban settings as a communicAction process can be understood politically as forging symmetric relations between communicating subjects through the appropriation of technologies and emergence of social technologies. Urbanization processes throughout the 20th century led to fragmentation of communities – dissociation between living and work, zoning of cities (live, work, study, consumption), as well as diminishing public spaces and urban areas where the main focus is not consumption. Coupled with post-industrial urbanization, neoliberalism has gained dominance as a political system with both local and global effects. Lives mediated by consumption and the individual biography as a market endeavor intensify in hyper mediatized urban centers. Furthermore, increasing precarization that reduces the security of contemporary life leading, for many, to precarious existences lacking the stability to plan their lives. These processes happen in a context of space schizophrenia (Santos, 2021) in which places are both singular and global, while citizenship is practically exercised to a great extent at the local level because global actors are anti-citizen. Fragmentation and breaking of connections are particularly visible in times of crises, however, at these times we can also see the need for these connections and how people act to (re) build these connections. This reconstruction can be understood as a communicative process structured by the constructions of communities as shared existence (Paiva, 2005). With the dismantling of the welfare state and the safety net it provides, individuals are left alone to self organize and solidarity the emerges as a strategy of action with practical and political aims to disrupt isolationism. Local solidarity enacted through communication becomes thus an expression of citizenship. Sociotechnical dispositives for citizen centered urban management – Refugees Welcome Stockholm, Transport a Sister – Help Ukraine, community gardens, community kitchens, compliance activism. In authoritarian regime, certain kinds of urban solidarity regime might be the only option that leaves a fissure for political organization.

A América Latina tem vivenciado ações de resistência em que plataformas digitaisde interação social caracterizadas por fluxos acelerados de comunicação tiveramum papel determinante. Analisamos como essas plataformas digitais modificam aação coletiva e a mobilização social. Discutimos a mediação entre temporalidadese memória coletiva, as oportunidades políticas oferecidas pelas mídias digitais e aintersecção entre movimentos sociais e mídias digitais para entender os processos deconstrução de memória coletiva num tempo-espaço em que mudanças materiais emarquivos e artefatos históricos são constantes.

For Indigenous populations in Brazil, maps are instruments of (in)visibility. Official maps have erased Indigenous territories and communities while cartographic representations have been a tool of resistance for Indigenous activists. These dynamics intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic when the spread of the virus among indigenous populations was poorly reported and absent from hegemonic contagion maps. Negligence from the state threatened the survival of communities around the country who organized collectively to create their own cartographic representations of the pandemic through resistant appropriations of media and data. 

This paper draws on interviews with Indigenous leaders and media activists to discuss processes of data appropriation and resistant cartographies during the Covid 19 pandemic. Findings highlight the use of data and counter mapping strategies for self-representation and political action that must be understood through a non-media centric perspective, drawing from conceptualizations at the intersection between human geography, communication, and post-colonial theory.