Visions of protest : a media-historic perspective on images in social movements

Abstract

Social movements and the messages they wish to spread are essentially visual phenomena. Although this is both an obvious and momentous assertion, social movement research has been hesitant to integrate visual data. Until lately, most insights into the use of images in social movements originated from historical and media studies. This contribution presents the recent surge in literature devoted to the visual analysis of social movements. It focuses on activists' practices of image production and distribution under certain media-historic constellations. In this perspective, the current opportunities to create and spread images of dissent are contrasted with previous appropriations of technical possibilities from early print to electronic media. In times of mobile devices combined with social network sites, scholars of movement images are confronted with profound changes in the ways images contribute to the emergence and dynamics of social movements. Thus, we argue for a media-sensitive analysis of images in social movements.