Media Practices and Protest Politics: How Precarious Workers Mobilise [1 ed.] 9781409456469, 1409456463

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Media Practices and Protest Politics How Precarious Workers Mobilise

to Carlo, who struggled till the very end, and to Verena and Andrea, my fellow fighters

ALICE MATTONI University of Pittsburgh, USA

ASHGATE

C Alice Mattoni 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Contents

Alice Mattoni has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Wey Court East Union Road Farnham Surrey, GU9 7PT England

List of Figures List of Tables List ofAbbreviations Preface and Acknowledgements

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington VT 05401-4405

Introduction

USA

www.ashgate.com

The Discursive Context and Contentious Field of Precarity in Italy

23

The Construction of Precarious Subjects in Mobilisations Against Precarity

41

4

Reflections in the Mirror: Media Knowledge Practices

65

5

Surfing Media Diversity: Relational Media Practices

91

6

The Construction of Public Identities: Media Representations of Protest

125

Conclusions: The Circuit of Grassroots Political Communication

155

3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mattoni, Alice, 1978Media practices and protest politics : how precarious workers mobilise / by Alice Mattoni. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-2678-3 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-2679-0 (ebook) 1. Political participation--Italy. 2. Social movements--Italy. 3. Communication in politics--Italy. I. Title. JN5593.M37 2012

7

Methodological Appendix References Index

322.40945--dc23

ISBN: 9781409426783(hbk)

2011052191

ISBN: 9781409426790 (ebk) MIX Paper from

w.fs rg FSC®C018575

11

2

302.2'3'08623-dc23

4IFSC 1 -~responsible sources

Theoretical Reflections on the Study of Grassroots Political Communication

1

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Mattoni, Alice. Media practices and protest politics : how precarious workers mobilise. 1. Precarious employment--Political aspects. 2. Labor movement. 3. Mass media--Social aspects. 4. Mass media-Political aspects. 5. Protest movements in mass media. 6. Communication in industrial relations. I. Title

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, UK.

up,

1

165 175 191

List of Figures

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6

Pp,

Media coverage of mobilisations against precarity Media coverage of the Euro Mayday Parade Alternative media coverage of mobilisations against precarity Timing of mainstream media coverage Timing of radical left-wing media coverage Timing of alternative media coverage

127 128 129 131 131 132

List of Tables

1.1

The twofold cleavage in studies of social movements and media

14

2.1

Political actors in the contentious field of precarity

31

A.1

Social movement generated documents retrieved for each case study Age of interviewees Political affiliations of interviewees Interviewees divided according to type of mobilisation Type of occupation of the interviewees at the moment of the interview Type of contract of the interviewees according to the labour market sector at the moment of the interview

A.2 A.3 A.4 A.5 A.6

~~ÚI

166 170 170 171 171 171

List of Abbreviations

Ali

AIP

Associazione Italiana Politiche Industriali

CGIL CISL COBAS CPE CRUI CUB

Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori Confederazione dei Comitati di Base Contrat Première Embauche Conferenza dei Rettori delle Università Italiane Confederazione Unitaria di Base

ESF EU

European Social Forum European Union

FI FIOM FNSI

Forza Italia Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici Federazione Nazionale Stampa Italiana

GAD GAP GC

Grande Alleanza Democratica Grande Alleanza Precaria Giovani Comunisti

IMC

Independent Media Centre

NIDIL

Nuove Identità del Lavoro

PDS PIMP PRC

Partito Democratico della Sinistra Phone Indymedia Patch Partito della Rifondazione Comunista

RA RdB RNRP

Rete per l'Autoformazione Rappresentanze Sindacali di Base Rete Nazionale dei Ricercatori Precari

SALC SdL SEL SinCobas SULT

Sindacato Autonomo Lavoratori Consolari Sindacato dei Lavoratori Intercategoriale Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà Sindacato Intercategoriale dei Comitati di Base Sindacato Unitario dei Lavoratori dei Trasporti

xii

Media Practices and Protest Politics

UDU UIL USB

Unione degli Universitari Unione Italiana del Lavoro Unione Sindacale di Base

WOMBLES

White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggles World Trade Organisation

WTO

Preface and Acknowledgements

I started to think about this book many years ago. It was a sunny June in 2003. 1 had just graduated from the University of Padua, in Communication Sciences, and I was spending the beginning of the summer relaxing with my friends, most of whom lived, like me, in public student houses. One student house, in particular, was at the centre of my social life at the time. It was named Monte Cengio. Managed by a regional public body, it hosted several flats, accommodating about 11 students each. One day in June about 22 students living in two of the Monte Cengio flats received a formal letter ordering them to leave the flats within a few days. The reason was the organisation of a party a couple of months before. The party, involving several university students, including myself, had been quite fun. And also a little bit noisy. Some neighbours complained that night. For this reason, the 22 students identified as the party organisers had to leave the flats. Most of them were close friends of mine. They were desperate: it was the beginning of the exam session and they had no money to rent a flat. They also considered the measure profoundly unjust. We began to protest. With the support of the political science university collective, we occupied the flats and organised several other protests linking this episode of injustice with the broad problem of university student housing. In doing so, we attracted the attention of local journalists who became a rather stable presence during the occupation. I remember we read the news about the protests we organised. And we judged the work of journalists. Some were good at reporting. Others simply seemed not to understand what was going on in the university student house. Two were extremely supportive. They once brought some pastries to one of the two flats at dinner time. We also made several flyers to be distributed amongst other students because we needed to involve as many people as possible in order to be heard. It was during those days of protests that the idea of investigating how activists communicate during mobilisations began to take form in my mind. From the very beginning, my research and writing enterprise was of a collective nature. Not only because it sprang from student mobilisations, but also because several friends and colleagues participated emotionally and intellectually in the writing process. This book is full of the voices and narratives of activists and journalists. I am especially grateful to all those activists who shared their narratives, memories, impressions and documents about mobilisations against precarity with me. Without them, this book could never have existed. During the writing of this book, I had the pleasure of meeting a number of colleagues who provided me with stimulating critiques, academic suggestions and sharp comments about my work. I wish to thank, in particular, Massimiliano

I

xv

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Preface and Acknowledgements

Andretta, Bianca Beccalli, Kathleen Blee, Matteo Cemison, Nick Couldry, Donatella delta Porta, Alberta Giorgi, William Gamson, Jeff Goodwin, Anastasia Kavada, John Markoff, Amy McDowell, Lorenzo Mosca, Charlotte Ryan, Suzanne Staggenborg, Emiliano Treré, Ilaria Vanni, Markos Vogiatzoglou, Peter Wagner and Annika Zorn. The colleagues who tools part in the Writing Group Seminar organised by Postdoctoral Fellows of the School of Arts and Science at the University of Pittsburgh were indeed crucial in the final stages of this book. There have been several colleagues with whom I shared research and publication projects and from whom I learnt much over the past years: Bart Caminaerts, Loris Caruso, Hae-Lin Choi, Nicole Doerr, Omid Firouzi-Tabar, Alberta Giorgi, Patrick McCurdy, Simon Teune, Caterina Peroni and Gianni Piazza, and all the collaborators of `Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements', amongst whom Laurence Cox and Cristina Flesher Fominaya who have always given me exceptional academic advice and support. The European University Institute and the University of Pittsburgh also formed the backdrop for meeting colleagues and friends that rendered my days in the academic environment happier and more agreeable, even when I did not feel so. Kelsy Burke, Elena Del Giorgio, Mayo Fuster, Alexandra Gatto, Igor Guardiancich, Yolanda Hernandez, David Kim, Joel McKim, Arnout Mertens, Mathias Moschel, Annalisa Paese, Louisa Parks, Martina Salvante, Simon Toubeau and Frans Weiser. Thanks to all of you for the support, the chats and the academic exchanges, and especially to Michele Grigolo and Daniela Piccio: you were crucial many times during the writing of this book. I met many people in Florence over the years who reminded me that a world outside academia also exists. I thank Federico and Andrea who introduced me to Florentine underground nightlife. Old and present flat-mates, Francesca, Mara, Beppe, Andrea, Giglio, Sandra and Marco, with whom I shared many joyful dinners, and all the other friends that rendered my life in Florence more pleasant: Camilla, Fabio, Francesca, Bryan, Francesca, David, Irene, Simone, Giulia and Sergio. I owe more than they can imagine to a bunch of friends who transformed the years I spent in Padua as an undergraduate student into my personal university of life, and they continued to support me throughout the years. I especially thank Alessandra and Carla. No words can express the joy I feel when I think that you are still part of my life so many years after our first spritz together. And DJ Daltanius: countless times I have relied on you and you were there. And finally Francesca, Vanessa, Luca, Davide, Simone, Fabio, Stefano, Francesco, Mauro, Luca and Claudia: I learnt a lot from you all and I will never forget the (several) times you gave me a hand and offered me a smile exactly when I needed it. I thank, all my supportive relatives. In particular, I thank my mother Verena, my brother Andrea and, also, my father Carlo who passed away while I was completing this book. You always encouraged me in so many ways. You taught me to keep asking questions even when it seemed that all the answers had already been given. Your drawings, graphics, pictures and artwork, are always around me

so that I remember how many ways there are to depict the world out there. Thank you for this and for your unlimited love. A final word goes to Domenico. I thank you for sharing your life with me and for continuing to choose to do so.

xiv

Introduction

On Tuesday, 14 June 2011 the Italian Minister of Public Administration and Innovation, Renato Brunetta, gave the closing keynote speech at the `Young Innovators' convention organised in the framework of the national day of innovation. As soon as his intervention ended, a young woman from the audience asked to pose a question to the Italian Minister. At first he refused, explaining that he had another public appointment. But then he decided to listen to the question and invited the young woman to move closer to the stage. The young woman approached the dais and the Italian Minister asked her to introduce herself. She began to speak into the microphone, saying, `I belong to the Network of Precarious Workers in the Public Administration.' The Italian Minister interrupted her, `Thank you, thank you. And goodbye,' he said, leaving the stage. He then added, `This is the worst of Italy'. The situation became tense. Other precarious workers who had accompanied the young woman began to shout at the Minister. They asked to be listened to. They said that precarious workers are the real innovative force in the Italian public administration. They followed the Italian Minister outside the convention centre, continuing to shout at him. Some said, `Shame on you'. Others attempted to stop the car the Italian Minister was trying to leave in. All this was filmed and the day after was posted on YouTube and on the websites of major mainstream newspapers. The words the Italian Minister employed with reference to the young woman, a precarious worker, circulated widely. Reactions were immediate and massive. Thousands of precarious workers began to post comments online. The Italian Minister answered with his own video on YouTube, in which he reaffirmed his opinion of precarious workers as `the worst of Italy'. Online comments continued. In particular, posters targeted the public page of the Italian Minister on Facebook. While the posts published in the weeks before this episode ranged from 2 to 37, the day after the infamous declaration of the Italian Minister, the last published post received approximately 12,000 comments in less than 24 hours. Most were by precarious workers who criticised the Italian Minister and demanded his immediate resignation. Precarious workers from all over Italy reaffirmed their dignity and expressed their anger, refusing to be labelled as `the worst of Italy'. In fact, they claimed to be `the best of Italy'. The main character in this story is not an awkward Italian Minister who refused to answer questions from precarious workers during a public convention. The leading figure is a social subject that frequently appears in the public discourses of contemporary Italy; that is the `precarious worker': a worker with a shortterm contract, either full-time or part-time, who experiences constant uncertainty with regard to work, accompanied with some form of exclusion from the welfare

10

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Introduction

state. Again, the focal point in this story is not the YouTube video that the Italian Minister posted online replying to precarious workers, but the precarious workers' ability to interact with media channels in order to refuse and subvert the idea that they were `the worst of Italy'. Their capacity to act at the symbolic level in order to create discourses, meanings and interpretations that underlined the agency of precarious workers in defining their own experience of precarity. This ability to react, however, did not come from nowhere. Its origins can be traced back to the beginning of the 2000s when precarious workers began to mobilise collectively. Ten years ago, indeed, things were dramatically different in Italy. Precarious workers were almost absent from public discourses and the political scene. In that context, a number of social movement groups began to mobilise at the local, national and transnational levels to improve their working and living conditions, but also to gain visibility and recognition at the symbolic level. Independent from those institutional actors usually devoted to labour issues, including left-wing political parties and trade union confederations, these mobilisations were the result of bottom-up organisational patterns in the labour realm driven by precarious workers who acted collectively, mainly through noninstitutional political channels and informal political participation. The result was a collective effort that led to the discursive construction of `precarious workers' through the use of diverse channels of communication and mediation: from the organisation of contentious performances in the streets to the creation of infoiniational websites on the internet. Today, although precarious workers still struggle to improve their working and living conditions, they have at least acquired a stable position in the symbolic realm of political imagery. And they play a significant role among Italian left-wing social movements. In this book I tell the story of how precarious workers that mobilised in Italy between 2001 and 2006 interacted with a wide range of media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals in order to define precarious workers not as mere victims, but as a political subject able to formulate claims and demands outside institutional political channels.

as precarious workers at the time they were interviewed. Most were experienced activists that had participated in previous cycles of struggle, either generally related to the labour realm or to protests against corporate globalisation. Only a minority were experiencing activism for the first time, and this was due to their young age. Further details about the interviewees can be found in the methodological appendix, together with the presentation of the research strategy, the materials collected and the analytical approach. The five mobilisations are analysed further in the following chapters and presented concisely in the remaining part of this section.

2

The Euro Mayday Parade Originally, the parade was a local protest event in Italy. It occurred for the first time in Milan on 1 May 2001 and was named the Mayday Parade. Three social movement groups initiated it: a group of self-organised precarious workers, the Chainworkers Crew; activists belonging to the Deposito Bulk social centre; and the local section of the Confederazione Unitaria di Base (CUB), a radical trade union.' These three social movement groups established linkages with other political and social actors at the local level. As a result, in 2002 there was enough of a shift from the local to the regional level, and in 2003 the establishment of an embryonic national network: national preparatory meetings and a common mailing list to plan the parade were established. Various political and social actors from a number of Italian cities participated in the parade's organisation and joined the Milanese on 1 st of May. In 2004, the parade was sustained by a more structured, though still fluid, national social movement network, and was joined by the (ex) Disobbedienti network belonging to the post-autonomous radical left-wing tradition, as well as by more institutionalised national political actors such as Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici (FIOM), a branch of the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) trade union and Giovani Comunisti (GC), the youth section of the radical left-wing political party Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC).2 The involvement of more and more social movement groups led to the parade's exponential growth. According to the organisers, protest participants in Milan, who numbered about 5,000 in 2001, had reached 100,000 six years later in 2006.3 In 2004 the parade changed its name to Euro Mayday Parade. Spanish social movement groups organised a parade in Barcelona, while smaller protest events also occurred in Dublin, Helsinki and Palermo. Furthermore, in 2004 a transnational meeting of European social movement groups against precarity took place during the `Beyond the ESF' forum, a counter-European Social Forum organised at

Five Mobilisations Against Precarity The research presented in the following chapters forms a qualitative study in which I analysed interactions between social movement groups and a wide range of media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals. The fieldwork revolved around five mobilisations that took place between 2001 and 2006 in Italy. For each mobilisation I collected: semi-structured interviews with activists lasting from 45 minutes to two hours; social movement materials and artefacts created in the framework of the protest event, such as leaflets and calls for action; and mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media texts about the protest event. The activists that I interviewed were involved in the organisation of protest events during mobilisations. With a few exceptions, they all defined themselves

1 For a brief introduction to rank-and-file trade unions and social centres in Italy, see Chapter 2. 2 For a brief introduction to trade unions confederations and left-wing political parties in Italy, see Chapter 2. 3 Source: www.chainworkers.org and Euromayday mailing list at www.euromaday.org

I~~~~

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Introduction

Middlesex University by the White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggles (WOMBLES). From that year onwards, a transnational social movement network sustained the protest campaign. In the years that followed, there was a proliferation of preparatory meetings and assemblies, both national and transnational: in 2005 the Euro Mayday Parade tools place in 19 European cities, rising to 22 in 2006.4 The transnational social movement network also widened to include other activist groups based in non-European countries, for example in Tokyo, Japan in 2008. However, some activists and scholars observed that the Euro Mayday Parade `had entered crisis by 2006' (Neilson and Rossiter 2008: 53), with the parade in Milan progressively coming to resemble a rave party rather than a day of struggle, and the transnational preparatory meetings becoming increasingly rare. That said, social movement groups sustaining the Italian parade promoted a more politically oriented event in 2011, named again Mayday Parade for the first time since 2004.

Besides participating in the national demonstration, it organised two direct actions before and during the demonstration, one in a shopping mall and the other in a bookshop. The two direct actions involved thousands of activists and were considered successful by their organisers in terms of participation and symbolic relevance. In the days after the demonstration, however, a judicial inquiry into the two direct actions was opened, and a number of activists were identified as responsible for what the mainstream media labelled a repetition of the violent `proletarian expropriations' of the 1970s. The demonstration in Rome was one of the last occasions that activist groups organised a San Precario appearance.

4

The Reddito per Tutt* DirectActions

In 2004 the Chainworkers Crew invented the icon of San Precario. It appeared for the first time on 29 February 2004, in a supermarket named the Co-op in a peripheral neighbourhood of Milan. Activists dressed up as priests, monks and nuns, intoned the San Precario prayer and distributed small saint cards to customers whilst bearing the statue of the saint in a procession. The unusual procession was a direct action against precarity (Reload Video Crew 2004). In the following months, similar direct actions were organised in Padua, Bologna, Venice, Rome, Naples, other Italian cities and, again, in Milan. The biggest took place immediately before and during a national demonstration in Rome on 6 November 2004. Rank-and-file trade unions, namely the Confederazione dei Comitati di Base (COBAS) and the CUB, both of whom also called for a general strike against high living costs, organised this demonstration to claim `Redditto per Tutt*', that is, `income for all'. In this context, a social movement network of precarious workers, university students and social centres, already mobilised around the theme of precarity, decided to join the call for action. The resulting social movement network named itself the Grande Alleanza Precaria (GAP).' 4 More precisely, in 2005 parades occurred in: Helsinki, Barcelona, Hamburg, Liege, Ljublijana, Seville, Milan, Copenhagen, Maribor, Paris, Amsterdam, L'Aquila, Marseille, Vienna, London, Stockholm, Naples and Palermo. In 2006, parades took place in: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Helsinki, L'Aquila, Lyon, Liege, Limoges, London, Maribor, Marseille, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Paris, Seville, Stockholm, Turin, Tornio and Vienna. 5 The GAP, standing for Grande Alleanza Precaria, is a subtle and ironic reference to the political alliance Grande Alleanza Democratica (GAD) formed in 2004. The GAD included several political parties going from the centre-left to the radical-left. At the beginning of 2005, the GAD became a more stable political coalition named the Unione.

5

Demonstration Against the Ddl Moratti

The demonstration against the Ddl Moratti was part of a two year protest campaign against the Dal Moratti, the university reform proposed by Letizia Moratti, the Minister for Education and Universities at the time.6 From the very beginning, a large network of social movement groups struggled against the Ddl Moratti in both 2004 and 2005. This legislative proposal intervened in an entire labour market sector, namely the public education system. A number of mobilisations, therefore, involved elementary schools, high schools and universities. With regard to the latter, in 2005 there were three main social actors struggling against the Ddl Moratti: chancellors and professors, who criticised the reform through their representative body, the national committee of the rectors of all Italian universities, named Conferenza dei Rettori delle Università Italiane (CRUI); PhD students and researchers, who decided to block lessons and examinations in order to make their claims visible to the Minister; and university students, often organised in political collectives who occupied faculties all over Italy, organising discussion groups about and demonstrations against the reform. These struggles culminated during the autumn of 2005 in Rome, where La Sapienza University, one of the biggest in Europe, was occupied for about three weeks. A national demonstration against the Ddl Moratti then took place on 25 October, when about 100,000 protesters symbolically besieged the Italian parliament where the public education reform was to be discussed and eventually passed. The promoters of the national demonstration were not institutionalised political actors in a strict sense, with the exception ofthe GC. However, the two year period of mobilisation against the Ddl Moratti had contributed to the emergence 6 The Italian university system revolves mainly around public universities. According to the Ministry of Education, University and Research there were 67 public universities and 28 private universities in Italy at that time. For this reason the Ddl Moratti affected a great number of professors, researchers, students and administrative staff. The Ddl Moratti was a law aiming to reform the recruitment system for professors and researchers in Italian universities. One of the most criticized aspects of the law was the abolition of open-ended contracts for researchers.

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Introduction

of new political actors, such as the national network of precarious researchers Rete Nazionale dei Ricercatori Precari (RNRP), and the reinforcement of linkages among pre-existing university student collectives.

employs thousands of precarious workers in Rome.' The Precari Atesia collective of precarious workers was established in 2005 by a group of call centre operators who wanted to improve their working conditions and fight against the unjust application of short-term contracts, and who did not consider themselves to be adequately represented by traditional trade unions. Their requests were all linked to their specific workplace: the Precari Atesia collective demanded open-ended contracts for both full-time and part-time workers instead of short-term contracts, an increase in salaries and the application of the law on industrial safety. The Precari Atesia collective organised assemblies, strikes and demonstrations in order to raise these issues. In 2005 there were four important protest events. On 12 May and 1 June 2005, there were 24 hour strikes accompanied by a picket in front of the workplace in order to contact as many precarious workers as possible, since operators worked in shifts and it was difficult to meet all together. On 22 July 2005 a spontaneous assembly took place after the announcement that 800 precarious workers were to be dismissed. As a direct result of this assembly, four activists involved in the Precari Atesia collective were fired immediately: they were blamed for obstructing colleagues' working activities and for organising an unauthorised assembly. The reaction to this sudden firing was the organisation of another picket to the bitter end and numerous protest actions, supported by the radical trade union, COBAS. The goal was not only the general struggle against short-term contracts, but also the reinstatement of the four sacked workers. Finally, on 10 September 2005 there was another strike by the Precari Atesia collective, supported by COBAS and other precarious workers groups from the COS group — the new owner of the Atesia (now named Almaviva) call centre company.

6

The Serpica Naro Fashion Show The Serpica Naro fashion show was a media hoax. The name Serpica Naro, an anagram of San Precario, referred to a false Anglo-Japanese fashion designer that the Chainworkers Crew invented as the face for a real fashion show during the Milan fashion week at the end of February 2005. Activists succeeded in enrolling the false fashion stylist in the Milan Fashion Week, one of the most important public and commercial events in the Italian economic capital. But the Serpica Naro fashion show was also a collective action. Activists mobilised precarious workers employed in the fashion sector to speak about precarity and to present a self-produced fashion collection at the Mecca of the global fashion system, namely the Milan Fashion Week. The preparation of the fashion show tools place in four stages. The first goal was to achieve the subscription of Serpica Naro in the list of young fashion stylists at the Camera della Moda, the Italian institution that controls the Milan Fashion Week. Once the Chainworkers Crew had succeeded in this, the second step began. The social movement group invented a press office, managed by the false journalist, Nadja Fortuna, who maintained contacts with the Camera della Moda and the press. Activists also produced false press releases, an official Serpica Naro website and a false website specialising in fashion news which spoke extensively about the young Anglo-Japanese fashion designer. In the meanwhile, the Chainworkers Crew invented a dispute between Serpica Naro and the activists themselves, who publicly blamed the fashion stylist for exploiting precarious workers in order to produce her clothing. The social movement group also organised demonstrations against two Italian fashion stylists, Laura Biagiotti and Prada, ostensibly for similar reasons: Finally, there was the creation of the fashion show itself, which was to appear as credible as possible. Independent, underground fashion designers created their own collections. Activists also invented a series of ad hoc, ironic fashion lines designed to solve the daily problems of women with short-term contracts. The last stage was the Serpica Naro fashion show itself, when activists revealed the hoax and framed it as a political action against precarity.

7

Outline of the Book The five mobilisations outlined above are significant examples of struggles in which precarious workers organised to raise their voices collectively in society. But they also disclose mediation processes sustaining the political communication of non-institutional actors situated at the margins of the labour market. In doing so, these mobilisations raise some important questions. First, what does it mean to gain public and political visibility in contemporary societies? In the case of Italian mobilisations against precarity, visibility was not confined to mainstream media such as national newspapers and private television channels. Precarious workers engaged in communication and mediation processes that employed and combined a number of media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals. Visibility, therefore, passed through strategies and tactics that involved the media environment at large. In Chapter 1 I provide a theoretical framework to understand patterns of visibility in mobilisations against precarity

The Precari Atesia Strikes The last mobilisation is formed by a series of protest events linked to a specific workplace, where precarious workers aimed to improve their working conditions. The workplace was the Atesia call centre, one of the biggest in Europe, which

7 Atesia belongs to the company Almaviva, which specialises in customer care activities, amongst which is the management of call centres for a variety of firms.

/P

8

Media Practices and Protest Politics

and, more generally, in grassroots political communication. After explaining why grassroots political communication is relevant today, I sustain that the literature examining mediation processes in social movements has not so far grasped how social movement actors employ multiple channels of mediation during the same mobilisation. Finally, I conceptualise the `media environment' and `activist media practices' as two valuable analytical tools to understand how grassroots political communication developed during mobilisations against precarity. Second, what are the diverse sites where social movement actors seek visibility in contemporary societies? Precarious workers struggling against precarity certainly developed a diverse range of mediation processes during mobilisations. But they also focused on political organisation as a crucial means to construct precarity as a visible social problem for other precarious workers. An important site of visibility was, therefore, the time and space of protest. As I show in Chapter 2, mobilisations against precarity, indeed, took place in a discursive context where many institutional political actors framed flexibility in a fairly positive manner. Precarity, as a concept indicating the negative outcomes of flexibility, was not a common term in the Italian context. Visibility for precarious workers meant engaging in the construction of a composite political subject able to elaborate and diffuse a common discourse about precarity. The organisation of struggles was a first important step in this direction. In Chapter 2 I first introduce the notions of precarious workers and precarity. I then reconstruct the discursive context on labour market flexibility as it stood in the 1990s. Finally, I outline the main institutional and non-institutional political actors forming the field of contention related to precarity. In Chapter 3 I explore the processes of political organisation that led to struggles against precarity. In particular, I consider the mobilisation of resources, innovation in the repertoire of contention and the creation of political discourses as important factors in the ongoing construction of precarious workers as a political subject. Third, how do processes of grassroots political organisation intertwine with processes of grassroots political communication? During mobilisations against precarity, the construction of precarious workers as a political subject did not end with the organisation of protest. Although one of the sites of visibility was the time and space of protest, social movement groups also interacted with diverse media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals. And in doing so they departed from knowledge about the media environment. In Chapter 4 I discuss how activists interpreted the media environment as a techno-political space providing social movement actors different degrees of visibility. 1, therefore, illustrate the importance of what I label media knowledge practices, which activists perform in order to gain information, develop attitudes and, eventually, interact with the different layers of the media environment. Starting from activists' perceptions of the different categories of media organisations and media technologies, I finally discuss the notions of a discursive opportunity structure'. While struggling against precarity, social movement groups spoke with journalists, created infointational websites and printed flyers amongst other

Introduction

9

categories of relational media practices, which I define as those activist media practices oriented towards the manipulation, recombination and appropriation of technological media support and/or oriented towards interaction with media professionals. Relational media practices are another central dimension to understand the intertwining of processes of grassroots political organising and grassroots political communication. In Chapter 5 I outline how social movement groups develop social ties with journalists working in mainstream and radical left-wing media, as well as with alternative media practitioners. I then focus on the use of information and communication technologies to support grassroots political communication before, during and after protests. Finally, I show how social movement groups develop four styles of relational media practices that can be equally employed towards mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media, and are frequently combined during a single mobilisation. Fourth, within which layers and fissures of the media environment do social movement actors gain visibility when mobilising? The combination of media knowledge practices and relational media practices during mobilisation plays an important role in the discursive construction of precarious workers as a political subject. But, as activists are also well aware, the mediation of protest produces messages that circulate in unexpected ways within the media environment. The circulation of messages within and beyond the social movement milieu leads to the construction of public identities that are to some extent detached from the original processes of political subjectivation at work during mobilisations. In Chapter 61 discuss the construction of public discourses about precarious workers in the media environment. I start with some considerations about the amount and timing of media coverage. I then focus on the dynamics through which public identities related to mobilisations against precarity took place across the media environment. Finally, I discuss the asymmetry in flows of communication related to media contents about protests. In the concluding chapter I bring together the four questions outlined above and propose some further reflections on grassroots political communication in contemporary societies. I start from some considerations with regard to the notion of visibility in mobilisations against precarity. Precarious workers have, indeed, developed a comprehensive approach to communication and mediation processes, within which the sites of visibility go beyond the appearances on the national television news. I then employ the analysis of mobilisations against precarity to discuss some features of the circuit of grassroots political communication and to introduce the concept of the repertoire of communication in social movement processes. I also take into consideration the flourishing of social networking sites such as Facebook and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, and show that the repertoire of communication can be a fruitful analytical tool to study grassroots political communication in waves of protest both present and future.

Chapter 1

Theoretical Reflections on the Study of Grassroots Political Communication

Introduction The precarious workers of the Precari Atesia collective self-produced a radical magazine entitled Sfront End in which they told the stories of ordinary precarity within the call-centre. The activists who organised the Serpica Naro fashion show infiltrated the Milan Fashion Week, a highly newsworthy event, and denounced the diffused exploitation of precarious workers within the fashion industry. During one of the two Reddito per TWO direct actions in a mall on the outskirts of Rome, activists distributed flyers to costumers in which they explained the necessity of income re-appropriation by precarious workers. Students struggling against public education reform during the mobilisations against the Ddl Moratti created their own blogs to clarify why they were part of the precarious workers' struggles in Italy. Some social movement groups that participated in the Euro Mayday Parade set up a live radio broadcast with activists from a number of European countries so as to clarify that precarity was not just an Italian problem. These snapshots, which I deepen in this book, exemplify activists' engagement with a diverse range of communication and mediation channels employed to render precarity a visible social problem for different audiences. They are yet another example of an unrelenting trend in contemporary societies: the passage of political communication through a wide range of media outlets, from the press and television to internet platforms and web applications. Mass media and television, in particular, still function as crucial gatekeepers between citizens and political actors. However, from the 1990s onwards, the emergence of information and communication technologies transformed mainstream-dominated media systems into multifaceted media environments. The configuration of the media ecology changed and today a number of media outlets and technologies coexist and recombine in the daily lives of individuals. Proliferation processes (Dahlgren 2009) have rendered the media more multiple, interconnected and diverse than in the past. This leads to the transformation of political communication, which also passes through a variety of media channels and media texts. Election campaigns, for instance, entered a stage in which political parties pair the use of digital media, from personal websites to social networking platforms, with the employment of mass media (Norris 2000). While the political communication of institutional political actors has been widely investigated in recent work (Negrine 2008; McNair 2003), there is a lack

I

12

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Theoretical Reflections

of research on non-institutional political actors, including social movement groups and social movement organisations. As the five snapshots mentioned above also suggest, these actors play an active role in the creation of political messages in different types of media outlets and technologies. To date, however, systematic theoretical reflections and comprehensive empirical investigations on how they engage in mediation processes have not appeared. This is rather surprising since informal political participation has increased in importance in western countries, especially amongst young people (Spannring, Ogris and Gaiser 2008). Citizens have lost trust in institutional political actors (Dogan 2005) and engage less often in conventional political activities such as voting, party membership and campaigning (Dalton 2002). Yet this is only one side of the story: many individual and collective actions are intrinsically directed to the political level, although they are not usually interpreted as founal political participation. Peaceful and legal actions such as signing petitions or striking, or more disruptive forms of engagement such as occupying a building or blocking the streets with sit-ins are usually either instrumental or symbolic expressions of political involvement (Topf 1995; Marsh 1977). The who, what and where of political participation has shifted towards non-institutional forms of engagement (Norris 2002). Although citizens have moved away from electoral participation and grant less trust to the main actors of representative democracies, they still engage in a variety of political activities which nevertheless tend to challenge and redefine the very idea of democracy (della Porta 2009). In other words, in recent decades there has been a displacement of politics which has shifted to more and more non-institutional sites such as individuals or local groups of citizens involved in political consumerism (Micheletti, Follesdal and Stolle 2004; Stolle, Hooghe and Micheletti 2005; Micheletti 2003), and transnational social movement networks protesting against international summits and organising social fora (della Porta 2007; della Porta et al. 2006; Tarrow 2005). Social movement scholars have proved that infollual political participation enhanced by social movement processes is more frequent than in the past (Soule and Earl 2006; Rucht 1998). At the same time, specific forms of legal and peaceful non-institutional political participation have gained legitimacy in western democracies, and are increasingly important channels to promote or resist social, political, economic and cultural change in `social movement societies' (Meyer and Tarrow 1998; Taylor 2000; Rucht and Neidhardt 2002). Each instance of political participation usually includes and sometimes overlaps with at least one instance of political communication, even where noninstitutional political participation such as petitions, boycotts, strikes and street demonstrations is concerned. Despite the existence of broader definitions of political communication as a field of study (Franklin 1995; for two traditional definitions in this direction, see Graber and Smith 2005), the very definition of what can be considered part of the realm of political communication is usually narrow and only recently have some authors in the field defined political communication in broader terms, also considering social movement groups and social movement

organisations as active subjects of political communication (see for instance Kriesi 2004; Sanders 2009). This book follows the same broad definition of political communication and analyses how non-institutional political actors such as social movement groups and social movement organisations communicate within and beyond their milieu. The focus is, thus, grassroots political communication, here intended as the wide range of politically oriented media practices performed by those groups of individuals that engage in informal political participation. In the remainder of the chapter I shed light on the existence of a twofold cleavage that contributes to the fragmentation of knowledge on grassroots political communication. I then discuss early attempts to move beyond this fragmentation considering the formation of public discourses and media-related strategies among social movement actors. Finally, I propose to look at grassroots political communication by acknowledging the existence of a media environment in which different categories of media objects, media subjects and communication flows intertwine, and adopting the media practice perspective to look at how social movement actors interact with the media environment.

13

Cleavages and Clusters in the Study of Social Movements and the Media Individual and collective actors that engage in social movement processes are the example par excellence of non-institutional political actors that develop grassroots political communication. The literature on social movements, however, provides only fragmented insights about interactions between social movement actors and the media. When it comes to this topic, a `divorce' still exists between media studies scholars and those belonging to the field of sociology, history and political sciences (Downing 2008, 1996), with social movement scholars still paying only `tangential attention to media dynamics' (Downing 2008, 41). Regardless of the specific field scholars belong to, the literature on social movements and the media seems to form four clusters around two cleavages. Each medium is both a technological object that occupies a space in the daily environments of individuals and a means that connect individuals to the symbolic world of messages (Silverstone 1994; Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley 1992). This peculiarity, also named `double articulation' (ibidem), renders it difficult to investigate the textual and contextual level of the media in order to impart this intertwining of the material and symbolic sides of mediation processes (Livingstone 2007). Studies addressing social movement processes also face this challenge, which leads to the presence of two main cleavages. A first cleavage is related to the articulation characterising the media as technological objects. In this regard, the literature on social movements and media organisations and outlets, based on non-digital or analogue technologies, is usually disconnected from literature on social movements and more recent media organisations and outlets based on digital technologies. A second cleavage rests on the articulation characterising the media as means that connect individuals, or

J,

14

Table 1.1

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Theoretical Reflections

The twofold cleavage in studies of social movements and media Non-Digital Technologies

Mainstream media NON-DIGITAL MAINSTREAM MEDIA i.e. newspapers, television, radio

15

public spheres. In recent theories of the public sphere, however, the concept of `media' does not refer only to mass and mainstream media. The general public sphere in which public discourses originate and circulate is seen to consist of three fora: daily encounters among people, public assemblies and the mass media (Gerhards and Neidhardt 1993, quoted in Gerhards and Schdfer 2010). According to Gerhards and Schdfer (2010), e-mail exchanges and private chats mirror the first forum, in which individuals meet and exchange opinions on a daily basis, while blogs, mailing lists and internet fora mirror the second forum of the public sphere, in which individuals gather in public assemblies since these means of communication support the creation of public discussions focused on specific issues amongst internet users. Search engines mirror the third forum, which is the mass media such as the printed press and television, in that they organise content for large audiences (Gerhards and Schdfer 2010). 1 suggest that the internet applications and web platforms listed by the two authors do more than mirror the offline public sphere. They cross and intertwine with the three abovementioned fora, according to which the offline public sphere is structured. The creation of `public sphericules' based on new technologies may lead to the further fragmentation and segregation of publics in the general public sphere (Gitlin 1998; Sunstein 2002). At the same time, however, claims and discourses made by non-institutional political actors may travel across different technological supports and fora in the public sphere (Bennett 2003). Due to the intertwining of offline and online meetings and encounters, therefore, `parallel discursive arenas' elaborated by `subaltern counterpublics' (Fraser 1992) may also gain space and visibility in societies at large by entering the general public sphere. This is an important opportunity not only at the local and national levels, but also in transnational public spheres where mass media fora are extremely important in shaping public opinion beyond national borders (Downey and Fenton 2003). The debate about the state of the contemporary public sphere(s) considers new technologies, and especially the internet, as forces capable of reshaping the processes of public discourse formation. It also suggests that to understand grassroots political communication in contemporary societies we should consider the theoretical and empirical musing on the diverse range of technological supports and messages by adopting a cross-media perspective. Similar concerns arise in media studies seeking to understand the mechanisms and dynamics of convergence cultures and transmedia storytelling, according to which cross-platfolut studies are more likely to capture current communication flows and mediation processes. While investigations related to the public sphere stress the diversity of media technologies and media outlets, media studies address the multifaceted nature of media environments from a different point of view. They recognise diversity, but at the same time stress the separation of the medium and the message on the one side, and the convergence of different media platfoinis on the other. Departing from these assumptions, scholars argue that individuals live in a `convergence culture' following cultural and technological shifts with regard to how media messages are produced, diffused, received and then recombined once more (Jenkins 2006).

Digital Technologies DIGITAL MAINSTREAM MEDIA i.e. online newspapers, social networking sites, commercial blog platforms

Alternative media NON-DIGITAL DIGITAL ALTERNATIVE MEDIA ALTERNATIVE MEDIA i.e. alternative radio, street television, i.e. alternative informational theatrical performances, leaflets, websites, alternative blog platforms posters, magazines

better audiences, to different worlds of messages: either mainstream and dominant or alternative and counter-cultural. This leads to a separation between the literature on mainstream media and social movements on the one side, and the literature on alternative media and social movements on the other. As I illustrate in the table above, the combination of the two cleavages results in four distinct clusters of investigation that contribute to the fragmentation of knowledge on the topic (Rucht 2011). With a few exceptions (Coopman 2009; Dunbar-Hester 2009; Lester and Hutchins 2009; Rauch 2007), scholars addressing social movements and the media do not usually undertake comparative studies that aim to understand how social movement actors address different types of media organisations, outlets and technologies. Obviously, this body of research started life in a less differentiated media environment, where the boundaries between different technological supports and media messages were fewer and less blurred. Although useful for empirical and analytical reasons, the separations between the four clusters of literature and their related concepts make it difficult to grasp grassroots political communication as it develops in contemporary societies. Examples of multiplatforming content did already exist in the past (for example, Bonner 2009). But today more than ever, individuals deal with diverse media supports: from traditional newspapers and magazines to radio stations and television channels; from internet applications and portable multimedia supports such as mobile telephones, to transnational satellite television channels and webradio stations. As a consequence, the format of the messages individuals deal with are also more diverse than ever before, they combine different types of languages and are conveyed using a variety of supports. Media messages seem to be more ubiquitous, scattered and less dependent on the technological object from which they originate. To some extent, the diversity of media outlets and technologies is at the centre of theoretical and empirical research on the public sphere. From Habermas (1989) to his critics (Calhoun 1992; Fraser 1992), scholars studying the functioning of the public sphere suggest that the media play a crucial role in shaping democratic dialogue within societies, and constitute an important element of contemporary

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16

Theoretical Reflections

Media Practices and Protest Politics

There is the need, therefore, to move from a `platform-centred' approach to a `content-centred' approach to follow the travels and transformations of messages across different media devices (Jenkins 2009; Murray 2003). Social movement studies usually focus on one specific media platform at a time. But social movement actors usually interact with different media organisations and outlets in the course of the same protest campaign. And while some tend to reduce asymmetry with mainstream media, others prefer to focus on reducing dependency on mainstream media and hence engage in the creation of alternative media channels (Carroll and Ratner 1999). The Quadruple-A model (Ruckt 2004, 2011) also considers these patterns and maintains that social movement actors may use four types of strategies to react to their lack of resonance in mainstream media: abstention, when the focus shifts away from mainstream media to inwardlydirected group communication; attack, when social movement actors decide to openly criticise mainstream media and sometimes organise violent actions against them; adaptation, when the mainstream media logic is accepted and strategies towards mainstream media are developed accordingly; and alternatives, when social movement actors create their own media to establish a different space in order to communicate both amongst themselves and with broader audiences. Unlike other studies, this model suggests the existence of overlapping practices for dealing with the media, developed according to different logics and purposes. Mainstream media, however, remain at the centre of this model since all the strategies activists may adopt are seen as means to avoid their lack of mainstream media coverage. This book seeks to understand what social movement actors do with the media at large when engaging in mobilisations. In doing so, it departs from a different perspective revolving around the concept of the `media environment' as a whole, in which and through which activists develop multiple `media practices' that frequently overlap. The next section elaborates these two concepts further.

The Media Environment

Some authors interested in social movements and the media have recently acknowledged the need to consider different types of media technologies and messages at the same time. The internet, for instance, should not be considered independently from the traditional mass media (Bennett 2004) and, more generally, some scholars have noted that to understand the role of media in informal political participation, the complexity of the communication flows that shape contemporary societies should be borne in mind (Gillan, Pickerill and Webster 2008; Cottle 2008; Cammaerts 2007a). Drawing on these assumptions, I start from a broad definition of the media environment characterised by three dimensions: the role of media subjects; the type of technological objects; and the direction of communication flows.

17

Media Subjects

The media environment involves individuals who use technological objects for different purposes and, therefore, play different roles in their regard. In their study on new media in contemporary anti-war movements, Gillian, Pickerill and Webster start from a definition of a (war) media environment revolving around the concept of `information sources'. Accordingly, they speak about the existence of an infouuation environment defined as a `full range of information resources available to the public, which may extend from recollections of returning combatants to newspaper reportages, from personal experiences of conflict to satellite television coverage" (Gillan, Pickerill and Webster 2008, 19). However, Couldry (2002) suggests we overcome the classical division among media producers, media sources and media audiences when dealing with the media. This is even more important when considering contemporary societies where individuals simultaneously play different roles with regard to the media, especially in particular situations of protest, mobilisation and claims making. Broadly speaking, individuals assume three roles with regard to the media environment: as media audiences they look for information and consume media content; as media producers they create information and originate media content; and as media sources they provide information to other individuals who then elaborate new media content. The three roles are more blurred now than in the past with regard to both portable and fixed digital media devices. On this, for instance, expressions such as `produmers' (Burmann and Arnhold 2008) indicate the merging of the consumer and producer role in marketing and advertisement studies. An activist, for instance, is (part of) a media audience when sitting in her living room watching a political discussion show about precarity, a media producer when she posts on her Facebook profile information on the next demonstration about precarity in her city and a media source when a journalist interviews her during that same demonstration. Again, however, it is also true that the three roles continue to be separate. Not only because some individuals are more media productive than others, such as professional journalists, but also because the same individual usually experiences the three roles — producer, audience and source — in different situations and contexts. These experiences are particularly important because they are not exhausted in interaction with the media environment. As I will show in Chapter 4, activists also employ their experience as media producers, audiences and sources to interpret the media environment in which they act: they construct semantic maps in which the political and technological dimensions of the media environment combine. Technological Objects

The media environment includes diverse technological objects that make up the infrastructure within which communication and mediation processes develop. To recognise differences in the type of technological objects is, thus, a first step towards

9

18

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Theoretical Reflections

an encompassing definition of the media environment. According to the `pervasive communication environment perspective' (Coopman 2009), media environments include fixed and portable, analogue and digital media platfotius that coexist and intertwine. Combining the two dimensions, four main technological objects populate the media environment: fixed analogue media devices like television and radio; fixed digital media devices like computers; portable analogue media devices like newspapers and magazines; and portable digital media devices like smart phones and laptops. The four categories sometimes combine and increasingly converge. The launch of tablet computers, for instance, rendered newspapers and magazines not only portable, but also digital and, as such, certainly more hyper-textual and interactive than they were when the press was first invented. But portable analogue media devices like newspapers, or fixed analogue media devices like television still play an important role in societies and, in particular, in political communication, be it institutional or grassroots. In Chapter 5 I show that during mobilisations against precarity, social movement groups interacted with a number of technological objects: from newspapers to laptop computers, from television to mobile phones. During mobilisations against precarity, the use of one specific technological object seldom excluded the appropriation of other technological objects. There was, rather, a cumulative attitude towards media devices that often resulted in mediation processes that combined, sometimes during the same demonstration, a number of technological objects. The result was that media texts carried their contents from one site of the media environment to another.

of a sender and a receiver in an asymmetric relationship, since one exerts more control over the communication flow than the other. The example of mainstream television broadcasting of political news is the emblematic example of this type of communication flow. Two-way communication flows instead imply mutual interaction between the sender and the receiver of the message, who both exert control over the communication flow. If not always, many forms of alternative media such as free radios and community television use this type of communication flow, where the creation of reciprocity between senders and receivers of messages is significant. Finally, the three-way communication flow implies the presence of diverse participants who interact with one another in making communication flows. Collective discussions through mailing lists to organise mobilisations, for example, are based on the implementation of common discursive threads between various individuals that engage in such three-way communication flows. While I discuss different forms of communication flows that occur during mobilisations against precarity throughout the book, in Chapter 6 1 devote particular attention to the results of such communication flows in terms of media texts circulating in the media environment. Mobilisations against precarity obtained a certain degree of visibility within different layers of the media environment and this, in turn, led to the construction of public identities related to precarious workers participating in protests. Combinations between the type of technological object, the role of media subjects and the type of communication flows are diverse. Although some communication flows can be found more frequently when looking at a certain technological object, the relation between the three dimensions of the media environment is not fixed. Portable and digital technological objects, for instance, include one-way, two-way and three-way communication flows (Ferber, Foltz, and Pugliese 2007). The result is that grassroots political communication, but also political communication in general, today rests on communication flows in which different media subjects and objects intertwine in a variety of combinations, including the increasingly frequent merging of analogue and digital devices and content.

Communication Flows

The media environment contains a diverse range of communication flows that originate from information and content passing through both (technological) objects and subjects. In media studies the directions of communication flows are particularly important in order to understand power relations between media producers and media audiences. One-way communication flows usually characterise mass media like television, in which the direction of information is, indeed, one way and asymmetrical, with rare opportunities for feedback from media audiences (Lasswell 1971). Two-way communication flows, however, imply the presence of media messages from media producers to media audiences and vice versa, leading to reciprocity and feedbacks (ibidem). The existence of one-way and two-way communication flows elaborated in different and less developed media environments is still valid today, but incomplete. For this reason, scholars interested in the democratic aspects of digital communication look at communication flows while taking into consideration their interactivity, including the direction of information and the degree of control over the information that subjects exchange through the media (McMillan 2002; Ferber, Foltz and Pugliese 2007). The resulting model singles out the existence of one-way, twoway and three-way communication flows that can be seen at work, in the media environment in its entirety. One-way communication flows imply the presence

19

Activist Media Practices This book focuses on social movement groups as subjects acting in and with the media environment while engaging in mobilisations. To study how individuals employ and embed the media in local contexts and their daily lives, current media anthropologists draw on Hobart (2009) and Couldry's (2004) approaches based on media practices (Postill 2009). I also assume that it is useful to adopt a media practice approach as a theoretical and analytical lens to understand what social movement actors do with the media. The aim is to understand and compare various forms of grassroots political communication: from interactions between social movement actors and mainstream media professionals to the creation of

20

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Theoretical Reflections

alternative informational websites during mobilisations. Although different in many respects, these two social practices are both oriented towards and/or occur in the media environment. In addition, they are frequently connected: the creation of alternative informational websites during given mobilisations can serve as online repositories for photographs and video material that may then be used by mainstream media journalists seeking to cover the same mobilisation. The focus on media practices allows us to see various types of actions and reactions with regard to the media environment, its technological supports, mediated messages and professionals at work. Yet it also makes it easier to uncover the interconnections and interdependencies between these actions and reactions. More specifically, in this book I present two relevant sets of practices oriented towards the media that can be grouped under the umbrella term activist media practices. There are, firstly, media knowledge practices related to the media environment that I address in Chapter 4. Through this first set of activist media practices, individual activists and social movement groups interact with the diverse world of media messages circulating in the media environment, engage in the production of media related literacy and develop self-reflexive perceptions of the `things' they do and expect from the media at large. There are, secondly, relational media practices related to the media environment that I discuss in Chapter 5. Through these activist media practices, individual activists and social movement groups construct and redefine networks of relations with media professionals, including journalists, engage in the manipulation and recombination of technological supports and create their own spaces ofcommunication and mediation within the media environment. These two sets of activist media practices develop in parallel and usually intertwine in various articulations. However, grassroots political communication is also directed towards the media environment which is not a passive space. In fact, activist media practices may have diverse outcomes in terms of the representation of protest participants within the media environment. For this reason, in Chapter 6 1 also analyse media representations that occur within and beyond the social movement milieu, shifting from the alternative to the mainstream layers of the media environment and imparting a range of public identities related to social movement groups.

to remain separate. With some exceptions, indeed, scholars usually focus on one specific category of media technology (analogue vs. digital) and/or media messages (mainstream vs. alternative) when investigating grassroots political communication. Recent approaches to the investigation ofpublic spheres, however, underline the existence of a broad range of media outlets and technologies that intertwine in the construction of public discourses. And the emergence of contentcentred approaches in media studies suggests we follow the same message across different media platforms in order to grasp communication flows in convergent cultures. The Quadruple-A model was a seminal attempt to take into consideration different strategies towards (mainstream) media in social movement studies. Activists, indeed, can decide to adapt to mainstream media, to be absent from and hence ignore mainstream media, to attack mainstream media, either physically or symbolically and to create alternative channels of mediation in order to bypass mainstream media. This model recognises the existence of different media strategies in social movements, but assumes that these are usually linked to a lack of mainstream media coverage. In order to develop a perspective that does not assign a central role to mainstream media, I have introduced two pivotal concepts to analyse grassroots political communication in contemporary societies. I first positioned social movement actors in a broader media environment which is a space of mediation where subjects, like activists, have different and sometimes overlapping roles (media audiences, media producers and media sources) and deal with a wide range of technological objects (digital/analogue and portable/ fixed devices), imparting a variety of communication flows (one-way, two-way and three-way). Drawing on social practice theory, I then frame what social movement actors do with the media as activist media practices that are, in turn, media knowledge practices and relational media practices resulting in media representations of social movement actors. Before exploring further activist media practices, the next two chapters sketch the discursive context and the contentious field in which precarious workers were embedded and the five mobilisations against precarity which they developed.

21

Conclusions In this chapter I argued that grassroots political communication is increasingly important in contemporary societies. While institutional forms of political participation are declining in western democracies, citizens progressively engage in contentious politics that frequently challenge the institutions of representative democracies. When protesting, social movement actors also communicate with protest participants, allies and opponents, and they do so through different media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals. The existing literature on media and social movements is divided into four main clusters that tend

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Chapter 2

The Discursive Context and Contentious Field of Precarity in Italy

Introduction

The diffusion of precarious employment is a common trait of contemporary societies both in the Global South and the Global North (Standing 2011; Standing 1999). In Europe and the United States precarious employment was widespread till the 1930s, substantially decreased from the 1940s to the 1970s, then expanded again from the 1970s onwards (Kalleberg 2009). Employers reacted to structural transformations linked to globalisation processes and technological advancements by supporting neo-liberal policies that, amongst other objectives, pursued labour market flexibility, externalised the costs of workforces and weakened the welfare state system (Edgell 2001; Kalleberg 2009; Wacquant 2009) with the consequence of creating a marginalised workforce that is extremely vulnerable at the social and economic level (Chun 2009). The development of neo-liberal policies was accompanied by shifts at the discursive level. As for labour policies, flexibility became a `new political mantra' in western countries (Beck 2000: 3) presented as natural and inevitable in the public discourse (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 195). Similar changes also occurred in Italy, especially from the early 1990s, when a `flexibility ideology' became the prominent answer to the unemployment emergency (Gallino 2001; Gallino 2007) and legal changes followed, exponentially increasing opportunities for employers to hire short-term workers in a number of labour market sectors. After a period of policies aiming to support open-ended and full-time employment, from the late 1960s to the 1980s, Italian society entered a new era of flexibility, characterised by diverse forms of short-term non-standard employment (Saracen 2005). In particular, four legislative measures drafted and passed in the space of a decade contributed to labour market flexibility in the early 1990s: the `Ciampi Protocol' of 1993; the `Pacchetto Treu' of 1997; Legislative Decree 368 of 2001; and, probably the most significant of all, the Law 30 of 2003 and Legislative Decree 276 of 2003 (Gallino 2007). Overall, the new body of legislation rendered possible a variety of contractual forms other than full-time and open-ended contracts. While some were already employed in specific seasonal labour market sectors, such as tourism and agriculture, one of the outcomes of the new legislation was to extend so-called `non-standard' employment, different from full-time and open-ended employment, to the whole of the Italian labour market.

24

v., Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Discursive Context and Contentious Field of Precarity in Italy

From early in the 1990s to 2007, the number of temporary workers increased dramatically, especially amongst the younger generations. The 2011 OECD Employment Outlook states that 46.7 per cent of Italian citizens aged between 15 and 24 had a temporary contract in 2010. The same figures stood at 16.7 per cent in 1994 (OECD 2011). A recent report on the Italian labour market, indeed, points out that from June 2009 to January 2010 approximately 76 per cent of new contracts were temporary (UIL 2011). This means that independently from the actual number of precarious workers in Italy, the majority of workers who enter, or re-enter, the labour market have a temporary contract. In a country characterised by a welfare state that continues to revolve around full-time and permanent workers, being employed as a temporary worker means scarce, if any, access to social protection (Pedaci 2010; Madarna and Sacchi 2009; Bronzini 2002). The diffusion of temporary employment rendered such workers extremely vulnerable and subject to individual insecurity (Beck 2000; Beck 1992). In the past decade the literature on precarious workers has grown considerably, focusing on two main topics: first, the definition of the object of study and its boundaries (see for instance Tronti and Ceccato 2005; Fudge and Owens 2006; Standing 1999). The term `precarity' and the expression `precarious workers' assume different meanings, and they vary according to the country under discussion (Appay 2010; Barbier 2008). This is because the experience of being a precarious worker changes according to several factors such as access to social protection, the type of short-term contract, the labour market sector and the type of job held. Being an illegal immigrant working precariously in the construction sector is very different to being an Italian citizen working as a short-term translator for a publishing house. The experiences of precarious workers, therefore, vary not only across countries but also within the same country. The condition of precarity, finally, frequently goes beyond working conditions and positions since the whole existence of precarious workers becomes uncertain and unpredictable, especially where precarious workers suffer from a lack of welfare state support. Precarious workers, therefore, deal with `social and economic vulnerability' (Boumaza and Pierru 2007), and precarity becomes `existential precarity' (Fumagalli 2007) or `social precarity' (Murgia 2010). The complex definition of the object of study renders an accurate assessment of the number of precarious workers in Italy problematic because the parameters for defining precarious workers are uncertain. In 2007 approximately 12 per cent of Italian workers were employed on temporary contracts (Jessoula 2012). Their number increases to approximately 20 per cent when counting `pseudo-autonomous' workers, who are only formally autonomous (Pedaci 2010). But for some authors, precarious workers are actually more numerous than suggested by official statistical measures (Gallino 2007) while others argue that in Italy perceived precarity is far higher than actual precarity (Accomero 2006). Second, the literature has investigated the individual experience of being a precarious worker and its outcomes at the societal level (Castel 2003; Paugam 2000). Amongst these studies, some underline that precarity leads to a potential

~!~,

25

growth of anomie (Rizza 2000) and difficulties in constructing political subjectivities (Vantaggiato 1996). The diffusion of temporary contracts and the parallel lack of social protection, indeed, work as discursive agents able to steer precarious workers through the production of `decollectivization, individualization, recommoditization, precariousness, vulnerability' (Pedaci 2010: 258). This, in turn, renders the collective organisation of precarious workers more difficult (Wacquant 2009, 55). In the same line, some authors also underline how the management of temporary employment agencies in Italy promotes an understanding of flexibility as an `unavoidable situation' which is beyond the control of policymakers and, therefore, against which precarious workers have no agency (Degiuli and Kollmeyer 2007). Others, instead, reconstruct precarious workers' individual strategies to cope with precarity and define their discontinuous identity as workers (Armano 2010; Murgia 2010; Fullin 2004). While it is certainly important to consider the atomisation and individualisation of precarious workers, the understanding of working and living conditions among individuals experiencing precarity also passes through the study of their agency at both the individual and the collective level (Kalleberg 2009; Chun 2009), as well as the intentional subjectivity that characterises the labour patterns of precarious workers (Armano 2010: 37). The diffusion of precarious employment triggered the emergence of economic, social and political grievances that could be addressed collectively through protest. As early as 1996, for instance, a transnational social movement network based in France singled out precarity as a contentious issue when organising the Euro March against unemployment and precarity (Chabanet 2002). From late in the 1990s to the present, struggles of precarious workers developed across South Korea (Chun 2009), Japan (Allison 2009), the United States (Chun 2009; Brophy 2006) and Canada (Cranford and Ladd 2003), amongst other countries. In Italy the so-called `non garantiti', an expression which literally means `not-guaranteed', were already represented in social movement discourses during the 1970s (Grispini 2006). But in recent decades especially, precarious workers have mobilised in a more continuous and consistent manner across different labour market sectors. The reason behind this is that it was only from the 1990s onwards that short-term contracts became more common than in previous decades. Workers faced a labour market that increasingly demanded a short-teiin workforce and a welfare state system pegged to full-time and open-ended employment. Working conditions that were already difficult due to increased labour market flexibility became even more severe due to the lack of social and economic protection for temporary workers. For this reason, precarious workers began to organise collectively in order to react. In this book I focus on Italian mobilisations against precarity, initiated and sustained by social movement groups and social movement organisations without the support of institutional political actors, such as trade union confederations and political parties. I give specific consideration to the symbolic dimension of such mobilisations with an emphasis on the use of different channels of communication and mediation, as ever since precarity began to emerge as a social problem in

26

Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Discursive Context and Contentious Field of Precarity in Italy

Italy, one of the priorities of precarious workers has been to become visible in public and political arenas in order to be recognised as political actors with specific claims. Before doing this in the following chapters, I first sketch the broad discourse on labour market flexibility that existed before the emergence and diffusion of struggles against precarity. I then present the main political actors that populated the field of contention related to labour market flexibility in Italy from 2001 to 2006. And I finally explain how non-institutional political actors engaged in the organisation of struggles against precarity without the systematic support of institutional political actors.

unionists, to overcome the high unemployment rates in the Southern regions of Italy. As Stefano Micossi states:

The Public Discourse on Labour Market Flexibility in the 1990s The discursive context in which social movements against precarity began to act, in 2001, was very much averse to the introduction of critical voices about flexibility. This section outlines the dominant discourse about precarity as it emerged in the centre-left daily newspaper La Repubblica, one of the leading Italian daily newspapers in terms of readership. Although I do not claim that this reconstruction is fully representative of public debates on labour market flexibility over past decades,' it does describe the flavour of those debates and supports what various scholars have already observed from a more theoretical stance: the presence of dominant discourses about labour market flexibility in Europe (Beck 2000; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) and Italy (Gallino 1998; Gallino 2001; Fumagalli 2006) during the neo-liberal era. At the beginning of the 1990s, labour market flexibility was not yet an autonomous and central issue within public discourse. However, different political and economic actors, such as entrepreneurs and traditional trade unionists, began to use the term `flexibility' with regard to various economic problems affecting Italy, like unemployment and the difficult economic situation in the Southern regions of Italy. For instance, the Italian association for industrial policies, named Associazione Italiana Politiche Industriali (AIP), organised a congress in which more than 350 managers from both the public and private labour market sectors participated. The main topic was the analysis of the degree of flexibility of the Italian labour market, and the claim reported in the daily newspaper was that `labour market flexibility is the new AIP goal to render us more competitive with foreign countries'.' Moreover, some entrepreneurs and politicians suggested the adoption of flexible incomes, negotiated locally between industrialists and traditional trade 1 The reconstruction is based on the archives of la Repubblica from 1990 to 2000. This data were collected as a part of Professor Ito Peng's SSHRC funded research project on Familialistic Welfare States in Transition. I would like to thank Professor Ito Peng for sharing this data with me. For a more comprehensive reconstruction of public discourses on flexibility and precarity in six Italian daily newspapers see Guidi (2007). 2 la Repubblica 4 May 1991.

27

The main road to decrease the North-South difference [ ... ] is to support new productive initiatives (be careful, I do not speak of huge public investments) by guaranteeing maximum flexibility in the use of labour.' The labour market flexibility issue arose more prominently from 1993, due to the `Ciampi Protocol' named after the Prime Minister at the time. Discussions on the agreement started in March and ended in July, when it was finally signed by the government, industrialist representatives and the secretaries of the three trade union confederations. Based on concerted politics among various collective subjects with different interests, this agreement paved the road for the introduction of greater flexibility within the Italian labour market (Gallino 2007). In the meanwhile, various political and economic actors began to openly address the topic, and the flexibility discourse seemed to achieve a certain weight at the public level. Representatives of the transition government of the time, including the Minister of Labour, Marco Giugni, declared a positive attitude towards the introduction of private temporary employment agencies.' Representatives of entrepreneurs asked for more and more flexibility within the Italian labour market, both before and after the signature of the `employment social agreement'. For instance, the general director of Confindustria, the national association of entrepreneurs, Innocenzo Cipolletta, stated that: First of all there is the labour flexibility theme. A cultural shift is needed, it has to be recognised that, besides traditional forms based on full-time and open-end contracts, different forms of contracts can exist, which have the same dignity.' Later on in the same article, he explains exactly what flexibility means: It means that we cannot have a maximum weekly working time established by law, it means that one can resort to part-time contracts without being damaged. Nowadays two part-time employees cost much more than one full-time employee.6 Moreover, Innocenzo Cipolletta affirmed that flexibility is necessary to overcome both unemployment and concealed labour: `the struggle for employment

3 la Repubblica 25 November 1992. Stefano Micossi was the director of the Confindustria research centre. 4 la Repubblica, 9 March 1993. 5 la Repubblica, 10 March 1993. 6 la Repubblica, 20 November 1993.

Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Discursive Context and Contentious Field of Precarity in Italy

can be won only thanks to higher labour market flexibility',' while the president of Confindustria, Luigi Abete, suggested that `the lack of flexibility risks increasing moonlighting and labour not subject to equal taxation'.' Trade union confederations agreed with the government and industrialists that a more flexible labour market was needed, even though they often used the expression `negotiated flexibility' to warn industrialists and the government that a deregulated labour market would increase the number of precarious workers in Italy.' The debate about labour market flexibility grew and become polarised in 1994 due to a forthcoming general election. In fact, one of the most important issues on the political agenda for both the right-wing and left-wing coalitions was the unemployment emergency in Italy. Once again, the common solution was to be increased labour market flexibility, even though subtle differences existed which may be summarised as follows. Entrepreneurs demanded `maximum flexibility',10 while according to trade union confederations and the outgoing Minister of Labour, Marco Giugni, there was a need for `regulated flexibility'. Indeed, the Minister drafted a `Libro Bianco'— a white paper — in which regulated flexibility appeared to be the only means for overcoming unemployment on a medium-term basis. With regard to political parties, within the right-wing coalition the newly born Forza Italia (FI) party, founded by Silvio Berlusconi, based its electoral programme on three main points related to the labour market sector: a new reduction in hiring tax, the revision of labour legislation and increased labour market flexibility." The main political party of the left-wing coalition, Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS), affirmed that `productivity has to be increased and more mobility and flexibility are needed'.1z In May the right-wing coalition won the general election and the new Minister of Labour, Clemente Mastella, organised a series of informal meetings between trade union confederations and the government. The starting point was the agreement signed in 1993, but labour market reforru was postponed due to the difficult relationship between the new government and trade unions. In sum, the flexibility discourse began to take shape in the early 1990s as a shared response to the unemployment emergency. More precisely, two main frames, connected with different political actors, emerged. On one side was the `maximum flexibility' frame, principally supported by entrepreneurs and right-wing political parties like FI. On the other side was the `regulated flexibility' frame, mainly sponsored by trade union confederations and left-wing political parties such as the PDS. Therefore, the flexibility discourse oscillated between two different positions belonging to the same continuum, in which labour market flexibility was seen as the most efficient measure for increasing the Italian employment rate.

The right-wing government experienced an internal crisis and was eventually substituted by a technical government in January 1995. Tiziano Treu, the new Minister of Labour, was not a politician but an academic expert in labour politics. Even during this transition phase, the unemployment emergency was one of the most important topics on the political agenda, as the same Minister of Labour stated when illustrating the government's position:

28

7 8 9 10 11 12

la Repubblica, 3 October 1993. la Repubblica, 9 November 1993. la Repubblica, 4 November 1993. la Repubblica, 4 February 1994. la Repubblica, 1 March 1994. la Repubblica, 16 February 1994.

29

In my opinion the most important emergency is employment. [ ... ] We need an accurate and very difficult policy mix of more flexibility measures in the labour market, structural investments and professional education.13 In line with this, the government drafted a bill on labour market flexibility in June, known as the `pacchetto Treu' or `pacchetto occupazione' — the `Treu package' or `employment package'. Three important changes were proposed: first, the introduction of private temporary employment agencies; second, part-time and fixed-term contracts would be extended to numerous labour market sectors; and third, a single contract that could be shared by two workers would be introduced for the first time in Italy, and called `job sharing'. In 1995 the flexibility discourse was enriched by a new frame which identified unemployment as the social problem to be solved, and flexible working hours as the means to increase the employment rate in Italy. The main supporter of this frame was the PDS, whose members of parliament drafted a bill on the reduction of working hours. Livia Turco, who coordinated the proposal, declared that: `The ancient formula of eight hours for five days does not work, anymore'.14 In connection to this, the draft bill suggested a 32 hour working week instead of the traditional 40 hours. In 1996 after a break due to another general election, governmental activities related to labour market flexibility resumed. The Minister of Labour was still Tiziano Treu, whose draft bill was enacted by the Parliament in May 1997. Even though the `Treu package' was approved, public discourse on labour market flexibility did not end, since entrepreneurs were now demanding dismissal regulations. Besides the variety of frames belonging to the flexibility discourse, the introduction of private temporary employment agencies and the enlargement of labour market areas in which it was possible to apply part-time and fixedteim contracts led to the construction of novel public discourses within which the expression `flexible workers' was replaced by novel composite terms, like `atypical workers' or `precarious workers'. Even though it is not possible to speak of a real and consistent discourse on precarity, the mainstream daily newspaper la Repubblica now for the first time represented the viewpoint of workers in an explicit manner. Fissures in the flexibility discourse also began to appear because of sporadic mobilisations by precarious workers who stressed their negative 13 la Repubblica, 20 January 1995. 14 la Repubblica, 23 March 1995.

30

The Discursive Context and Contentious Field of Precarity in Italy

Media Practices and Protest Politics

living and working conditions. In particular, two main sectors began to be affected by workers' struggles against fixed-teim contracts: the public health and public education sectors, where a spontaneous committee of fixed-term teachers mobilised to improve their working conditions. One explained her situation during a demonstration in Torino: My name is Cristina Reinero, I'm 33, 1 teach mathematics and physics. [ ... I Each summer I'm fired, and I have no income until October—November and if all goes well, then I begin again. My husband is the same, precarious worker and fired.15

Nonetheless, these voices were still rare, and entrepreneurs continued to pressurise political parties and the government to obtain a more flexible labour market. The majority of the articles were still characterised by a positive attitude to labour market flexibility, as the following titles suggest: `Labour flexibility is the recipe to enter Europe',16 `Fazio: more flexibility to help the economic recovery"' and `Employment, flexibility needed'.18 Overall, representatives of governments, entrepreneurs, political parties and trade union confederations played an active role in the construction of the flexibility discourse during the 1990s. The following section shows, on the contrary, that the contentious field related to the labour market saw the emergence of social movement groups opposed to the flexibility discourse from a bottom-up perspective.

Political Actors Contending with Labour Market Flexibility

Challengers in the field of contention related to precarity include a varied range of grassroots and non-institutional political actors, who add their voices to those of trade union confederations, and frequently have a polemic and oppositional attitude towards them. Precarious workers have always been present in specific sectors of the Italian labour market such as teachers in public high schools and seasonal workers in the tourism sector (Gremigni and Settembrini 2007; Regalia 2005). In past decades, moreover, some mobilisations have also seen the presence of precarious workers. But it is from the 1990s especially that the field of contention related to precarity begins to emerge as a distinct space of struggle explicitly referring to structural neo-liberal transformations in the labour market. As the table below shows, there were four main types of political actors opposing precarity at the time of the empirical investigation.

15 la Repubblica, 2 July 1997. 16 la Repubblica, 28 August 1997. 17 la Repubblica, 10 February 1998 Antonio Fazio is the former governor of the Bank of Italy. 18 la Repubblica, 19 April 1998.

Table 2.1

31

Political actors in the contentious field of precarity Institutional Political Actors

Non-institutional Political Actors

Single Issue

Trade union confederations

Rank-and-file unions Groups of precarious workers

Multi Issue

Political parties

Social centres University collectives

The first type includes institutional political actors whose main field of interest is labour, like trade union confederations. Italy has three main traditional trade union confederations linked to specific political cultures: CGIL, which is linked to the former Italian Communist Party and remains left-wing oriented; Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (CISL), linked to Catholicism; and Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL), linked, in turn, to the social-democratic tradition. CGIL has the largest membership of the three, with about 5.7 million members in 2010. Usually concerned with permanent and full-time workers, the three traditional trade union confederations opened new branches explicitly devoted to precarious workers in 1998 (Choi and Mattoni 2010). None of them, however, played a major role in the grassroots mobilisations against precarity this book investigates. In the case of Nuove Identità del Lavoro (NIDIL), the branch of CGIL devoted to precarious workers, the focus at the time of the empirical investigation was more on individual services for precarious workers than the development of collective action (ibidem). The metal workers' branch of CGIL, FIOM, instead participated in some cases in grassroots struggles and protests against precarity.19 The second type includes institutional political actors that address multiple issues, though traditionally they have strong linkages with labour. This is the case of small, radical left-wing political parties, like the PRC formed after the last Italian Communist Party national congress in 1991, when its name was changed to the PDS and a group of about 90 members decided to found a different political party, more openly linked with the communist tradition. Although they played an important role at the time of the empirical investigation, the PRC split in 2009 when some of its members left the party and founded a new radical left-wing political party named Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà (SEL). The third type includes non-institutional political actors that address issues related to labour and, in particular, precarity. The most structured of these were social movement organisations, like rank-and-file trade unions, that first appeared during the 1970s when workers employed in the service sector, such as teachers and employees, also began to protest and strike to improve their living and working conditions (Bedani 1995). Amongst rank-and-file trade unions there was COBAS, a confederation of local union committees inspired by the tradition 19 FIOM is the trade union representing metalworkers. It was founded in 1901 and had a relevant role in the past struggles of the workers movement.

t

32

Media Practices and'Protest Politics

The Discursive Context and Contentious Field of Precarity in Italy

of workers' councils, born in the late 1980s and involving high-school teachers at first. There was then Rappresentanze Sindacali di Base (RdB) which was a confederation of rank-and-file local unions formed in 1987. Subsequently, in 1992 the RdB participated in the constitution of the united national confederation CUB, also named RdB-CUB.21 Rank-and-file trade unions are organised in a more horizontal manner (as compared to trade union confederations), place an emphasis on direct action and promote participative democracy (della Porta and Mosca 2007). They also criticise and refuse the practice of social concertation, as employed in industrial relations in the 1990s, where workers, entrepreneurs and governmental representatives engaged in negotiations to adjust income and labour policies through tripartite agreements (Pulignano 2009). The least structured non-institutional political actors that address issues related to labour were social movement groups, mainly involving precarious workers, that emerged both at the local and national levels and in the private and public sectors. These social movement groups were usually strictly linked to specific professions and/or specific workplaces. Examples are the Precari Atesia collective, founded in 2005 within a call centre in Rome, and the RNRP, a national network of temporary researchers employed in Italian universities created in 2004. Both mounted grassroots mobilisations against precarity in the past decade. The fourth type included other non-institutional political actors that addressed contentious issues not directly linked to labour such as political university collectives, and were frequently linked with transnational protests against corporate globalisation, like social centres. The latter are usually formed in abandoned buildings, frequently owned by the state or local public administrations, and occupied by groups of activists in order to have a space to promote underground cultures and offer self-organised services to the neighbourhood in which they are located (Montagna 2007). They emerged late in the 1970s (De Sario 2009; Ruggiero 2000; Consorzio AA STER 1996) and from the 1990s onwards constituted the backbone of radical left-wing `movement scenes' (Leach and Haunss 2009), though a smaller amount of radical right-wing social centres were also founded in the last decade. The four types of political actors engaged in the contentious field related to labour market flexibility had different approaches to the political organisation of precarious workers: institutional political actors tended to adopt a top-down strategy to the development of collective action focused on precarity, while noninstitutional political actors preferred to employ a bottom-up strategy focusing on the direct participation of precarious workers (Choi and Mattoni 2010). When considering the collective level of precarious workers' organisations, some studies

in the framework of union revitalisation see precarious workers as a challenge but also as an opportunity for trade union confederations (Thornley, Jefferys and Appay 2010; Mosco and McKercher 2008; Milkman and Voss 2004). Some case studies in Italy also underline that trade union confederations did include precarity in their political agendas to some extent (Leonardi 2008; Ballarino 2005). Nonetheless, precarious workers often considered them as unable to defend their rights and represent their needs. For this reason, they frequently organised collectively outside established political organisations with whom they had tense relationships. Without dismissing the importance of institutional political actors in struggles against precarity, this book mainly focuses on grassroots political participation by precarious workers in order to analyse how political actors positioned outside institutional political channels were able to organise, struggle and communicate in mobilisations against precarity. In the following section I discuss how non-institutional political actors such as social centres and groups of precarious workers engaged in the organisation of struggles against precarity and interacted with institutional political actors such as political parties and trade union confederations.

33

I!

20 Another radical trade union was the Sindacato dei Lavoratori Intercategoriale (Shc), formed in 2007 from the union of Sindacato Intercategoriale dei Comitati di Base (SinCobas), Sindacato Unitario dei Lavoratori dei Trasporti (SULT), and Sindacato Autonomo Lavoratori Consolari (SALC),In 2010, Shc, RdB and part of the CUB merged and formed a new radical trade union named Unione Sindacale di Base (USB).

The Grassroots Organisation of Precarious Labour

All of the five mobilisations investigated in this book involved mainly social movement groups based on strong participation and lacking structural resources. The common trait was the difficult interactions between the social movement groups that promoted mobilisations, frequently independently and autonomously of more established political actors in the labour realm, and political parties and trade unions that were usually considered as merely instrumental allies to assure the necessary resources in the organisation of mobilisations. Differences with regard to the social movement networks sustaining grassroots protests against precarity were often a result of the territorial level of the mobilisation. At the local level, the strikes at the Atesia call centre in Rome were organised by a collective of precarious workers, the Precari Atesia, without any substantial initial support from other political actors. A similar situation occurred with the Serpica Naro fashion show: a single social movement group, the Chainworkers Crew, organised this mobilisation about precarity.21 These two mobilisations, which were both local and rooted in specific workplaces, revolved around one social movement group that acted as the protest promoter. In both cases, however, a network of supporters which formed around the initial social movement group proved crucial in sustaining the mobilisation.

21 The Chainworkers Crew formed in 1999. For a more detailed history of the social movement group and its approach to political struggles against precarity see Chainworkers Crew (2001).

34

Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Discursive Context and Contentious Field of Precarity in Italy

After Serpica Naro, the false fashion designer, was accepted and registered at the Camera della Moda as a real fashion designer, the Chainworkers Crew was able to construct a widespread and underground network mainly made up of individuals such as activists, independent fashion designers and precarious workers at the Milan Fashion Week. Alessandra,22 a Chainworkers Crew activist, told me how this network was constructed:

was also different from the Serpica Naro fashion show because it was made up of precarious workers with no prior political experience interacting with political actors with longer and more solid political experience. The trade union confederation CGIL already had a presence in the call centre, although many of the precarious workers who established the Precari Atesia collective did not consider it to be representative of their situation. To some extent, the target of the mobilisation was not only the management of the Atesia call centre, but also trade union confederations, considered as an ally of the employer rather than a resource for precarious workers. When the Precari Atesia collective organised strikes and assemblies, it got in contact with other political actors: the radical trade union COBAS and the Assemblea Coordinata e Continuativa Contro la Precarietà.24 Both were composed of more experienced activists. In this case, therefore, the network of relations that sustained the mobilisation was made up of collective actors amongst which the least experienced, the Precari Atesia collective, maintained strict control over the organisation of protests. Unlike the Serpica Naro fashion show and the Precari Atesia strikes, in both the demonstrations against the Ddl Moratti and the Reddito per Tutt* direct action there was no single protest promoter, but a number coming from all over Italy. Various social movement groups and, in particular, a social movement network of student collectives from different Italian cities organised the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti. Some student collectives belonging to the GC, the youth branch of the far left political party PRC, were also among the protest promoters in Rome and other Italian cities, although they presented themselves as grassroots student collectives rather than members of a political party, since the GC often maintained a dialectical position with regard to their political party of reference and many of their members had strong ties with other social movement groups. A national social movement network organised the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions within the context of a national demonstration to support income launched by rank-and-file trade unions. The national social movement network, which styled itself as the GAP, gathered a number of social movement groups that had in previous months organised similar direct actions in many Italian cities. Renzo, an activist from a social centre based in Milan, explained that the social movement groups participating in the two direct actions in Rome had already organised similar protest events on a small-scale basis in their own cities:"

Then the second stage began. The stage for involving others: the self-production, a group of our friends who were creative and also ourselves to produce ... the construction of the structure which was intended to host the fashion show, the bureaucratic side related to permits, then the feast, the DJ, the alcoholic drinks. [ ... ], all this through our contacts, so that someone came to mind, that guy does this, try to ask to him, then you told him the whole story, do you want to participate, yes, ok, and he did his part. Alessandra, like other activists from the Chainworkers Crew'21 explained that the individuals involved in the creation of the Serpica Naro fashion show were friends or acquaintances whose work was linked to the Milan Fashion Week: some were on the Milan Fashion Week staff, while others worked for contractors. The majority of them were precarious workers who had not previously been involved in any political activity, although some of them were connected to the underground fashion culture in Milan, as Carolina pointed out: There was an enlargement and a subterranean vein of small-scale rebellion, which involved many people within and outside the city. They were neither activists nor particularly informed people. They were simply people who experienced not only a series of situations of precarity, but also situations of exploitation. All these individuals acted as essential supporters of the Serpica Naro fashion show and were coordinated by the Chainworkers Crew, which maintained control over the protest event. Friendship ties acquired in the labour sector sustained the involvement of individuals in collective action. Though precarious workers did not share the same workplace, the network of affective relations in their profession functioned as a tool of mobilisation that was sustained by collective actors, but also by individual actors since many precarious workers participated in the organisation of the protest event as individuals with no previous political affiliation. On the contrary, during the Precari Atesia strikes precarious workers overcame their atomisation, exploiting the shared working experience in the same workplace, one of the biggest call centres in Europe at that time. The Precari Atesia collective 22 All names of interviewees are fictional for reasons of privacy. For relevant aggregated demographic features of the interviewee sample see the methodological appendix. 23 See for instance interviews with Michele, Carolina and Tamara quoted later.

35

1

These things are not very organised. Each of us developed a similar model in our territories, which was `we have to demonstrate against precarity and high living costs.' The symbols of high living costs [ ... ] are places of consumption by definition: the big malls. Going to the malls when there were a lot of people 24 This was a coalition of individual activists and activist groups based in Rome formed in 2000. Among its aims was the production and diffusion of information about precarity and the organisation of struggles and campaigns against precarity. 25 See also interviews with Manuela, Oreste and Antonio.

I

36

Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Discursive Context and Contentious Field of Precarity in Italy

consuming and speaking with these people, you develop a solidarity mechanism of collective negotiation [in order to have a discount]. This had already happened in Milan and other places [ ... ]. [About the 6 of November] the choice of the place, of the neighbourhood and the moment was made by those who knew the territory in Rome best. This is the organisational level [ ... ]. You set a time for a meeting [in a place] and then you gather there. That's how it happened for Rome.

The Euro Mayday Parade, and precarity as a contentious issue, was not, however, supported by other rank-and-file trade unions. At least not in the first year it was organised, as Goffredo pointed out:

A similar organisational pattern was seen in the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti and the subsequent wave of mobilisations related to public universities that took place in autumn 2008 and autumn 2010 when social movement groups from many Italian universities travelled to Rome to participate in the same national demonstration after mobilising within their own universities in the preceding weeks. In both mobilisations, protest promoters formed national networks in which all activist groups held a certain degree of legitimacy because of their previous participation in local protest events on the same contentious issue. That said, in the case of the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti, together with newly founded social movement groups, the presence of two existing national social movement networks, the (ex) Disobbedienti network, mostly based on social centres, and the RNRP, based on groups of precarious researchers, helped to diffuse the protest and then coordinate it. With the exception of university student collectives linked to the GC, activists supporting the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti argued that political parties and trade unions were largely absent, even from demonstrations. Institutional political actors usually active in the field of contention related to labour issues were also absent from the Euro Mayday Parade, which was, and still is at the moment of writing, a national and transnational protest event. In 2001 two protest promoters organised the parade for the first time in Milan: the Chainworkers Crew and the social centre Deposito Bulk.26 In order to secure logistic and economic support for the parade, the two social movement groups decided to request the support of the regional section of the CUB, a national radical trade union, as Michele recounts: At that time we opened up to the CUB, saying to them: we have the right idea to face the problem of precarity, we need a ... let's say a `basista', a solid logistic base, if you trust us you will see that you will gain something from this. Obviously, there are no conditions, in the sense that if you trust us, then you trust us and provide your logistic organisational structure to bring the result home. But it is not possible to attach any conditions to this [the parade]. At that time, we have to be honest, they decided to trust us.

26 The Deposito Bulk was a social centre in Milan that ran from 1997 to 2006.

37

The first year, the [Euro Mayday Parade] was snubbed by many of those who dealt with labour issues: trade union confederations obviously, but also rankand-file trade unions, that at the beginning said that this was just a joke, that this was not the way in which the issue [precarity] should be treated, that the issues were open-ended contracts and national agreements. According to this activist, neither traditional nor rank-and-file trade unions supported the parade which was seen as a `joke' rather than a serious means of struggle. Moreover, labour struggles should emphasise issues other than precarity, like open-ended contracts and national agreements. Francesco explained that this happened even with those rank-and-file trade unions that, after some years, began to fully participate in the parade: The clearest example of this was the Sincobas and COBAS more generally. For a couple of years they basically said to us `well, you are completely marginal in the labour market, you are in a transitional phase, then, when you have openended contracts, you will see that labour disputes are done differently, there are traditional unionist methods'. Sincobas [said this], and then at the third parade we had to go and pull them off the floats because they were trying to take the lead [in the parade] the very first time they had even attended ... The controversial and difficult interactions with rank-and-file trade unions did not, however, prevent the original protest promoters from enlarging the social movement network behind the Euro Mayday Parade. The Chainworkers Crew and Deposito Bulk involved more and more social movement groups from a number of Italian cities. Despite national preparatory meetings and the organisational process passing through a national mailing list named Precog, the autonomy granted to each social movement group in the national network was an important characteristic of the Euro Mayday Parade at the domestic level. Goffredo clarified the logic behind this network, dynamic: Usually the assumption was: there is no single subject acting as a promoter and so there are no subjects which adhere, but everyone may act as a promoter of the Mayday, without any differentiation between who arrived later [in the network of activist groups]. [ ... ]. We discussed the best ways to arrive [at the Mayday]. In some cases there was complete freedom, in the sense that each single territory decided their own personal way of arriving. In other cases there was an attempt at coordination through national collective appointments. In other cases there were collective national campaigns, but delocalised in the territories.

Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Discursive Context and Contentious Field of Precarity in Italy

The success of the parade in telius of the numbers of protesters attracted other social movement groups that began to participate in the national network. This, in turn, led to internal competition for visibility in the parade itself. At stake was the `paternity' of the Euro Mayday Parade: the newcomers blamed the original protest promoters for considering the Euro Mayday Parade their own creation; the original protest promoters, in turn, blamed the newcomers for pushing those social movement groups that first had the idea of the Euro Mayday Parade to one side. The `upward scale shift' (Tilly and Tarrow 2007) to the national level also brought along existing cleavages among political actors active at the national level, whether institutional cleavages such as those between political parties and trade unions, or non-institutional ones within social movement networks. 27 In 2004 the parade became transnational, with a special focus on the European level of contention. As a result, the number of protest promoters increased. Social movement groups were locally rooted in different European countries but acted together at the European, transnational level. Preparatory assemblies were organised in different European cities by local social movement groups belonging to the transnational social movement network.28

Milkman 2006). The Italian mobilisations against precarity beginning in 2001 instead frequently took place outside trade union confederations, with branches devoted to precarious workers such as the Nidil, linked to CGIL, absent from all the mobilisations considered in this book. Revitalisation here, therefore, concerns the institution of unionism rather than existing trade union confederations: workers with discontinuous relationships to the labour market as a result of their precarious conditions engaged in the development of `social movement unionism' (Robinson 2002) that went beyond traditional collective bargaining (Mosco and McKercher 2008). For instance, some of the social movement groups and social movement organisations involved in the Euro Mayday Parade constituted the `Punti San Precario', literally `San Precario Points', in a number of Italian cities. These are an example of bio-unionism, which took into consideration the peculiar working and living condition of precarious workers and departed from the notion of precarity as existential and social, rather than simply related to the labour realm. Overall, precarious workers' struggles posed a question of power related to the symbolic realm to traditional trade unionism. Precarious workers, indeed, attempted to construct an imagery linked to precarity beyond the political representation of trade union confederations. An imagery that would be able to bind precarious workers, either employed in the same workplace through individual contracts, as in the case of the Atesia call centre, or from different labour market sectors, as in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade. But grassroots political communication in the framework of mobilisations against precarity went beyond the quest for visibility in societies. Although related to the need of elaborating a new political language to speak with and about precarious workers, this objective also had material consequences at the level of political organisations, since recognising the innovation of discourses about precarity at the symbolic level implied the necessity of elaborating the struggles of precarious workers differently to those of full-time and open-ended workers. In the next chapter I explore how this was achieved.

38

Conclusions In this chapter I sketched the figure of precarious workers and the notion of precarity. I then discussed the discursive context about labour market flexibility that was dominant in Italy till the end of the 1990s and introduced the constellation of institutional and non-institutional political actors that populated the contentious field related to labour market flexibility. Finally, I explained the grassroots organisation of precarious labour by focusing on how social movement groups and social movement organisations interacted in order to promote and develop struggles against precarity at the local, national and transnational level. Non-institutional political actors such as social centres and groups of precarious workers often interacted with institutional political actors such as political parties and trade union confederations, in an instrumental, and sometimes even confrontational, manner. Precarious workers, indeed, had little confidence in the willingness and ability of trade union confederations to represent them. Rank-andfile trade unions, while considered more positively, were still treated with a pinch of scepticism in matters of their strategic and tactical support. In other countries, trade unions are revitalised through the involvement and cooptation of social groups at the margins of the labour market suffering from the lack of political representation, for example migrant (and often casual) workers (Milkman 2000; 27 The main cleavages involved PRC and the national social movement network linked to the post-autonomous area named the (ex) Disobbedienti network, and rank-andfile trade unions like CUB and trade unions like FIOM-CGIL. 28 For instance, in 2005, preparatory meetings took place in Paris and Berlin.

39

Chapter 3

The Construction of Precarious Subjects in Mobilisations Against Precarity

Introduction The Precari Atesia collective organised its first 24-hour strike on 12 May 2005. Call centre operators gathered in front of the entrance of their workplace, taking turns to speak into a megaphone to explain their working conditions and express their claims during a spontaneous assembly. Staying on the premises of the company was useful to make contact with other precarious call centre operators, since working times and spaces among activists belonging to the Precari Atesia collective were seldom shared. A banner near the building entrance read `Precari Atesia on strike break ', underlining how the strike assumed a peculiar meaning for precarious workers with temporary contracts that rendered them formally able to manage their working time but in reality obliged them to take on precise shifts. A second 24-hour strike took place on I June 2005. Precarious workers continued to protest to improve their working conditions and, in particular, to shift from temporary to part-time or full-time open-ended contracts. During the strike, one activist from the Precari Atesia collective was interviewed by a journalist working for the alternative news agency Amisnet. He pointed out that the Precari Atesia collective was self-organised, autonomous and independent from trade union confederations. Indeed, the protesters also targeted trade union confederations, blamed for not representing the interests of precarious workers employed in the call centre. The Precari Atesia collective illustrates some significant aspects of precarious workers: the lack of common working space and time; the peculiar meanings that protest strategies and tactics usually employed by open-ended workers assume for precarious workers; and the difficult political relationship with trade union confederations. As pointed out in the introduction, precarious workers are not only at the margins of the labour market, but are substantially excluded from the welfare state and are seldom represented at the political level. The primary challenge of Italian grassroots mobilisations against precarity was the elaboration of a composite political subject able to act at the public level to express claims and demands. But it was also to construct, discursively, precarity as a political category able to define a plural condition of life that unites precarious workers belonging to different labour market sectors in Italian mobilisations against precarity. These processes first occurred through the organisation of struggles outside of institutional political channels. But they also took place through

l'~

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Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Construction of Precarious Subjects

the intertwining of grassroots political organisation with grassroots political communication. Before looking at this intersection by analysing activist media practices, in this chapter I discuss how Italian social movement groups attempted to move beyond the atomisation characterising precarious labour and to engage in a process of social and political recomposition related to precarity. In this chapter I look at the meso-level of collective action to analyse the formation of political subjectivities with regard to the spaces of struggles and the places of work, the mobilisation of resources, the implementation of repertoires of contention and the creation of political discourses in protests against precarity.

its anonymous forecourt into a place where precarious workers could speak about the decisions of the company and, more importantly, could share the experience of being a precarious call centre operator. This improvised space of struggle provided precarious call centre operators with a space and time to begin the construction of those social ties necessary to organise further protest events. The presence of a common space of conflict was also important to the Euro Mayday Parade. Social movement groups active in transnational protests against corporate globalisation were able to produce or reinforce mutual understandings, and share political interpretations and trust among activists that subsequently engaged in mobilisations against precarity at the national and transnational level. In 2003 when the Euro Mayday Parade was still a regional protest event linked to the social movement milieu of Milan and Lombardy, some social movement groups from other Italian regions such as the Strike, a social centre based in Rome, participated in the parade because of pre-existing connections with activists in Milan.' The organisation of a transnational Euro Mayday Parade relied greatly on the presence of ties among activists from a number of European countries that had been established due to common involvement and participation in counter-summit demonstrations in Prague (against the World Bank in 2000), Nice (against the European Summit in 2000), Naples (against the Global Forum on E-government in 2001) and Genoa (against the G8 in 2001) and in the European Social Forums (ESF) in Florence (2002), Paris (2003) and London (2004). This cycle of protest constituted a common terrain for the social movement groups sustaining the Euro Mayday Parade. The reason the 2004 Euro Mayday Parade was organised in Milan and Barcelona was that Italian and Spanish social movement groups were already in contact due to existing ties between activists, created at other protest events, as Francesco explained:

The Spaces of Struggles and the Places of Work Precarious workers are fragmented, isolated and atomised. Even when they share the same working time and space, they experience a contractual individualisation that makes it difficult to think about common struggles and collective bargaining. In Italian businesses in the early 2000s, moreover, precarious workers were not amongst the priorities of trade union confederations and left-wing political parties. Social movement groups mobilising against precarity were at the margins of the political arenas dealing with labour issues. As a consequence, grassroots political actors willing to engage in mobilisations against precarity had scarce structural resources (Williams 1995), especially with regard to material resources like economic capital and socio-organisational resources, like political infrastructure (Edwards and McCarthy 2006). Precarious workers were, however, able to overcome their lack of structural resources through a twofold revisitation of the notion of place as related to conflict and work. As for the spaces related to conflict, struggle created significant opportunities for the organisation of subsequent mobilisations and the construction of precarious workers as a political subject. As for the places related to work, precarious workers mobilising against precarity were able to exploit the `excess of sociability' (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008) by using informal networks of relations that precarious workers created in their diffused and multiple workplaces. The Spaces of Struggle In the Precari Atesia strikes, precarious workers in the call centre had limited opportunities to discuss their concerns about their working conditions. Divided into four different shifts and subject to strict controls during their working hours, precarious call centre operators had difficulties establishing social ties at work. Some of them began to meet informally in the room used for breaks where they shared their concerns about working conditions within the call centre. When in May 2005 the company decided to decrease the workers' pay per call without any prior discussion with employees, the call centre operators organised a spontaneous assembly directly outside the call centre building. They transfoirned

43

The Euro Mayday Parade was born through an intermediate step; that is a very strong relationship which we constructed over the past years with activists from Barcelona, who we met during the Genoa protests while running away from the police. Then they did things in which we were very interested. [ ... ] Some of us went to Barcelona and we got to know each other better. We invited them to our university where we organised some initiatives. The relationship was getting closer and closer, so that there was an intermediate Euro Mayday Parade with Milan and Barcelona, then the next year it was natural to include other cities and the network was born. As Francesco says, these ties were first established in a situation of strong emotion since activists were `running away from the police' during a particularly confrontational counter-summit. As noted about the counter-summit in Prague (2000), these kinds of protest events enact and amplify powerful emotions which transform into affective solidarity among protestors and create `affective ties' 1 See also the interview with Francesco.

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Media Practices and Protest Politics

among activists (Juris 2008a) that, as Federico's story suggests, may last long after the protest event itself and create the basis for future collaborations and the diffusion of protest through `direct channels' (Kriesi et al. 1995). After organising in Milan and Barcelona in 2004, social movement groups from Milan organised a discussion about precarity at one of the `autonomous spaces' in London during the ESF (Juris 2005).2 This was the `Beyond the ESF' autonomous space at Middlesex University, in which a variety of `antiauthoritarian and anti-capitalist' groups participated and discussed five themes, one of which was `precarity/casualization' (Juris 2005, 267). The debate was intended to facilitate the building of a transnational network of activist groups already protesting against precarity in their home countries. The practical outcome was a joint declaration and a call for action, commonly known in the social movement milieu as the `Middlesex Declaration' (Euromayday Network 2004) to render the Euro Mayday Parade a transnational day of protest against precarity. In the following months, two preparatory meetings of the new transnational social movement network, named the Euro Mayday Parade network, took place in Paris and Berlin. Even in this case, then, collective action created important physical spaces in which activists met, discussed and eventually committed to a common transnational network: as in the movements against corporate globalisation, `it is largely through collective praxis, rather than discursive unity, that political alliances are forged' (Juris 2008a, 65). At the national level, prior collective action linked to precarity played a similar role in the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti and in the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions. In the latter, the development of similar kinds of collective actions at the local level created and reinforced affinity and mutual understanding among the various social movement groups that eventually joined the same national network. Similary, the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti was the final step in a longlasting mobilisation against public university reform that had started in 2004. During this first wave of protest, temporary researchers working in universities played an important role in conferring visibility on the problem of precarious employment in the public higher education sector. Protest events organised in 2004 kick-started a debate about precarity in the knowledge sector by linking it with issues such as the quality of education, the structural transformation of universities and, as a consequence, the living and studying conditions of university students. Precarious researchers from a number of Italian universities, moreover, decided to create the RNRP, a national network of precarious researchers. This network 2 In 2002 the first European Social Forum took place in Florence. In the following years it occurred about once a year in different European cities: Paris in 2003, London in 2004, Athens in 2006 and Malmo in 2008. As the years went by, more and more grassroots activist groups accused the European Social Forum of being too institutionalised, not horizontal in its organisation and not radical enough. For this reason, they organised a parallel forum that occurred in the same city as the European Social Forum (Agrikoliansky and Sommier 2005), such as that organised by the WOMBLES in London in 2004.

The Construction of Precarious Subjects

45

was also active in the second wave of the struggle against the Ddl Moratti in 2005 which culminated in the national demonstration after a three-week occupation of La Sapienza University in Rome. The occupation of La Sapienza University is another example of the creation of a temporary common space for precarious researchers and university students. Together with the nearby neighbourhood of San Lorenzo,' La Sapienza became a place in which social movement groups could discuss the organization of other protest events. During the night, moreover, the organisation of cultural events attracted thousands and thousands of young people living in Rome. According to the activists who promoted the protests, these public events facilitated participation in the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti since they courted the attention of undergraduate university students that were not directly engaged in the organisation of the protest event and involved them in the mobilisation.4 For instance, Aldo, a university student who participated in the struggles against the Ddl Moratti in Rome explained: [As for] the thousands of students who came to the demonstration, the party counted more, this is true, because they did not read it [the mobilisation] in the newspapers and did not see it on the television news. But they saw it in the faculties, we lived it there. They did not see Indymedia, because this was a tool that mostly activists used and that maybe a lot of students began to use while they were occupying the faculties. Aldo underlines the fact that public events happening in the physical space of La Sapienza University allowed the bypassing of mainstream media in communicating with potential protesters, and contributed to socialising university students and younger activists in the use of the alternative media that activist groups usually employed to communicate and organise their protests. As during the occupation of universities in past cycles of struggle (Passerini 1996), collective action changed the use of a physical space usually devoted to other tasks performed by university students (such as attending classes and taking exams), transforming it into a space of communication where the political content of the mobilisation was mediated and became accessible to the less politicised. From a different perspective, collective action brought the `movement scenes' (Leach and Haunss 2009) to physical spaces different to the usual social centres and this shift seemed to further increase the capacity of movement scenes as `a gateway to active engagement in the movement' (Leach and Haunss 2009, 270).

3 San Lorenzo is a neighbourhood with a strong anti-fascist tradition. During the 1960s and 1970s, also due to its geographical position, it became a centre for university students and counter-cultures which still continues to this day. 4 See interviews with Antonio, Mario, Roberto and Aldo.

P:

Media Practices and Protest Politics

46 The Places of Work

Three of the mobilisations considered in this book were rooted in the service and knowledge labour market sectors and, specifically, involved three different workplaces: a call centre (Precari Atesia strikes), a university (mobilisations against the Ddl Moratti) and the fashion industry (Serpica Naro fashion show). The Serpica Naro fashion show addressed precarity within the fashion industry, an important labour market sector in Milan, the economic capital of Italy. Similarly to many other knowledge industries, precarious workers employed in the fashion industry engage in the continuous production of social relations that are functional to the sustainment of the fashion industry itself (Ardvisson, Malossi and Serpica Naro 2010). Interactions with other (precarious) workers create social networks in which friendship and fellowship often overlap, creating affective ties that sometimes survive the strong competition within this labour sector (Ardvisson, Malossi, and Serpica Naro 2010). Though precarious workers in the fashion system do not share the same physical workplaces, they certainly partake in a large portion of the diffused and immaterial places of production formed by these social networks. The organisation of the Serpica Naro fashion show was possible due to the existence of these social networks which connected precarious workers belonging to the social movement group Chainworkers Crew and precarious workers employed at the Camera della Moda, the institution which supervises and organises the Milan fashion week. The cooptation and appropriation (Edwards and McCarthy 2006) of the knowledge produced and accumulated within the fashion industry passed through these social networks, as Alessandra pointed out when explaining how the Chainworkers Crew organised the early stages of the protest event which consisted of the creation of a fake fashion designer: The interesting and important thing is that before performing our actions, we study, we do intelligence work, and we try to understand where we have advantages, our strong points. What does it mean to have strong points? To have particular information, to know how the circuit works, to have people who work in certain places or newsrooms. Due to the cooptation of precarious workers employed by the Camera della

The Construction of Precarious Subjects

47

show. In this case, the Chainworkers Crew involved precarious workers employed at different levels in the fashion sector, as described by Carolina: This was the context in which we had a lot of help from so many people who worked in the [fashion] environment. For instance, the red line on the catwalk was given to us by a person who worked in a chain store and who tools it from this chain store's depot. People really far away from us who, perhaps through friends and a scattered conspiracy, gave us ... even 50 disposable paper cups! In this case the cooptation of precarious workers was relevant for appropriating specialised knowledge to prepare the fashion show, and also for acquiring the necessary material resources, for example equipment, to render the fashion show as convincing as possible. While the appropriation of resources through the cooptation of precarious workers was crucial for gaining access to material and informational resources, the Chainworkers Crew also appropriated the latter by using the web: activists shaped the identity of the false fashion designer from the collection, analysis and reinvention of material that real fashion designers published on the web: to manage this, the activist group relied on the presence, among its activists, of some highlyskilled precarious workers employed in the communication sector, establishing a connection based on solidarity between precarious workers active in two different, though related, labour market sectors. In this case cultural resources were already internal to the social movement group since activists used the knowledge they had developed as precarious workers in the communication sector to appropriate other kinds of resources. The work that precarious workers did in terms of social network construction and specialised skill development within the fashion and communication industries, thus, led to `a four of politics which is not already absorbed into the regime of precarious life and labour' (Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos 2008, 281). In other words, the knowledge and competencies precarious workers had acquired in their work time and place were transferred to the time and place of struggle.

The Innovation and Broadening of Repertoires of Contention

Moda, according to Alessandra, the Chainworkers Crew had access to the knowledge necessary to create a fictional fashion designer who would meet the requirements established by the Camera della Moda, information that only those working within the institution would generally be aware of The right infolniation and knowledge about the internal dynamics of the Milan Fashion Week were the cultural resources necessary to develop the media hoax. Cooptation also helped the Chainworkers Crew to develop the `informational resources' they needed to carry out this collective action (Cress and Snow 1996, 1095). Once Serpica Naro, the fake fashion designer, was accepted and registered in the Milan Fashion Week, another important task was to organise the setting of the Serpica Naro fashion

One ofthe challenges that precarious workers, willing to organise collectively, must face is the reinvention of the modern repertoire of contention that characterises workers' movements (Brancaccio et al. 2005). Repertoires of contention are, indeed, based on the identities of protesters and the social linkages that bond them in a mobilised collectivity (Tilly 2006a). The emergence and diffusion of precarity contributes to the fragmentation of workers' identities, both at the individual and the collective level. In reorganising the space and time of production, moreover, precarity also changes the social linkages amongst precarious workers. The fractures that precarity provokes in the labour realm also put into question some of

4

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Media Practices and Protest Politics

the traditional forms of protest the workers' movement had employed in the past to improve working and living conditions. Strikes, pickets and demonstrations continue to exist as means through which precarious workers express their claims at the public level. But they frequently assume different meanings and, also, change some of their traits. Precarious workers mobilised on precarity in Italy were familiar with and sometimes even socialised to the usual repertoire of contention adopted by workers' movements. At the same time, however, they were also familiar with and sometimes even socialised to the repertoire of contention employed in transnational struggles against corporate globalisation, including counter-summits This twofold familiarity (Tilly 2006a) contributed to shape the repertoire of contention adopted during mobilisations against precarity in Italy. The modern repertoire of contention of workers' movements was, therefore, both innovated and broadened: innovated because forms of protests usually adopted by full-time and permanent workers, like strikes, were revisited and acquired a different meaning in the hands of precarious workers, and broadened because forms of protest employed in the transnational mobilisations against corporate globalisation, like the parade, were also used as a means of struggle by precarious workers. In some cases, mobilisations about precarity revolved around contentious performances that were already part of the contentious repertoires of labour movements. The Precari Atesia collective, for instance, organised strikes and pickets at the entrance of the Atesia call centre, two contentious performances which are part of the contentious repertoire that workers have commonly used to address employers (Tilly and Tarrow 2007). The adoption of a familiar contentious performance also took place in the case of the struggles against the Ddl Moratti, which culminated in a national demonstration in Rome. Demonstrating in the streets is a modern form of protest that has been employed by a wide range of social movements, including workers' movements. Though more confrontational and still less accepted as a means of claims making, direct actions are also a wellknown format for protest in the social movement milieu (Carter 2005). Those carried out in the Reddito per Tutt* case consisted of two direct actions: one in a supermarket and another in a bookshop, during which activists bought goods at symbolic prices in order to protest against precarity and high living costs. Though different in many respects, these direct actions recall those performed during mobilisations organised by the youth movement in 1977, where the so-called autoriduzione, a direct action that saw the self-reduction of prices of goods, was widespread (Lumley 1990). These three mobilisations present quite common contentious performances — strikes, demonstrations and direct actions — that have been widely used, tested and refined in past mobilisations on a range of contentious issues. To label these contentious performances as common means that they were familiar, recognisable and well-known performances within the repertoire of contention usually used by workers' movements, youth movements and student movements, but the very experience of being a precarious worker rendered these contentious perfoi wances

The Construction of Precarious Subjects

49

less usual than they first appear. This was particularly evident in the case of the Precari Atesia collective. After a first spontaneous assembly of precarious workers

outside the Atesia call centre, activists from the collective decided to strike. This is a fairly common contentious performance that workers adopt to improve their working conditions. But precarious workers from the Atesia call centre were not traditional workers. Their contracts were contratti a progetto, contracts based on a specific project, according to which they were supposed to manage their working hours and days autonomously in order to complete the project. Their employer did not, however, respect this contract and forced precarious workers to act as regular employees with strict working hours. According to the contract, then, the precarious workers were not on strike: they were simply not working the hours that the employers had allocated to them. Ironically, what the Precari Atesia called a strike was in fact the strict application of their duties as established in the contracts they had signed when hired. There was, then, the use of a familiar contentious collective action, the strike, in a working context different from those with full-time open-ended contracts. The adoption of a quite standard method of struggle by a category of workers for whom being on strike had a completely different meaning, thus, highlighted the contradictions linked to their illegal situation. The same form of sciopero pignolo, a form of work-to-rule strike, occurred in recent mobilisations against economic cuts in Italian universities, also linked to struggles against precarity in Italy. In the 2010 wave of protest, for instance, both permanent and, to a lesser extent, precarious researchers refused to hold lessons and exams which were not tasks they should perform according to their contracts although, de facto, precarious researchers were and still are massively employed to perfolni these tasks basically for free in Italian universities. The decision to be `unavailable' for free labour had significant consequences for the normal functioning of universities, especially in autumn 2010 when many undergraduate courses had to be cancelled as a result of the protest. Although the sciopero pignolo is not a prerogative of precarious workers, this form of protest was able to underline the contradictions of precarity in the higher education sector and call centres. The redefinition of the meaning of strike is still an important issue for precarious workers. During a series of three public meetings held in 2010 and 2011, named `General Estates of Precarity', several social movement groups and social movement organisations from all over Italy discussed how to organise a `precarious strike'. The aim of the discussions, still ongoing at the moment of writing this book, was to reinvent the strike, starting from the working and living conditions of precarious workers. This, in order to transform this modern contentious performance into a form of struggle that precarious workers can use to reclaim their rights. The two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions also demonstrated a certain degree of innovation. Though linked to the repertoire of contention adopted by the Italian youth and student movements in the 1970s, the two direct actions were very different to those prior contentious performances. The contemporary contentious performances did not include tactics of physical violence against individuals or physical objects. Activists asked for a price reduction and consequently a

4

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Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Construction of Precarious Subjects

negotiation with the supermarket boss. These direct actions were oriented towards the symbolic and expressive side of protest: activists attempted to involve ordinary consumers in the direct action which was intended to be highly communicative. Moreover, the extensive use of the San Precario icon and the ironic metaphor of the `miracle' that the patron saint was going to carry out characterised the two direct actions as radical theatrical perfomiances rather than simple `proletarian expropriations'. In the words of Giacomo, for instance, the direct action that occurred during the morning in the Panorama Mall was:

ourselves without any mediation and with energy and potency, not in a way that only expresses the fact that we are overwhelmed by rotten luck every day.

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[ ... ] The action of precarious people who self-organised themselves and speak while they act. Therefore, there are megaphones to say some things, that pass from hand to hand, there is a negotiation with the managers of the supermarket, there are flyers, there are hundreds of people, there are the banners, there are the sticker cards ... this is communication [...], this is a situation, a collective dynamic that speaks in a direct way. As Giacomo pointed out, precarious workers `speak while they act' and the entire situation was a communicative event directed towards the people in the mall and the journalists present. The move towards the symbolic, communicative and expressive levels of protest innovated contentious perforrances of the past within current social, cultural and political contexts: while the link with repertoires of contention of the past still existed, the nature of the contentious perfoitriances changed in their means and ends. Repertoires of contention presented a certain degree of innovation with respect to the past contentious performances of workers' movements. But they were also broadened due to the specific political culture of the social movement groups mounting mobilisations against precarity. The Euro Mayday Parade, for instance, was a sort of carnival where various floats equipped with sound systems played different genres of music, from reggae to techno, followed by people dancing and parading at the same time. The choice to have a parade, evoking a carnival, a feast and a rave at the same time, was novel with respect to traditional First of May demonstrations in Italy. Trade union confederations usually organised two public events to speak about workers' rights: one big national demonstration in an Italian city that changed each year, and a number of smaller demonstrations all over Italy; and a massive free concert held at the San Giovanni square in Rome and broadcast live by national public television. The social movement groups that first set up the parade chose this format exactly because they wanted to be perceived as different from trade union confederations, as Michele explained: When we thought about this we said to ourselves that we wanted to construct a public moment in which one says yes, I am precarious, but there are a lot of us and ... it is not that we are jinxed. We are precarious, there are a lot of us, and we want to overcome this condition, to organise ourselves. We are able to represent

51

The collective construction of floats, the use of different kinds of music during the parade and the achievement of a joyful atmosphere were intended to construct a positive image of precarious workers and to show their ability to represent their own situation without the political mediation of trade union confederations, whose demonstrations many activists involved in the Euro Mayday Parade considered `sad' rallies in which workers are depicted as simple `victims'. The parade, on the contrary, was a sort of carnival revolving around music and iconic representations of precarity. As Michele underlined, moreover, it was also a matter of attaching positive emotions to the parade: joy expressed through dancing bodies was opposed to the sadness of orderly demonstrations. The presence of emotions during demonstrations is, indeed, an important means to develop further the creation of a collective `we' (Eyerman 2006). During the Euro Mayday Parade, the creation of a moment in which positive emotions could be expressed through the bodies of protesters was a way for precarious workers, whose working and living conditions usually differ greatly, to bond. Participating in the same parade, then, fostered the creation of a common sense of belonging based on the agency of precarious workers. The choice of the parade was the result of the involvement of the original organisers of the Euro Mayday Parade in radical Italian youth movements, social centres and transnational protests against corporate globalisation. For these social movement groups it was quite natural to think about the parade as a contentious perforinance to give visibility to precarious workers, as Michele also recalled: That was the mechanism that crossed everybody's mind in order to represent ourselves without using the stylistic elements of the traditional demonstration: the throng, the banners, the slogans. Since the group [of activists] that was organising these things was a group that had no intention of recalling those mechanisms of self-representation, which were already old and rather outdated, the only way we thought of doing this thing was to have a parade. Therefore, the trucks, the dances, the music, the ability of communicating in a more accessible form, different from the slogans cried in ears. This kind of contentious performance was, indeed, strongly embedded in the global justice movement, which uses carnival demonstrations extensively as contentious performances (St John 2008). From protest parties organised by Reclaim the Streets during the 1990s in Great Britain, to transnational sieges at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), European Union (EU) and G8 summits in many cities all around the world, the global justice movement has frequently employed this kind of contentious performance in recent decades (St John 2008). For the organisers of the Euro Mayday Parade, therefore, choosing a carnival instead of a traditional demonstration was a means to engage in collective

Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Construction of Precarious Subjects

identification processes (Casquete 2006; Eyerman 2006; Juris 2008b) by affirming their connections with the cycle of struggle against corporate globalisation and, at the same time, differentiating themselves from trade union confederations. What the parade mirrored was the composite nature of the precarious worker as a political subject. It was able to meld various political traditions and protest styles and became a sort of container in which each activist group could express its struggle against precarity through the contentious performance it considered most suitable. In 2004, for instance, just before the parade some activists groups performed a series of direct actions, pickets named `adopt a chain', used to speak about precarity outside commercial chain stores and malls open on 1 st May which mostly employed precarious workers. During the parade, some protesters attacked banks, temporary employment agencies and other symbols of neo-liberalism, which were blamed for introducing wide-scale precarity within contemporary societies. At the same time, activists dressed in pink were playing and dancing samba and radical unionists marched with their flags. When the Euro Mayday Parade shifted to the transnational level in 2004, the parades in other European cities maintained their own features so as to mirror the differences in the working and living conditions of precarious workers in each country. Each national network of activist groups organised a parade and/or other protest events named Euro Mayday Parade. This linked the local parades to the others taking place around Europe, stressing a common belonging to the same transnational social movement network and in this way marking the existence of a shared transnational mobilisation about precarity. However, unlike the demonstrations and sieges against the WTO, the EU and G8 summits, and unlike transnational activist meetings such as the ESF, where social movement groups and individual activists from a number of countries met and protested at the same time and in the same space, the Euro Mayday Parade culminated in a common day of struggle, May 1 st, in a number of cities all over Europe. While the timing and the type of contentious performances were more or less the same, the physical spaces in which they occurred were different. Social movement groups involved in the Euro Mayday Parade seemed to have partially overcome their lack of common space through the creation of a net-parade reinforced in both 2004 and 2005. Molleindustria, a website specialising in political video-games and linked to activist groups based in Milan, invented this action to reinforce the idea of a shared collective identity at both the national and transnational levels, as Oscar pointed out:

slogans against precarity.5 The net-parade became the space in which the avatars of activists from all over Europe converged to parade together against precarity. The 2005 version stressed the European dimension even more, as the virtual floats were also links to the websites of activist groups involved in the transnational social movement network that sustained the Euro Mayday Parade. The Serpica Naro fashion show was linked to repertoires of contention not usually associated with workers' movements. Participating in the official Milan Fashion Week with a fake fashion stylist was a performance linked to the practice of culture jamming, a set of contentious performances that many activist groups have used in past decades, and rooted in the Situationist International, an artistic avant-garde movement born in France at the end of the 1950s (Plant 1992). Culture jamming acts at the symbolic level of dominant cultural codes with the explicit aim of subverting them (Dery 1993; Jordan 2002; Cammaerts 2007b). Culture jammers occupy the media environment, and many of the actions that may be grouped under the label manipulate existing media in order to impart a subverted message to audiences. This tradition was also present in Italy where, from 1994 to 1999, the Luther Blisset Project, a name used by multiple activists, performers and artists to organise media hoaxes, was active (Bazzichelli 2006; Bazzichelli 2010). At the end of the 1990s two artists and activists belonging to the Luther Blisset Project named 0100101110101101.ORG succeeded in enrolling the fake contemporary Slovenian artist Darko Maver at the 1999 Biennial International Art Exhibition in Venice (Bazzichelli 2006; Bazzichelli 2010). The Serpica Naro fashion show belongs to the same category of media hoaxes: the Chainworkers Crew invented a sham fashion designer and organised the related fashion show both to interfere with the Milan Fashion Week, one of the most important institutions for spreading mainstream fashion all over the world, and to attract mainstream journalists from the general and specialised press to the event and draw their attention to the problem of precarity in the fashion system.

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To some extent, there was a need to give visibility to this identity, to this new class that is not a class, and the virtual demonstration had to be a collective representation, a multicoloured mosaic that would also be able to give aesthetic visibility. It was a collective representation. The official website of the parade hosted a net-parade joined by thousands of people who constructed their own personalised avatars and invented their own

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The Discursive Construction of a Political Category Social movement actors usually engage in the development of alternative systems of meaning (Melucci 1996) and articulate new ideas and knowledge about societies (Eyerman and Jamison 1991). Mobilisations of precarious workers also aimed to construct apolitical category, precarity, and apolitical subject, precarious workers. This was an important task to achieve considering the dominant discourses in Italian society at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s, when social movement groups began to mobilise against precarity in an extensive manner One of the primary objectives of mobilisations against precarity, therefore, was definitional work to overcome neo-liberal narratives about flexible workers, and to move beyond the elaboration of precarity as a neutral sociological concept to 5 Net-protestors were 17,166 in 2004 and about 4,800 in 2005.

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measure the objective conditions and positions of individuals in the labour market (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008). In this vein, mobilisations against precarity contributed to the discursive construction of precarity as a political category by starting from the individual and collective experiences of precarious workers. In particular, social movement groups engaged in reflecting on the definition of precarious workers as a composite political subject, and assigned precarity political relevance, especially in the formulation of solutions and proposals to overcome constant conditions of uncertainty and instability. Precarious workers are diverse and plural. The recomposition of precarious workers into a single political subject can, therefore, happen (or not) according to different patterns during collective action, even at the discursive level. The five mobilisations against precarity under investigation cast light on the various manners in which precarious workers defined themselves and attempted to construct precarity as a political category capable of mobilising other precarious workers. In the case of the Precari Atesia, for instance, precarious workers were call centre operators employed on short-term contracts. Without denying the existence of other kinds of precarious workers, activists participating in the Precari Atesia strikes focused on their direct experiences in the call centre. For the workers belonging to the Precari Atesia collective, their struggles were more meaningful than other mobilisations related to precarity since their working and living conditions represented the social subject of precarious workers most closely. In a sense, they considered the precarious call centre operator as the emblematic figure of the precarious worker. The activists who organised the Serpica Naro fashion show also focused on a specific labour market sector, the fashion industry, and, thus, on precarious workers working at the Milan Fashion Week. Unlike the Precari Atesia strikes, however, the Serpica Naro fashion show introduced the gender issue when speaking about precarious workers, whose working and living conditions were considered from the point of view of women. The organisers of this protest event performed a fashion show that spoke about precarity by presenting a series of special clothes intended to help women facing precarity. The entire fashion parade was a visual performance through which activists gendered precarious workers. The outfits addressed problems that women experience while working and that become particularly difficult to manage as precarious workers such as sexual harassment, high stress levels, gender-based discrimination and pregnancy. In the case of the Ddl Moratti, as well as in the subsequent waves of mobilisations in 2008 (Caruso et al. 2010) and in 2010, the focus was also on a specific type of precarious worker: temporary researchers in Italian universities who considered themselves particularly affected by the transformation of the higher public education system and, especially in 2008 and 2010, the severe financial cuts imposed on Italian universities. During these mobilisations, however, precarious workers as a political subject included graduate and undergraduate university students who participated massively in the mobilisations

The Construction of Precarious Subjects

55

all over Italy. Undergraduate university students interpreted their living conditions as precarious, although not in a univocal way. Some social movement groups stretched the concept by thinking about the futures of university students who were almost all potential precarious workers. University students empathised with precarious researchers in the name of an imagined future of widespread precarity. This definition of university students as precarious workers is synthesised in the call for action for the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti, which stated that `specialised and fragmented knowledge produces precarious [workers] who are blackmailable, without rights or contractual power'.' The type of knowledge elaborated and transmitted in Italian universities is related to the type of workers that those same universities will create. As was also stressed by some interviewees, this interpretation of university students as precarious workers was mainly elaborated by those activist groups linked to the GC and, more precisely, the Trotskyist strand within PRC.' Other social movement groups participating in the Ddl Moratti mobilisation, on the contrary, already considered university students to be precarious workers. Assuming that universities were `knowledge factories', many social movement groups linked to the Rete per l'Autoformazione (RA) considered them as places that revolved around the production of knowledge, in which undergraduate university students also participate.' On this subject, Antonio explained that: [University students] are precarious [workers] who already work. It is not that they educate themselves, they are being trained to go to work. They are already working. Therefore, we catch the new dimension of the university as a productive place for both students and researchers. Therefore, assuming that these two figures, both precarious, are both `put to work', means first of all finding the relation between these two subjects. According to the RA, therefore, those conducting research and those studying in universities shared the same condition of precarity at the same moment. Similarly, some high school activist groups that participated in the mobilisation against the Ddl Moratti stressed this point, defining themselves as precarious both as high school students and as future workers. In line with this, Matteo defines

6 Call for action published in Aringoli et al. (2006). 7 See also Aringoli et al. (2006) and interviews with Antonio, Aldo and Roberto. 8 During the mobilisations against the Ddl Moratti, the RA emerged as a loose national network of already existing university political collectives based in both scientific and humanities faculties in different Italian cities, amongst which Rome, Bologna, Padova. RA supported and developed projects of self-educations for and by university students. University poitical collectives supporting the RA positioned themselves in the postautonomous area.

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The Construction of Precarious Subjects

high schools as `temporary employment agencies' that use compulsory internships to place students with external employers who do not pay them.' But precarious workers as a political subject could be stretched in another, opposite direction. Some radical and traditional trade unionists I interviewed, for instance, considered workers with open-ended contracts as precarious workers as well: due to the delocalisation of production to other countries outside Italy, these workers risked expulsion from the labour market on a daily basis, so that even their open-ended contracts were not enough to give them job security. This broad interpretation became even more relevant from 2008 onwards with the global diffusion of the economic crisis. Moreover, precarious workers included those workers with open-ended contracts but no control over the organisation of their working hours, which have become so flexible they have lost the ability to plan their spare time in an autonomous way.10 The Euro Mayday Parade involved a variety of social movement groups and social movement organisations protesting against precarity in different labour market sectors and belonging to different political cultures. It, thus, revolved around the discursive construction of a broad category of precarious workers including all those people with uncertain working conditions and loose enough to resonate with the diverse range of social movement groups and social movement organisations participating in the organisation of the parade. From 2001 to 2006, the calls for action, agreed during preparatory meetings, then reproduced on posters and in leaflets for the Euro Mayday Parade, defined the category of precarious workers in broader and broader terms. In 2001, for instance, precarious workers were described through expressions belonging to established national language such as `atypical', `precarious' and `temporary', and through their working contracts such as the generic phrase `short teriu' or the more precise terms of `job training' and `apprenticeship'." The next year, social movements groups organising the Euro Mayday Parade used a new expression, `social precariat', to address precarious workers as a composite political subject.12 Posters and cards used to promote the parade refined the meanings attached to the `social precariat'. One of the posters used the term `tempworkers', carrying the slogan `These two workers are not identical ... one has his days numbered'. t3 A second poster employed the term `chainworkers', referring to precarious workers employed in multinational commercial chains like McDonalds and Burger King. The third poster used the term `brainworkers', a neologism referring to all those workers employed in

sectors where intellectual skills are more important than physical ones. In 2003 the expression `social precariat' was defined even more clearly in the call for action:

57

The precariat is to post-Fordism what the proletariat was to Fordism: precarious people are the social group produced by the neo-liberal transformation of the economy. It is the critical mass emerging from the everlasting whirl of multinational globalisation, while firms and popular quarters are demolished and office districts and commercial chains are erected. It is the tertiary sector of malls and commercial chains, of services to firms and individuals; it is the cognitariat of information technology and the communication industry. We are all precarious, consciously exploited or treacherously deceived by the flexibility ideology.14

The call for action stressed the similarities amongst precarious workers who all belong to the same `social group' created by neo-liberalism and the `flexibility ideology'. The `social precariat' was, therefore, a political subject constituted by a variety of individuals with different jobs and lifestyles. Other social categories at the margins of the labour market may be included in the `social precariat' such as unemployed people, students and migrants. The latter, in particular, were one of the emblematic figures of precarious workers due to Law 189/2002, more commonly known as the Bossi-Fini Law after the two ministers who proposed it. This law linked Italian residence permits to employment contracts. For this reason the majority of migrants in Italy at that time lived, and still live, in conditions of great uncertainty.15 At the transnational level, the conceptual category of the `social precariat' was also used, albeit through a European lens. The very name of the parade already suggested this, and the social movement groups sustaining the protest campaign decided to change it from Mayday Parade to Euro Mayday Parade. The use of multilingual posters also signalled this turn in the conceptualisation of the category of precarious workers: the `social precariat' was no longer Italian, but European. In this vein, the 2005 call for action underlined that: Precarity is the most widespread condition of labour and life in Europe today. It affects everyone, everyday, in every part of life: whether chosen or imposed, precarity is a generalised condition experienced by the majority of people. Precarious people are now the cornerstone of the wealth production process.16

9 See interviews with Matteo and Cecilia. 10 See interview with Luca, member of the CUB, and with Domenico, member of FIOM.

11 See 2001 call for action, available at www.chainworkers.org 12 See 2002 call for action, available at www.chainworkers.org. Translation by the author. 13 The term `tempworker' as well as the others introduced in the following lines are used in the original English by activists.

14 See 2003 call for action, available at www.chainworkers.org 15 From 2002 onwards, the Euro Mayday Parade calls for action explicitly addressed this problem and framed migrants as precarious workers. It was only in 2008, however, that the presence of migrants during the parade rose compared to previous years. 16 See 2005 call for action, available at www.chainworkers.org

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The 2006 call for action referred to the anti-CPE movement in France — a massive mobilisation against a legislative proposal related to equal opportunities and, in particular, against Article 8 of the proposal on the first employment contracts for young French citizens under the age of 26 (Obono 2008). The article, also known as Contrat Première Embauche (CPE), allowed employers to dismiss young employees without any reason within a period of three years (Obono 2008). After four months of mobilisations against the CPE, the French government decided to eliminate the article. The successful mobilisation, therefore, became a symbol of all struggles against precarity and within the social movement network that sustained the Euro Mayday Parade. In Germany and Spain precarious workers were strongly associated with migrant issues. Within a common framework of reference, therefore, each city was able to maintain and express the different living and working conditions of precarious workers in different European countries. The European dimension of the parade was, however, sometimes questioned within the transnational network of activist groups who organised it. The most important `frame disputes' (Benford 1993) were related to the recognition of Europe as a political reference space where struggles against precarity should be rooted. On the one hand, Europe was considered a common and fruitful space for struggle, recognising the European Union as a political institution to which protests and claims should be addressed. On the other hand, some social movement groups refused to consider the European space as a field of struggle and stressed their connections with transnational social movement networks against corporate globalisation as a whole instead. The emergence ofprecarious workers as a composite political subject developed in parallel to the elaboration of precarity as a political category, and was dual from a semantic point of view since it was at the same time a challenge to be faced and an opportunity to explore. In the case of the Precari Atesia strikes, in particular, precarity was seen first of all as a social problem, a risk to be taken and a situation to be overcome. This was due to the peculiar situation of precarious workers at the Atesia call centre who claimed to have all the duties of open-ended contract workers without any of their rights and felt exploited by their employer who used short-term contracts in order to pay lower taxes and, thus, make more profit. As for other mobilisations, two elements in particular shaped the elaboration of precarity as a challenge to be faced: one was linked to the material level of individuals' lives, namely `lack of income'; the other was related to the symbolic level of collective representation, namely the `lack of institutional political representation' and, as a consequence of this, invisibility at the public and political levels. The Euro Mayday Parade expressed this concern clearly as early as 2001, when its call for action read: `We are the majority of those who enter the labour market. But we have no voice, we do not exist. Our condition is obscure, suffered in silence and in solitude'." In the same year, the poster explicitly reinforced this sense of `political loneliness' by featuring the famous astronaut Yuri Gagarin with a

speech bubble reading `Mayday, Mayday', the international distress signal. This problem was also present at the transnational level of the Euro Mayday Parade, as the 2005 parade call for action shows: `we are invisible and count for nothing in the traditional foinis of social and political representation or in the European agenda'.'$ According to activist groups mobilised about precarity, therefore, the recognition of precarity as a social problem by institutional political actors was lacking at both the national and transnational levels. Apart from the symbolic level of political recognition and legitimisation, precarity was also framed as a social problem that caused material diseases. The activists and precarious workers I interviewed felt that precarity led to worse working and living conditions as compared to those of open-ended contract workers. Precarious workers lack a stable income and experience a constant feeling of uncertainty. This, in turn, brought other changes, the most important being the difficulties that precarious workers had in thinking about their futures and making long-term life plans. Here, there was a mix between material needs such as the possibility of owning or occupying a stable home, and more intimate desires such as the possibility of having a family. Carolina, an activist who was pregnant when her interview tools place, explained:

17 Source: 2001 call for action, available at www.chainworkers.org.

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It took us 10 years to decide to have a child, for instance. Obviously not only because of this [precarity], but this was one of the things that influenced us most. And now we are having a child ... with blinkers on. In the sense that you say to yourself, well, now we will see what happens. It's not that ... maybe we have more money than before, but the concept has not changed. You just become more kamikaze.

i What Carolina said reflected a common opinion among the women activists I interviewed: precarity was perceived as an even worse social problem when applied to women and, above all, mothers. In this sense, precarity acquired a gendered meaning: since women interviewees argued that being a precarious woman worker was extremely difficult, and that being a precarious working mother was even more difficult to imagine. The elaboration of the `social precariat' as a concept indicating a composite political subject was matched by the development of `social precarity' as a political category referring to a social problem beyond the mere contractual situations of individuals. In the Serpica Naro fashion show, Euro Mayday Parade and Reddito per TWO case studies the expression `social precarity' was used to highlight that precarity concerned various aspects of existence: affection, mobility, knowledge and income. Precarity was not framed as a social problem strictly linked to the use of short-term contracts, but as a more general social condition, a `new for in of life' as Claudio put it in one of the interviews, affecting numerous social categories including students, workers and migrants. The discourses developed in the 18 See 2005 call for action, available at www.chainworkers.org.

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Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Construction of Precarious Subjects

three mobilisations echoes the theoretical reflections of the `critical community' (Rochon 1998) of activists and intellectuals belonging to the autonomous Marxist or post-workerist tradition (see for instance Vimo 2004; Negri and Hardt 2000; Vimo and Hardt 1996) that considered precarious workers as the political subject who experience the double-face of precarity: a source of oppression and a means of liberation for workers at the centre of the post-Fordist system of production (Gill and Pratt 2008; Neilson and Rossiter 2008).t9 With the exception of the Precari Atesia strikes, indeed, social movement groups struggling against precarity also recognised some positive aspects of flexible jobs. Precarious workers, thus, escaped from the victim label and claimed agency over the development of their own life projects. Many activists stressed that precarity or, rather, flexibility could be the result of an active choice made by individuals, and that being a precarious or, rather, flexible worker could be a resource: autonomy and freedom in planning life and work, time, and balancing them according to one's preferences and needs was the most valuable aspect of flexibility. Antonio, for instance, pointed out that: `Flexibility is not simply a negative condition of passivity, of blackmail and suffering, it also has the potential for autonomy, for freedom from the traditional prison of work'. This approach to precarity refutes the construction of precarious workers as mere victims, imparting instead the more positive reading of flexibility. Despite all the negative consequences of being precarious workers, in fact, the majority of the interviewees appreciated the potential linked to short-term contracts, since having more than one job in a lifetime was considered stimulating. The construction of precarious workers as a composite political subject also included claims and demands for change in response to a plural, and yet common, condition of precarity. In the case of the Precari Atesia strikes, for instance, there were concise, material and immediate demands: the main demand was for short-term contracts to be switched to open-ended contracts. A similar situation happened in the case of the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti: since these actions were against the introduction of a particular law, the main target was the Parliament, with Italian deputies asked not to approve the law. Once again, the demand was as concise as the protest target. Both these mobilisations, moreover, asked for immediate changes. In the Reddito per Rat* direct actions and the Serpica Naro fashion show, however, more general claims related to precarity went hand in hand with solutions experimented during the protest events themselves. In the former, precarious workers were constructed as consumers rather then simply the producers of

goods. In line with this, they gained access to goods during two direct actions and redistributed them to others attending the protest event. To some extent, they put into practice a symbolic representation of the solution they had elaborated in order to face precarity: income redistribution. In this way, moreover, they also evolved the claim around which the protest event revolved — as its name suggested: a `basic income' for everyone, distributed as both money and services such as free public transport and low rent homes for precarious workers. In a similar way, the Serpica Naro fashion show put some of the solutions it proposed into practice. Since one of the problems that precarious workers experience is isolation, the development of the sham fashion show in itself provided the opportunity to establish new social ties among some of those employed in the fashion sector. There, the practical and immediate solution was to establish a network of precarious workers or, as the press release claimed, `Putting people and their knowledge together. People and knowledge that are usually networked from above to create and recreate ideological outposts'.20 In other words, the Chainworkers Crew explicitly addressed one of the features that every protest event implies: the creation of social ties among individuals that have similar concerns related to the same contentious issue. The difference was that, in the Serpica Naro fashion show, this outcome was one of the declared objectives of the protest event, which also aimed to reveal the precarious equilibrium on which institutions, firms and enterprises employing precarious workers rest, as Alessandra pointed out:

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19 Pragmatic interactions and theoretical exchanges between activists and intellectuals belonging to the broad post-autonomous tradition were, and still are at the moment of writing, important in the formation of the system of meaning about precarity in Italy. In this chapter, however, I focus on the last stage of this process: the creation and then the diffusion of discourses during protests and through call for actions and other social movement artefacts.

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In two words, this is to render more precarious those who render us more precarious. In the sense that if you render us more precarious, we can render you more precarious. Because when you propose an awful work contract to me, you can't claim my loyalty. Because the absurd thing is that they also ask this of us, not only that we work ten hours per day, but also that we be loyal. But precarity has a price.21 Alessandra summarises one of the most important aspects of the Serpica Naro: the creation of a temporary world in which it was possible for precarious workers exploited in the Milan fashion week, to connect, to use their knowledge for a common cause and to reveal the intrinsic fragility of their employers. Both the Reddito per TWO direct actions and the Serpica Naro fashion show represent instances of `prefigurative politics' in which collective action renders the solution protesters are fighting for possible (Epstein 1991; Polletta 2002). Activist groups experienced, on a temporary basis, how their lives would be if their protests succeeded. 20 See press Chainworkers 2005 press release about the Serpica Naro fashion show, available at www.chainworkers.it. 21 In Italian, the first sentence was `precarizzare i precarizzatori', a slogan that immediately evoked one of the most important aspects of the collective action frame related to the Serpica Naro fashion show.

Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Construction of Precarious Subjects

During the Euro Mayday Parade a protest campaign developed over several years and two geographical levels, the claims varied according to changes occurring both within and outside the social movement milieu. From 2001 to 2002, for instance, the calls for action expressed general claims against precarity without any precise protest target, while from 2003 onwards one of the demands of the Euro Mayday Parade was the abrogation of Law No. 30/2003 which introduced several forms of short-term contract, including on call jobs and job sharing. Social movement groups considered the abrogation of the law a prerequisite for improving the working and living conditions of precarious workers. This dynamic was similar to that seen in the Precari Atesia strikes and the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti. Transformations occurring at the legislative, social and political levels usually activate social movements that react to change and propose new solutions. On the whole, however, the Euro Mayday Parade went one step further. Instead of simply reacting to legislative and political changes, activist groups proposed innovative solutions to precarity, asking for `new social rights' for precarious workers and the introduction of a `basic income' in Italy.22 The expression `new social rights' refers not only to basic working rights such as maternity leave, but also to other social rights which may be grouped under the umbrella term `access rights'. The claims expressed in the Euro Mayday Parade addressed the right to (access) public transportation, to a home and to knowledge. The fulfilment of these `new social rights' together with the introduction of a `basic income' was the pivot of the new welfare state system that precarious workers demanded through the parade. Changes at the level of welfare state measures, instead of the reintroduction of generalised open-ended contracts, was the solution that the Euro Mayday Parade proposed in order to maintain the positive outcomes of having a flexible contract whilst neutralising the negative outcomes of being a precarious worker. When the Euro Mayday Parade shifted from the national to the transnational level, Europe was also considered as a political space in which claims could be elaborated and diffused. Even though a national call for action focusing on Italy continued to be made, claims acquired a more transnational meaning. In 2004, for instance, social movement networks organising the parade at the transnational level asked for `European equality', `European social rights' and the adoption of the European directive on temporary workers.23 Something similar happened in 2005, when the call for action read:

FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT for migrants and INCOME SECURITY FOR ALL as fundamental steps toward a truly social Europe.24

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We demand social equality for all, the end of labour precarisation and all forms of flexploitation, after two decades of labour market deregulation which have caused diffuse poverty and NOT reduced unemployment. We demand

22 See calls for action 2004 and 2005 available at www.chainworkers.it. 23 See call for action 2004, available at www.chainworkers.it.

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As stressed in the call for action, the issues at stake included not only precarity, but also the construction of `a truly social Europe', and migrants, besides being precarious workers, were also included among those who should have the right to `income security'.

Conclusions

This chapter discussed how social movement groups struggling against precarity mobilised outside the institutional channels of political representations in Italy. Involving atomised, precarious workers at the margins of the labour market and excluded from the welfare state, social movement groups were able to engage in processes of political organisation and symbolic production at the local, national and transnational levels. Mobilisations became the collective venue where individual precarious workers could express their anger, make their demands and feel part of the same social subject. The five mobilisations also attempted to elaborate a composite political subject able to represent itself outside traditional political channels, and to define precarity as a political category interpreting a new form of life in Italian society and beyond. In discussing the mobilisation of resources, the forms of protest and the creation of discourses about precarity, I pointed out the peculiarities of this political subject positioned at the margins of labour. As for mobilising resources, social movement groups were able to overcome the physical and symbolic fragmentation of workplaces, seeking to develop solidarity ties between precarious workers in order to organise collectively. In this sense, precarious workers infiltrated and subverted precarious living and working conditions, transforming themselves from passive victims into struggling agents. Moreover, social movement groups employed spaces of conflict as a means of recomposition of atomised precarious workers who met in the streets, squares and buildings where protests took place. The analysis of forms of mobilisation showed that precarious workers innovated and broadened the repertoire of contention commonly related to conflicts between employers and employees, assigning new meanings to old forms of protest, like the strike, and including contentious performances extensively employed in other social movements, like the parade. Finally, social movement groups engaged in the elaboration of common discourses that presented precarious workers as a composite, yet inclusive, political subject and precarity as a political category that stretched beyond the realm of labour to include reflections on the new forms of life to which this working condition led. An important step was the elaboration and construction of an imagery that showed precarious workers as an emerging political actor able to organise 24

See call for action 2005, available at www.chainworkers.it.

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I

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Media Practices and Protest Politics

outside the channels of institutional political representation. In the case of the Precari Atesia, this was also accompanied with a victory in the struggle with the management of the call centre. Parallel to contentious performances, the Precari Atesia collective engaged in an autonomous learning process about the Law 30 so as to grasp their own situation at the legal level as well. The result was the creation of a dossier distributed among precarious call centre operators, and, also, the beginning of a legal action against the call centre management. The Precari Atesia collective, indeed, pushed for an enquiry by the competent governmental body, the Labour Inspectorate, in order to state the unjust application of short-term contracts and force the management to hire workers on an open-ended basis. The Labour Inspectorate enquiry actually declared the illegal and unjust application of short-term contracts in the call centre in August 2006. This legal victory was, indeed, important. But the particular strength of the assemblies and strikes that the collective of precarious workers organised lay especially in the construction of relations amongst call centre operators in order to share experiences and produce common struggles within the company. Again, Milanese social movement groups sustaining the Euro Mayday Parade also acted at the legislative level, since they were able to organise a local social movement network that sustained a popular legislative proposal on the introduction of basic income at the regional level — although ignored by the regional government. These attempts signalled a willingness to move beyond contentious politics and infiltrate Italian governmental bodies with proposals that emerged in the framework of mobilisations against precarity such as the proposals for a basic income. But the basic income, as a potential solution giving agency to precarious workers with regards to labour market flexibility, was elaborated and then shared due to the mobilisation of precarious workers at the national and transnational level. This provided the time and space to produce shared imagery about precarity. In this chapter I showed that demonstrations, strikes, rallies, occupations and other contentious perfonnances take place at the public level and, as such, they work as the media through which social movement groups spread their messages. But grassroots political organising intertwines with grassroots political communication: the construction of political subjects and political categories, the creation of alternative systems of meaning and discourses and the elaboration of material and immaterial demands are sustained through communication within and beyond the social movement milieu. This is certainly true for all social movements, but even more so in the case of mobilisations against precarity that can be defined as `classification struggles' (Bourdieu 1991; Goldberg 2005; Chun 2009) aiming at developing and diffusing a new semantic of temporary workers. Italian precarious workers, indeed, attempted to be visible and have a voice in a discursive context where labour flexibility was the dominant narrative. The next chapters will address how grassroots political organisation and grassroots political communication intertwined in the making of Italian mobilisations against precarity.

Chapter 4

Reflections in the Mirror: Media Knowledge Practices

Introduction Activists involved in the Serpica Naro fashion show succeeded in their media hoax because they knew the mechanisms behind the Milan Fashion week well. But they also had a comprehensive understanding of the news-making process in mainstream media organisations. In particular, they were aware of some news values that rendered a fact newsworthy from the perspective of mainstream journalists: violence for instance. The Chainworkers Crew, therefore, went so far as to orchestrate a dispute between Serpica Naro and some social movement groups based in Milan who blamed the fashion stylist for exploiting precarious workers to produce her clothing line. The slogan used was `San Precario against Serpica Naro'. Social movement groups organised parallel demonstrations against the Milan Fashion Week and, in particular, against the events of two Italian fashion stylists Laura Biagiotti and Prada. Activists strategically used these protests to announce further protests against Serpica Naro and gain media attention, proposing exactly those stereotyped images of social movement groups that the mainstream media usually employ. The fashion show was the moment when this type of contentious performance was, to some extent, dismantled. In front of journalists, police and specialised audiences the `old style' demonstration outside the fashion show got under way, while Nadja Fortuna, the fashion stylist's sham public relations officer, announced that 'Serpica Naro does not exist'. The Serpica Naro fashion show illustrates that social movement actors know the mechanisms and processes that characterise the media environment. As subjects of grassroots political communication, social movement actors are positioned within the media environment where they initiate, develop and respond to communication flows related to specific contentious issues. The media environment is not, however, a neutral space of interaction. Activists attach meanings to and develop knowledge about subjects and objects that populate it. And they do this from specific positions and roles. Activists are audiences of media organisations and outlets. They consume a wide range of media contents, from mainstream television news to alternative informational websites (Rauch 2007). Activists are also producers of media content and messages. They frequently engage in the creation of messages spread through alternative media and they also increasingly employ ICTs to create their own weblogs, websites and profiles on social networking sites. Activists are sources of news on mobilisations for media

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professionals. Especially during the visible stages of mobilisations, they provide their own interpretations of struggles to journalists who consider social movement actors as a source of information when protest events and campaigns occur. Social movement actors, therefore, have a threefold role in the media environment when considering instances of grassroots political communication, since they act as news audiences, news producers and news sources before, during and after mobilisations. It is from this threefold position that activists elaborate their own understanding of the media environment as a whole and develop attitudes and expectations with regard to specific categories of media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals. Theories developed within the social movement milieu usually receive scarce attention in the social movement literature (Cox and Nilsen 2007). This is also true when considering knowledge developed about the media environment. Social movement actors, however, produce meanings and interpretations while interacting with the media environment, since they reflect on their own actions and the broader context in which they are inserted (Melucci 1982). As social practices in general, therefore, activist media practices rest on the production of perceptions and knowledge about the broader context in which and with which social actors interact (Savolainen 2008; Reckwitz 2002). Social movement actors, indeed, elaborate `lay theories' concerning mainstream media organisations (McCurdy 2011) and the media environment in general. This chapter starts from activists' perceptions of media subjects and media objects so as to unfold and compare what social movement actors know about the media environment and how they render the power relations that characterise media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals visible. In doing so, this chapter illustrates how activists deconstruct the `media frame', frequently transparent and hence considered natural by nonmedia people (Couldry 2000). Activists involved in Italian mobilisations against precarity showed a high degree of self-reflexivity with regard to the media environment. In particular, during interviews they engaged in `meta-talk' (Ferree et al. 2002) about media organisations and outlets in which they evaluated the media environment as news audiences, news producers and news sources. In this regard, activists extensively engaged in media knowledge practices defined as activist media practices related to the development of knowledge about the media environment. As a result, social movement actors developed partial semantic maps of the media environment, including a set of assumptions, predispositions and attitudes towards different categories of media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals. In this chapter I discuss the ways in which activists perceived the media environment, and to what extent they recognised media organisations and media outlets as valuable social actors to be taken into consideration when engaging in protest activities. I first introduce the general characteristics that activists struggling against precarity in Italy assigned to the media environment in which they acted. I then discuss activists' interpretations and explanations of visibility within mainstream, radical

left-wing and alternative media. Finally, I shift the focus to how activists developed knowledge about the media environment.

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Perceptions of the Media Environment

Activists depicted a media environment including mainstream media outlets, referring in particular to quality daily newspapers and alternative media, thinking especially of online alternative informational websites directly connected to the social movement milieu. But they also considered radical left-wing daily newspapers and weekly magazines as crucial. Neither mainstream nor alternative, these media were depicted as both political and media actors that maintained a continuous, though sometimes difficult, relationship with the social movement milieu. Activists tended to match specific channels of communication with certain categories of media. They associated radical left-wing media organisations with daily newspapers but not with television news, despite the fact that the television news TG3 is traditionally close to left-wing traditions due to the process of `lottizzazione' in Italian national television broadcasting, according to which management appointments for the three public television channels was distributed amongst governing and opposition parties (Ortoleva 1995, 64). When referring to radical left-wing media organisations, however, this was not particularly surprising, since in Italy these are mainly found in the printed press sector, a result of the strong party press tradition and of the fact that in past cycles of protest social movement groups founded newspapers and radio stations that, where they survived, are nowadays no longer `alternative' in the strict sense. Activists usually associated mainstream media with the so-called `quality press'. They often mentioned the two main national quality newspapers: la Repubblica and Corriere della Sera, and not only when explicitly asked about them during interviews. On the contrary, they seldom mentioned television news and never referred to radio news during interviews. The dominance of the printed press over other kinds of media such as radio and television, appears to be in contrast with the high degree of `media pragmatism' (Barker-Plummer 1995) that characterises social movements struggling against precarity, as I will show later in this chapter and the following one on relational media practices. Radio and television news, indeed, enjoy much larger audiences than the printed press in Italy, traditionally poor in readership (Roncarolo 2002, 72). This is probably due to the fact that activists regard the mainstream quality press and radical leftwing newspapers as an arena of competition where social movements contend with other political actors in order to impose their own alternative representations of contentious issues and social problems (Ferree et al. 2002; Champagne 1990; Gamson and Wolfsfeld 1993). The press, in addition, may allow activists to explain in more detail their reasons and claims since it uses longer written texts rather than the shorter spoken declarations that radio and television news broadcast.

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Finally, according to activists, alternative media mostly develop through ICTs and, among these, web-based applications in particular. To a lesser extent, activists also mentioned radio among the alternative media they relied on: both traditional FM radios and new digital radios streamed through the internet. Activists seldom referred to the press, with the exception of some alternative magazines, and never mentioned television. This, however, does not mean that video, pictures and other visual means of communication were absent in mobilisations against precarity. On the contrary, they played a very important role since they enriched narratives about mobilisations, particularly in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade. These visual materials were, however, frequently diffused online, where the textual, spoken and visual levels of communication combine in a variety of ways. The overlapping of web-based applications and alternative media in the development of perceptions about the media environment was due to generational and political differences amongst activists. Unlike younger activists and those who were members of social movement groups, those activists who worked in more structured social movement organisations, like rank-and-file trade unions, and older activists considered alternative media important but, at the same time, outside their cultural and political traditions. In other words, they stated that their activist groups were not directly involved in using or creating them. They explained that they relied on other means of communication instead, such as face-to-face interactions between workers and unionists, leaflets and other infoiination devices. Every means of communication, however, can be understood as an alternative media when it conveys a radical message (Downing 1984): leaflets, posters and even the body when used to communicate in face-to-face interactions, therefore, actually qualify as alternative media. From this point of view, when activists produced and distributed a leaflet, they were engaging in an alternative media practice. According to the activists themselves, however, this was not the case, since they associated alternative media with ICTs and, in particular, a variety of web applications. In sum, a twofold media environment dominated by two types ofinedia channels, the press and web-based applications, emerged from the analysis. Mainstream and radical left-wing media spread through the former, while alternative media overlapped with the latter. In the construction of this media environment, activists also considered radio, although it seems to play a marginal role as a media channel, and never considered television. Bearing this representation of the media environment in mind, the following sections explore in more detail the outcomes of knowledge media practices with regard to mainstream media, radical left-wing media and alternative media.

media, considered as constraints that frequently led to pictures of mobilisations against precarity that were unsatisfactory, if not damaging, for social movement groups. In other words, the perception of mainstream media was almost uniformly negative amongst activists: even when they told of positive experiences with journalists employed in mainstream media organisations they stressed the fact that these were exceptions confirming the general rule. On the whole, the analysis of activists' meta-talk revealed two axes of interpretation, regardless of the protest event in which activists participated. On the one hand, activists considered mainstream media as particularly biased due to their tight connections with institutional political actors, including trade union confederations, seen as having a vested interest in denying the relevance of struggles against precarity managed by social movement groups outside institutional political channels. On the other hand, activists considered the newsmaking process at work in mainstream media organisations as a constraint for social movements leading to the misleading coverage of protest events. What counted most in that process was the set of news values and routines that journalists applied, rather than the political connections of the mainstream media outlet as a whole. Activists, therefore, made inferences about actual journalists and news routines rather than about media organisation as such.

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Mainstream Media as the Unfriendly Press Misleading representations, lack of information and the misunderstanding of discourses related to contentious issues as framed by social movements: these are the problems that activists usually stressed when they spoke about mainstream

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The Political Intervention of Mainstream Media

Activists perceived mainstream media as politically biased due to connections to institutional political actors with strong interests in conveying misleading representations of mobilisations against precarity. The Italian media system is indeed marked by strong political parallelism and `deep integration' between journalistic and political elites (Roncarolo 2002, 73). Professionalisation, moreover, is low in comparison to other media systems such as those in Anglo-Saxon countries (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Roncarolo 2002). The lack of separation between facts and opinions is one of the most important characteristics of the media system in Italy and other Mediterranean countries such as Spain and Greece, where mainstream media have strong roots in literature and politics, two fields in which many journalists worked in the past and where the stress lies more on expressing opinions than reporting facts (Hallin and Mancini 2004). Activists involved in mobilisations against precarity were highly aware of this feature of the Italian media system and considered the boundaries between mainstream media and institutional political actors to be blurred in many cases, as Giacomo stressed: [Mainstream information in Italy] is low on intellectual honesty, for sure, in the sense that it doesn't do a journalistic job. [ ... ] Clearly, there is no will to find the famous news, to understand, to report objectively. That is, there is no objective news and then a separate opinion on it, which is a legitimate thing. There is a direct shift to opinion. So a newspaper article is written with politicians'

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opinions and with the journalist's opinion, which clearly follows the editorial line of the newspaper.

following other institutions. Antonio, for instance, links the content of mainstream media texts with the judicial standpoint:

While Giacomo pointed out the lack of objectivity, Sandra depicted journalists as `press agents' and mainstream media as the `press offices' of political parties and other institutional political actors according to which `the game of the big declaration is more important than the reason why something happens or what is happening. This also occurs when demonstrations take place'. The development of this kind of perception of mainstream media was strongly linked to the tension that activists experienced as protest participants able to compare protest events in which they had participated with mainstream media coverage of them. In each of the interviews this theme emerged strongly when speaking about mainstream media. This was particularly evident in those interviews on the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions. Mainstream media depicted these protest events in a negative way, linking them to far more violent direct actions that had occurred in past cycles of protest. The contentious perfomiance was interpreted through the lens of the `proletarian expropriations' that occurred in the 1970s. Reading mainstream media texts about the protest event was an unpleasant task for activists. As direct witnesses, they framed the protest events as radical forms of civil disobedience without any form of violence, while as media audiences they were expected to reframe the protest events as highly violent actions that reminded readers of the most stigmatised wave of protest of the recent past in Italy. Oreste recalled reading one particular article published by the national newspaper la Repubblica:

The subsequent judicial proceedings, which were repressive judicial proceedings, reproduced the media criminalisation mechanism, since the 39 [activists] who were sent to court were prosecuted for aggravated robbery. [ ... ] It was an action carried out without wearing masks and called on the media. Calling on the media, that was really different in comparison to the 1970s. Without using menacing tools or tools intended to cause fear among those who managed the supermarket. Instead, I repeat this, despite this novelty, the media and the judges tried to tread on this thing. Exactly because that very action caused a crisis event in the mechanism of mediation with political parties.

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There was a picture, I remember it very well, one of the classic pictures, but in that case it was much more powerful because they used that picture of the demonstration in Milan. The famous one, with a kid shooting in the middle of the street. This picture immediately takes you back to the `anni di piombo', to political violence. [The two direct actions] were very radical demonstrations, but there was no violence in that sense. So, it was quite a dirty trick from this point of view. According to Oreste, the picture was not published by chance. It was, instead, a dirty trick' designed to support the depiction of protesters as extremely violent by evolving a past cycle of protest usually associated with violent contentious performances. Visual devices employed in mainstream media, indeed, are often challenging for activists because images, including photographs, may suggest a misleading interpretation of social movements in a powerful and direct manner (Ryan 1991, 105-109). Many activists that participated in the two Reddito per TWO direct actions went a step further in their meta-talk about mainstream media texts. They judged them as responsible for what they named a `criminalisation mechanism' against mobilisations about precarity and, in particular, against all those direct actions similar to that in Rome that had taken place in many Italian cities in preceding months. Mainstream media criminalised activist groups,

This quote sums up the interpretation that many of activists I interviewed shared, whether directly affected by judicial proceedings or not. As in many other cases, a big difference between the direct and mediated experiences of the protest event was underlined. This quote also suggests that activist groups consider mainstream media as social actors in the strict sense, more than as a space in which various social actors speak about contentious issues. A subtle connection was made between mainstream media, judicial power and institutional political actors. A sort of network of intentions, if not relations, that aimed to portray activist groups as criminals rather than as political actors legitimately struggling for their rights. This process was defined by Giacomo as an `accusatory theorem' whose `pillar' was the mainstream media. A similar process occurred with regard to the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti. That day, thousands and thousands of activists peacefully occupied the Montecitorio Square in front of the Parliament where members were discussing and eventually adopted the Ddl Moratti. Although the demonstration was not authorised to enter the square, protesters were able to reach the destination without physical encounters with the police. Only a couple of brief scuffles occurred before and after the demonstration, when a small group of activists returning to the train station clashed with the police. As I point out in Chapter 6, mainstream media covered these clashes and emphasised them. Antonio attributed a specific role to mainstream media coverage: `Social conflict was translated into a mechanism of social alarm. So, into a mechanism of either criminalisation or production of fear'. Mainstream media were seen as powerful institutions that played an active role in society and made a substantial contribution to the mechanism the activist named the `criminalisation of the movement'. There is another perspective on how activist groups perceived misleading mainstream media coverage. According to many activists I interviewed, indeed, it was exactly because precarious workers were recognised as valuable and important political actors that the mainstream media depicted them in the `wrong' manner. The misleading representation of mobilisations, therefore, was due to the fact that struggles against precarity actually addressed a relevant social problem at the

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political level that they had to be eclipsed at the public level. This contrasts with what other scholars interested in social movements and mainstream media have found. Molotch, for instance, argues that for activists, `media coverage means that what they do matters to the world' (Molotch 1979, 73). The contrast between these two perceptions is probably due to differences in both geographical and historical context since Motloch is speaking about US movements in the 1960s and here we are dealing with Italian movements of the present time. As a consequence, media systems and media environments are also dramatically different. In the Italian case, for instance, the existence of connections between mainstream media and institutional political actors explains why activists considered the lack of mainstream media coverage as a sign that their mobilisations were a relative success. As Goffredo said when speaking of the Euro Mayday Parade, `[it] grew so much that someone told them [mainstream media] not to give so much importance to the parade. In the trade union environment, in fact, the parade was not considered in a real positive way'. The leitmotif was, in short, that mainstream media covered (or failed to cover) mobilisations against precarity in a `political way'.

restaurant on the parade route. The local sections of the Corriere della Sera and la Repubblica spoke of a violent parade which left a lot of damage. Speaking about this fact, Sandra blamed journalists for following the wrong `news logic':

The News-making Process Activists also looked at the ways in which media professionals, and journalists in particular, worked in newsrooms. They considered the news-making process and the underlying news values journalists relied on as another problematic issue to be faced. At a general level, according to activists, journalists looked for the `big declaration' to report and were constantly in search of a `story to tell'. The focus on these features, according to Manuela, contributed to biased mainstream media coverage: Since they are not able to understand what is going on, the easiest thing is to find a story ... that is, journalists have this thing that a story has to be in there, something to say that could be carried on until you have another story to tell. And it is more difficult to go ahead and understand what is actually happening.

Journalists missed a real understanding of the protest event and the `what' of the news. The presence of strong news values overshadowed other aspects of protest events that activists considered to be much more important. This was also the case where mainstream media showed their intention to report protest events in a more comprehensive way. With regard to the Euro Mayday Parade, some of the activists I interviewed recognised this attempt. In mainstream media texts it was indeed possible to see that journalists had distinguished between the parade and the demonstration organised by trade union confederations. Despite this effort, however, activists also noticed that the focus was on those actions that gave room for negative representations of the parade. For instance, during the parade in 2004 a small group of activists physically attacked some banks and a McDonald's

Other things are overshadowed since the amount of time on the television news or the amount of pages in newspapers are limited and so according to the news logic it is worth more to say that a stone was thrown at a McDonald's and then to give an account of what was going on. However, in the realm of the, let's say, true, not alternative, information, it can happen that they forget to explain why all that occurred. This is always left behind.

Activists were also aware of some of the structural limits that social movement scholars have pointed out when speaking about mainstream media coverage of protest events, including the presence of a limited amount of time or space in mainstream media outlets, named the `news hole' factor in the literature (Oliver and Maney 2000, 470) leading to a lack of understanding of the reasons behind presumed violent actions. Activists considered the representation of the Euro Mayday Parade as a violent protest event to be strictly linked with the focus on some actions within a broader context of mobilisation. In other words, the `logic of damage' (della Porta and Diani 2006) appeared to be at work even in those protest events in which physical violence against objects was not the rule, but the exception. According to activists, written or spoken texts were not the only means used to detach some details from their wider contexts. As seen above in the case of the Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade, mainstream media also frequently used pictures in order to synthetically depict the whole protest event from what Cecilia called `irrelevant things': The day after the only pictures that were published on the newspapers were of the only two crackers thrown, perhaps even before the parade, between morning and afternoon. Really irrelevant things in a context like the Mayday with all its actions and instances carried out in the parade. They were sporadic events just to say `these are the autonomous, the violent ones'.

Critical readings of media texts that led to explicit tensions between direct and mediated experiences of protest were also the basis for understanding the problematic role of another selection criteria that journalists frequently applied: apart from the relevance that violence holds as a news value, activists considered `novelty' as another factor that could increase the likelihood of receiving mainstream media coverage. This applied, for instance, to the Serpica Naro fashion show case, which was a highly communicative and certainly unexpected form of protest. According to Sandra, for instance, this type of protest event really matched what mainstream media journalists consider newsworthy:

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It was a really clever thing, because the newspapers followed it and the day after it was covered by nearly all the newspapers. But it was clever because of the way in which the normal media reported it. Since it was a really calm and communicative action, it had the opportunity to communicate all the reflections which were behind it.

actions, the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti and the Euro Mayday Parade from 2003 onwards) Concerning the latter, Oreste remembered that in 2004:

Despite this, some of the activists involved in the organisation of the protest event considered that the mainstream media coverage was not completely satisfactory. The very nature of the Serpica Naro fashion show, a media hoax, obscured the discourses that activists wanted to render public. As Carolina said, in mainstream media `the space devoted to the hoax was at best 60% and at worst 70% — and in many cases 95%'. Something similar happened, according to activists, some weeks before the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti, when students and precarious researchers occupied many faculties of La Sapienza University. This occupation involved thousands of people who participated in a variety of public events that activists organised during the day and night. According to Mario, mainstream media gave a misleading representation of what was going on: `There was the intentional will of the mainstream media to not take it [the university occupation] seriously. That is they didn't want to cover it or, if the worst came to the worst, they reported it as a cultural event'. The fact that social movement groups organised concerts, theatrical perfoiutances and other cultural events was certainly one of the aspects of the occupation. According to activists, however, these events were also an important means of political communication and socialisation. Mainstream media tended to ignore these aspects. In the literature about social movements, the organisation of massive demonstrations with large numbers of protesters is considered a positive factor for social movements: a huge number of protesters legitimises the activist groups that organise the protest event and, in turn, the contentious issues they raise. There is a correlation, moreover, between numbers of protesters and the likelihood a social movement will provoke real changes in society and influence policy-makers (De Nardo 1985). This `logic of numbers' is also useful to create a sense of belonging to `something bigger' and more important than daily individual life (della Porta and Diani 2006, 173). Finally, the size of a demonstration is one of the factors that seems to increase the likelihood of a protest obtaining media coverage (see for instance McCarthy, McPhail and Smith 1996; McCarthy et al. 2008). Activists involved in Italian mobilisations against precarity, however, perceived mainstream media to be uninfluenced by this `logic of numbers'. In other words, they did not see any positive correlation between huge numbers of protesters and the likelihood of receiving media coverage, and seemed to reinforce this perception in light of mobilisations against precarity. Three of the case studies under investigation, in fact, involved large numbers of protesters: the two Reddito per Tutt* direct

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Though 100,000 people were on the streets in Milan, the television news didn't mention anything about that, the public television news on the national channels. Nothing. That struck us a fair bit, because you say: good heavens, there are 100,000 people in the streets and nothing seems to happen! Despite these considerations, the activists seemed to consider the presence of high numbers of protesters as an objective per se, rather than a means to attract mainstream media coverage. While this would have been a welcome outcome, it was only a secondary objective. Activists considered the presence of thousands and thousands of protesters as one of the ways in which they could communicate with people, bypassing the misleading media coverage of protest events, and politicians, as Carla explained when speaking about the Euro Mayday Parade: Politicians more and more frequently rely on what the police say [about protest events] and they report the real numbers [of protesters]. It is impossible to deny that [the parade] was really massive. It is evident that other subsequent and collateral actions also worried politicians. Maybe [the parade] did not arrive at the `big audience', since there was a clamorous blackout by the official media. But politicians, they deal with those that are able to bring people onto the streets. Activists, therefore, considered the presence of large numbers of protesters as a relevant means of communicating with actual supporters who participated in mobilisations as well as potential allies or opponents, such as political parties, that observed mobilisations at a distance. In this sense, therefore, social movement groups conceived of large demonstrations as a powerful media in themselves that to some extent rendered mainstream media coverage irrelevant.

The Controversial Role of Radical Left-wing Media Earlier, I showed how activists perceived mainstream media as generally closed and difficult to access for social movements. In what follows, I discuss perceptions related to radical left-wing media organisations and media outlets. Activists recognise this category of media as political actors that develop multiple 1 According to activists, hundreds of protesters participated in the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions; between 50,000 and 100,000 people took part in the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti; and thousands of people participated in the events organised at La Sapienza University, occupied during the weeks before the demonstration. Finally, from 2004 onwards, the Euro Mayday Parade was the largest protest event occurring on 1 st May, and involving hundreds of thousands of protesters.

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interactions with social movement groups and contribute to the elaboration of narratives and interpretations of mobilisations against precarity. That said, attitudes towards radical left-wing media were twofold since they were perceived as open to claims and demands, yet also as problematic political actors: in certain protest contexts, access could be difficult for activists, and some of the interviewees did not take a constructive relationship with radical left-wing media organisations as a given. Radical left-wing media were generally considered as allies because before mobilisations they granted a certain amount of positive and accurate media coverage that contributed to the launch of protest events, speaking about them before they took place. While mainstream media usually promote an inferential framework that foreshadows violence during mobilisations (Halloran, Elliott and Murdock 1970), radical left-wing media helped activists prepare the ground for mobilisation. Matteo, for instance, explained how it manifesto promoted the Euro Mayday Parade in 2004:

completed narratives about protest events which were frequently incomplete, or else missing, in mainstream media texts. Activists also pointed out the possibility of establishing more direct contacts with radical left-wing media journalists than with their mainstream media counterparts. Giuseppe explained what this meant:

For sure, with regard to the Mayday, it manifesto devoted large amounts of space to the parade, in comparison to other newspapers. Even with regard to its launch, not only with regard to journalistic accounts. Obviously, I especially remember how they launched our truck, our mobilisations within the parade. We succeeded in obtaining a lot of space. Even the picture of our truck was published, the one of the pirates assaulting knowledge island. In giving visibility to mobilisations, radical left-wing media constituted an important channel for the `standing' of social movement actors in the media environment (Ferree et al. 2002) since they were represented as legitimate political actors participating in the construction of public discourses about specific contentious issues. During the protests against the Ddl Moratti, for instance, social movement groups promoting the national demonstration were not alone opposing the education reform. The CRUI had also spoken out against the Ddl Moratti. According to activists, this institutional actor, whose view on the reform was dramatically different from that of university students, PhD students and precarious researchers, enjoyed extensive mainstream media coverage of its formal protests. Mirella remembers that this was not the case among radical left-wing media: [They] paid more attention to the reasons of precarious researchers and less

space was dedicated to the CRUI. It was kind of an attempt to carry out a more in depth investigation of the precarious researchers' conditions, about the youngest generations, generally precarious, within universities. This was massively ignored until that moment, even by those media which are more attentive to these issues. Radical left-wing media were allies in that they privileged the point of view of grassroots mobilisations, and also because they expanded on contexts and

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With newspapers like it manifesto or Liberazione, which is friendly press, there is a more intimate, direct relationship on the same wavelength. So, it could happen to me as to everyone else to say to them: we need more space on that now, this should be said because it helps. And we found a certain attention concerning the success of the mobilisation and the message that we wanted to convey. In this case, direct access implies that activist groups have face-to-face interaction with journalists working in radical left-wing media, here defined as the `friendly press', since activists and journalists have more `intimate' relationships than those that activists establish with mainstream media journalists. Overall, activists developed a generally positive perception of radical left-wing media: they actively supported mobilisations, reporting them before they took place and reinforcing the discourses related to protest events. They were, in addition, more open than mainstream media, since activists were able to gain direct access to radical left-wing media through face-to-face interaction with journalists. The construction of radical left-wing media as allies during mobilisations was only one part of the story however. Some activists, indeed, also found their relationships with radical left-wing media particularly difficult. The most conspicuous examples in this sense are the activists involved in the Precari Atesia strikes, who had very negative opinions of radical left-wing media and, in particular, of it manifesto. They stressed that the political linkages of the radical left-wing media made it difficult for certain social movement groups to receive attention. The Precari Atesia collective blamed the traditional trade union CGIL, whose delegates were also politically active in the call centre, for the bad working conditions of call centre operators working in Atesia. According to Sergio and Lorenzo, this influenced radical left-wing media coverage, which depicted the collective in a rather negative manner: [Sergio] There are some journalists that ... we did one thing and they said another. They agreed with the others, the unions [ ... ] [Lorenzo] it manifesto is a little bit peculiar, it's in a rather strange situation. It is not a newspaper with a director who decides, there is no line, there is no owner who decides what should be published and what shouldn't. In theory, those who work there should be comrades, but [that specific journalist] not only is he not a comrade, he doesn't have any comradeship (they laugh). Activists had a clear perception of the political alliances of the radical leftwing media outlet in question, blamed for favouring trade union confederations while ignoring the struggles of the Precari Atesia collective. In a similar vein,

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speaking about the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti, some activists were of the opinion that radical left-wing media overemphasised the presence of certain political actors in the organisation of the protest event while overshadowing others. Antonio, for instance, points out that:

about the protest event at the national level. This was probably due to the different networks of relations established at different territorial levels: these seem to be tighter and unproblematic at the local level, but more dispersed and problematic at the national. On the whole, however, Michele recounted this experience as a typical example of the difficulties activist groups meet when trying to receive radical left-wing media coverage. In line with this, in some cases activists said that it was less time-consuming and more efficient to construct relationships with some mainstream media journalists than to attempt to secure coverage from radical left-wing media. In some cases, therefore, activists elaborated a rather negative perception of radical left-wing media. Although sympathetic in principle, they did not support and/or cover some mobilisations because of their political linkages with other political actors. Overall, activists assigned an apparently contradictory double role to radical left-wing media with regard to grassroots social movement groups, since they acted either as allies or as opponents. Activists often considered radical left-wing media as political actors that actively intervened in shaping the precarity discourse. As journalist Nadia explained, this was a normal problem to be faced:

it manifesto didn't speak about it [mobilisation against the Ddl Moratti] and

when it did, it used as a filter the presumed student union organisations, which don't exist in Italy, except some like the UDU. But in Rome the UDU is formed by five people and doesn't have real followers. In fact, they never launched a demonstration. [ ... ] Liberazione spoke about it [mobilisation against the Ddl Moratti] saying that the youth of their political party were involved in it, as is normal for a political party organ.' Activists explained the quality of media coverage by pointing to the existence of connections between radical left-wing media outlets and journalists with other political actors, like trade unions and political parties. Even when activists had relatively good links with radical left-wing media journalists they encountered some difficulties in receiving media coverage. This happened, for instance, in the case of the Serpica Naro fashion show. Journalists employed in radical left-wing media played an important role in the network of relations that sustained the protest event. Before it took place, some media texts published in radical left-wing media outlets reported on protests against fashion designers during the Milan fashion week and announced forthcoming protests against Serpica Naro. Although the first protests, targeting the two fashion brands Laura Biagiotti and Prada, were genuine, they mainly served to attract journalists to the Serpica Naro fashion show since activist groups announced that she would be their next protest target. Despite the support of radical left-wing media in spreading this news at the local level, Michele complains that: When we organised Serpica Naro, it manifesto didn't publish anything. The day after there were articles published by the `Corriere', `Il Giornale', by everybody. it manifesto had the article in advance, it knew everything in advance because we went to speak with them in the newsroom in advance. And it didn't publish anything. We had to quarrel for a week to have one article published.' In the case of the Serpica Naro fashion show, the social movement group collaborated with radical left-wing media journalists who wrote articles before protest events occurred. But activists had to `quarrel' in order to secure one article 2 UDU stands for Unione Degli Universitari and is a university student association. 3 II Giornale is a right-wing national newspaper founded in 1974 by the journalist Indro Montanelli. At the time of fieldwork and writing, the owner of the newspaper was Paolo Berlusconi, the brother of the current Italian prime minister, media tycoon and industrialist Silvio Berlusconi.

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With movements, the problem always regards who receives more space and why you give more space to someone and less to someone else. Because to some extent it seems you have assumed the political line of a person or a group. Controversies are always about that, while those less political ones, let's say, happen when you don't give space to certain initiatives. It is clear that when a mobilisation is taking place they would like you to write about all the assemblies, all the pickets, all the things they do. While you have only the `shorts', only the little `reminder' and they say to you: `you should have done bigger things', `you should have been more interested in it', `you were not attentive, you didn't follow us'. This frequently happens to me also because I always ask myself `is the reader interested in thisT Because, you know, when you write about these demonstrations, [ ... ] you always risk writing for those who did them. This quote illustrates the point of view of those sympathetic journalists frequently blamed for not having dedicated enough space to mobilisations Here, what was at stake was a complex mix of news values — what the reader really wants to be informed about — and constraints related to the news-malting process — that is the lack of space within a newspaper — which could also be interpreted as a reflection of what the media organisation as a whole thinks about certain protest events. As noted above, however, the fact that radical left-wing media are positioned at the intersection of the journalistic and political realms also led to biased media coverage that was seen as a problem for grassroots activists groups. This was certainly true for Liberazione, linked to the PRC, but apparently also applied to it manifesto, published by an independent cooperative society. Speaking about Liberazione, for instance, Sandra explained that:

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Liberazione gave space to it [the Euro Mayday Parade], because we were in

feel represented by institutional political actors such as trade union confederations and left-wing political parties, and they sought to represent their own claims and demands without any institutional political mediation. Mobilisations against precarity, therefore, questioned representative democratic processes and, therefore, also the role of radical left-wing media, which often represented the point of view of institutional political actors. For this reason, grassroots social movement groups had difficulties obtaining radical left-wing media coverage.

a phase preceding this one. In the sense that PRC was not in government, and PRC, since Genoa [the anti G8 demonstration in July, 2001], has always tried to pin its colours on the movement. It always positions itself as the movement party, always remaining in this game of violence vs. non-violence. In fact, Liberazione published articles in which there was a narration, a report about who was in the streets and then, instead, articles which denounced and attacked those direct actions occurring within the Euro Mayday Parade. Radical left-wing media are the direct mouthpieces of political actors, and political parties in the case of Liberazione. As a consequence, activists perceived radical left-wing media coverage as reinforcing the positions of predetermined political actors at the discursive level, and as selectively supporting mobilisations in which those same political actors were involved, reinforcing their specific collective action frames. Maya, for instance, observed that the Euro Mayday Parade was not covered at the very beginning, and that radical left-wing media `began to push the Mayday when it was taken up by political parties, not when it was simply recognised at the social level.' It was not enough, therefore, for activists to single out a relevant social problem, precarity, and a relevant political actor, precarious workers, to gain coverage in radical left-wing media. It was necessary for one or more institutional political actors to enter the network of relations sustaining the mobilisation. In some cases, activists considered radical left-wing media as political actors in the strict sense and, thus, perceived their strong political identities as the main obstacle to gaining recognition. Speaking about the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti, for instance, Mario pointed out that with these media outlets: There is anything but a frank political exchange. That is, you organise agitations against the Berlusconi government and we will follow you. And in fact, they followed us in the last period of the movement. You put into practice selforganisation and so on and we will consider you as too internal to social movements. [ ... ] In our relationships with certain kinds of press a more political relationship occurred. In this quote, Mario underlines that the development of grassroots mobilisations, what he names the `practice of self-organisation', did not fit with the political standpoint of the radical left-wing media outlet in question: being at the margins of the political arena and criticising more institutional political actors through the adoption of different organisational patterns, based on participation rather than representation, led to only partial recognition of mobilisations against precarity. In this line, Mario said that the relationship with radical left-wing media was often `political', meaning that political cleavages related to the forms and content of protests played a role in the recognition of grassroots social movement groups that expressed strong critiques of representative democracy. They did not

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The Voices of Social Movements in Alternative Media The development of alternative media channels and the creation of alternative media texts empower citizens taking part in such processes. In looking for new means through which to express their own voices and desires, citizens play an active role in the construction of their own subjectivities. Rodriguez, for instance, employs the expression `citizen media' to underline the transformative potential of this kind of media and, in particular, the role they play in changing the individuals involved in their production, since citizen media `alter people's senses of self, their subjective positioning, and therefore their access to power' (Rodriguez 2001, 18). Activists involved in mobilisations against precarity, indeed, considered alternative media as more than a means of communication: they were perceived as a means of organisation for social movements and, therefore, as a means of fostering political participation. That said, the analysis points to the presence of two different conceptions of alternative media. Activists often illustrated this point during the interviews by mentioning two alternative media outlets: Indymedia Italy and Global Project. Activists tended to identify themselves with only one of these two alternative media outlets, and to criticise that with which they did not identify. These crossed critiques highlighted the existence of two conceptions of alternative media outlets, both implying some challenging points. Indymedia Italy was, and still is at the moment of writing, based on an open publishing system that grants the anonymity of those who publish articles, comments and other contributions. Global Project, on the other hand, was, and still is at the moment of writing, organised through informal groups of activists that act as decentralised local newsrooms sending their contributions to the website.4 While in Indymedia Italy comments were admitted, anonymous and unmoderated, the Global Project website did not provide for comments. The fact that activists frequently referred to these two alternative media outlets was not surprising. Both played an important role in Italian social movements from 2001 onwards and many of the activists I interviewed were directly or indirectly linked to either Indymedia Italy or Global Project. It is quite normal, therefore, that they spoke about these alternative media outlets and not others during the interviews. In this line, one 4 For a more detailed description of Global Project and Indymedia Italy see the methodological appendix.

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activist labelled both Global Project and Indymedia Italy as `historical media of the movement'.' To some extent, the two alternative media outlets played an important role in organising and communicating transnational protests against corporate globalisation in Italy. The former was the reference point of one specific social movement network, namely the (ex) Disobbedienti linked to the post-autonomous area, and hence worked according to a specific political standpoint. Indymedia Italy played an important role in the demonstrations against the G8 in Genoa in 2001. There is yet another reason that explains why many activists referred to Indymedia Italy: the time I carried out the interviews, between November 2006 and February 2007. In November 2006, Indymedia Italy closed down and a broad discussion via the national mailing list and face-to-face meetings began in order to set up another online platform able to overcome some of the problems it had faced, such as `participation breakdown and the awareness of the Indymedia tool'.' The interviews with activists, therefore, took place at a very particular moment for Indymedia Italy, and many wanted to share their reflections on this alternative media outlet during the interviews. Some interviewees did not recognise the two alternative media outlets as points of reference in mobilisations against precarity. Biographical factors seem to explain this. On the whole, indeed, those who spoke more about Indymedia were in their 30s and expressed their belonging to grassroots activists groups, namely social centres, political collectives and groups of autonomously organised precarious workers. Those who spoke more about Global Project instead expressed their belonging to activist groups linked to the (ex) Disobbedienti network, regardless of age. Those who referred neither to Indymedia Italy nor to Global project, finally, were: either younger or older than those in their 30s and members of social movement organisations like rank-and-file trade unions. With reference to Indymedia Italy, activists considered the open publishing system employed by this media outlet as a powerful tool allowing everyone willing to construct, organise, cover and debate protest events to do so in a simple and direct manner, as Michele underlined:

instance, remembered what happened at the local level of Indymedia Italy in Milan:

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Indy, with all its limits, was a tool which everyone could interact with and offer their point of view about the Mayday. From a certain point of view, this was also its limit because it is difficult to let points of view really different from one another to interact.

At the same time, however, Michele pointed out the difficulties connected to this type of publishing system such as grouping different interpretations of the same protest event or contentious issues. This, in turn, led to a certain level of noise overshadowing the presence of useful infoiniation for users. Goffredo, for

5 See also interview with Oreste. 6 See Italy Indymedia mailing list message posted 19 November 2006.

Indymedia was bom as a free communication tool, expression was not controlled and so on. Then, I don't know anything about other cities, but in Milan it was like a toilet wall. Everyone wrote an insult to someone else and then I received an answer related to its own insult. From this point of view, maybe there is more maturity in some tools than in those who use them. Instead of using Indymedia Italy as a mediated space to share information about mobilisations, users employed it to insult each other. This is of course a situation that also occurs in other web-based applications, such as mailing lists, where users may begin to exchange high numbers of insulting messages, producing noise in the communication channel. According to computer jargon, this practice is named `flaming' and the resulting noise, which disturbs constructive communication among users, is named `flame war', also understood as `vitriolic online exchanges' (Dery 1994, 1). While this practice may be found in many web-based applications, in Indymedia Italy it acquired a specific political meaning since the focus was often on existing political cleavages among activist groups. I, thus, prefer to speak of `political flame wars' when referring to those violent online discussions linked to political issues. According to Michele, in fact, this specific use of Indymedia Italy was due to `the ongoing process of sclerosis in relationships internal to social movements'. As Goffredo also pointed out at the end of the quote reported above, users — not the open publishing system — were to blame for political flaming in Indymedia Italy. Mirella said the same, stressing that: I don't think that there is a limit in the tool. Rather, there are limits in the political relationship [ ... ]. During assemblies there were some potential evolutions and then they ended up with people insulting each other. The same happens on the internet, in the mailing lists, in Indymedia. The difference is that on Indymedia there was anonymity and so everything is even more unpleasant, since you can hide yourself behind an anonymous signature. As Mirella suggested, political flame wars also happened in face-to-face interactions during assemblies and other kinds of movement meetings. The substantial difference, however, was that many web-based applications, including Indymedia Italy, granted the anonymity of the user. This feature probably fostered flaming. Activists perceived this alternative media outlet as a spoiled opportunity for social movements to communicate in a constructive way. While producing meta-talk about Indymedia Italy, therefore, activists also reflected upon intramovement cleavages, seen as a challenging problem transferred to the arena of alternative media and, in this particular case, to the internet. Indeed, the political flame wars and the related production of noise in communication transformed

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Indymedia Italy into a rather self-referential alternative media outlet, as Mirella pointed out:

railway tracks. As Claudio explained, Global Project was a crucial tool in those direct actions:

I think of the experience of Indymedia, for instance the case of Lombardy, which is now closing. It was a place enjoyed by a restricted community; it was a virtual square, in which the same people from a community or those who organised mobilisations, some patterns, met. It was one of those instruments which are used by a specific social and political community. At least, I intended it in this way.

In 2003, to block the trains which carried tanks to the Iraqi war, Global Project was not a network which described movements' actions, but a network which coordinated those car convoys which went to train stations in order to block the trains. Through the radio they knew at what point the train was, where others were and where a block was needed.

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The presence of political flame wars reinforced this sense of the `virtual square', in which users continued and reinforced existing offline quarrels and clashes among activist groups. At the same time, however, Indymedia Italy was a public website where everyone could see the ongoing discussions and clashes. According to Renzo, this had negative consequences on how other social actors perceived social movements: Because it was very much used in a negative way [by mainstream journalists], since newspapers articles which condemned the movement frequently took the Indymedia garbage and used it like a political bulletin of the movement. I don't know if it was positive or not, but in the end the only effect was that many people knew that Indymedia was there. The usually private dimension of `intra-movement disputes' (Benford 1993) was transferred into the internet in the form of political flame wars which were subsequently quoted out of context by mainstream j ournalists and used as valuable material to describe activist groups and their activities. In this case, therefore, content created within the social movement milieu was able to spill over the boundaries of alternative media and become part of mainstream media texts. While this process is usually considered positively, the example above shows that this is not always the case. Sometimes, indeed, the migration of alternative media content to mainstream media can have negative consequences on social movement groups. The second model of alternative media was Global Project. One of its slogans is `actions that produce words and words that produce actions', as a couple of activists also recalled during interviews.' The meaning of this slogan became clearer and clearer as I interviewed people directly or indirectly involved in Global Project, considered a powerful tool for the promotion and construction of mobilisations. A typical example is how activists used the Global Project website during the mobilisation against the Iraqi war in 2003. After the Italian government decided to support the USA, a variety of protest events occurred all over Italy. Among others, many activist groups joined direct actions named `TrainStopping', which consisted of physically blocking trains carrying war materials by occupying 7 See interviews with Claudio and Biagio.

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More than simply reporting direct actions, then, Global Project functioned as a means of coordinating various activist groups which moved along the trains' paths in order to block them. Activists involved in Global Project, thus, perceive it as a tool to organise mobilisations instead of simply communicate them. The point of the outlet, therefore, is not for everyone to express a point of view about a certain protest event. In line with this, Global Project is not an open publishing online platform, but included contributions from many social movement groups based in various Italian cities, such as Padua, Bologna, Naples and Milan. According to Barbara, this was the substantial difference between Indymedia and Global Project in narrating protest events: Indymedia was constructed more by single individuals who posted materials about what they experienced [during the protest event], various impressions, but it was less a collective construction related to the before and the after [of protest events]. In this quote, Barbara implicitly compares Indymedia Italy and Global Project, in which she was directly involved. In doing so, she conveys her conception of the `collective construction' of alternative media texts, absent in Indymedia Italy because individuals rather than social movement groups posted their own `impressions' of protest events. Here, the sum of individual reports about one protest event, imparting multiple viewpoints on the same topic, was not perceived as a truly `collective construction', also because it took place after the protest event. On the contrary, the media coverage provided by Global Project was collective from the very beginning: these were not individuals but activist groups producing media texts about protest events, both before and after they occurred. The fact that Global Project did not employ an open publishing system avoided the development of noise in communications, and no flame wars like those taking place in Indymedia Italy could occur. Activists who did not participate in Global Project, however, raised some critiques of this alternative media outlet. They blamed it, in particular, for representing protest events only from the specific point of view of certain activist groups, without including other standpoints related to mobilisations. Michele, for instance, stated that:

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Global Project spoke about the Mayday by filtering it through the political positions which it represented . It did it well, since reports by Global Project are well done, but they only represent one piece of reality. This is part of the problem related to communication structures belonging to an area versus means of general communication.

shows. According to activists, however, other people outside the social movement milieu sometimes became temporary audiences for alternative media outlets. This happened at particular moments such as when a protest event involved a high number of protestors and/or was highly visible in the mainstream media. Activists based this assumption on the number of hits their websites received and, also, the discussions that developed about specific protest events in alternative media outlets such as Indymedia Italy. In short, media knowledge practices developed from relational practices with media texts (objects) and media professionals (subjects) as I illustrate also in Chapters 5 and 6. They were not, however, exhausted in these direct interactions. Apart from the valuable role of activist experience related to the media at large, common sense about specific media outlets is also at work in the construction of activists ' imagined maps of the media environment. This was evident when dealing with left-wing oriented media outlets and journalists. During interviews, activists frequently employed teams like `obviously', `for sure', `certainly' and other similar semantic expressions when speaking about the positive attitudes of radical left-wing media to mobilisations against precarity. This happened more than once, regardless of the protest event under discussion, with the exception of the Precari Atesia strikes, especially when activists did not remember if and how radical left-wing media covered mobilisations against precarity. The understandable lapse in memory was immediately replaced by another cognitive resource: a sort of previous knowledge related to radical left-wing media that positions them among those that one of the activists quoted above named `the friendly press'. This was probably due to the history of such media. it manifesto, for instance, was founded in the 1970s as an alternative media outlet, and was embedded in the social movements of the time (Downing 1984). Although today activists do not consider it manifesto an alternative media outlet in the strict sense, they certainly place it among those media that are expected to support events promoted by social movements. Apart from direct interactions with media organisations and outlets, therefore, the site of media knowledge practices was also a diffused and shared common sense about specific media organisations and outlets: a sort of collective memory about the media environment that consisted in a general heritage to which activists refer. No matter if this was to some extent contradicted during interactions with media organisations, outlets and/or professionals. Like other social practices, therefore, activist media practices also rest on a dialectic relation with knowledge. On the one hand, knowledge implies a `set of internalized social rules and norms' (Savolainen 2008, 29), in this case related to the media environment and to the variety of objects and subjects which populate it. On the other hand, knowledge rests on actual experiences of and in the media environment such as difficult interactions between sympathetic journalists and activists. As a result, `these rules and norms are not stable; they may undergo changes, due to their reinterpretation, as the actor pursues everyday projects' (ibidem). Such tension between the `already supposed ' and the `to be known' of

As Barbara pointed out when speaking about Indymedia Italy, this quote also shows that there were two different conceptions of what the `collective construction ' of meaning related to protest events was among activists that participated in mobilisations against precarity. According to Barbara, Indymedia Italy represented protest events through a plurality of individual voices that did not place any value on the creation of common discourses in mobilisations. On the contrary, Michele stressed that Global Project reported on mobilisations as they were developed and viewed within a specific network of social movement groups and, in this, was more biased and closed than other alternative media outlets, such as Indymedia Italy.

The Patterns of Media Knowledge Practices

~

Social movements groups had different interpretations about subjects and objects populating the media environment . In doing so, they elaborated knowledge referring to media organisations, outlets, professionals and technologies. The patterns through which knowledge about the media environment was produced were at least two. As it is clear also in the sections above, activists were far from passive audiences of media organisations. They instead decoded and deconstructed media texts both individually and collectively, producing an imagined map of the media environment in which media outlets were seen more as social and often political actors than spaces within which to engage in public debate with their opponents, allies and potential supporters. The encoding of media texts was not, however, the only social practice related to the media environment . Direct interactions with media professionals and, in particular, journalists before, during and after protests such as demonstrations and strikes, are also important to develop the semantic map of the media environment, where each media outlet has its role and (political) attitude. When activists spoke about alternative media, sometimes triggered by questions and sometimes spontaneously, they spoke from a position different from that of mere media audience. Many of them were, in fact, producers of alternative media outlets and authors of alternative media texts. As such, they also speculated on their potential audiences. Among these they included journalists, who use alternative media as sources to write about social movements, and those people already involved in the social movement milieu. This was not always perceived as a positive fact, as the discussion of Indymedia Italy reported above

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the media environment is socialised within activists in social movement settings, where activist media practices are often collectively discussed and decided. This allows the elaboration and sharing of `accumulated experiences' (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, 49) related to the media environment within the social movement milieu.

visibility in mainstream media than others (Gamson 2004). These approaches emphasise the role of structures, whether political or discursive, in shaping social change. When social movements produce narratives, discourses and frames about contentious issues, for instance, the fact that some are able to gain mainstream media attention while others are not is linked to their degree of resonance with the broader discursive opportunity structure. Yet activists elaborate knowledge about the media environment in which they act. In the case of Italian mobilisations against precarity, for instance, activists knew that neither high numbers of protesters nor the novelty of a protest event were sufficient conditions to obtain mainstream media coverage because of the strong political orientation of the Italian press. They also knew that even where mainstream media covered mobilisations against precarity, the focus was seldom on the reasons behind them because of specific news values regulating the newsmaking process. The development of `lay theories' (McCurdy 2011) of mainstream media illustrates that social movement actors hold their own interpretations of media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals that support and, in some cases, orient the organisation of collective action. As other scholars have pointed out in criticising the political opportunity structure approach (Goodwin and Jasper 2004; Gamson and Meyer 1996), perceptions and knowledge are important to understand what social movement actors do with the media or, from a different perspective, what social movement actors do to the discursive opportunity structure. The discursive opportunity structure is certainly useful to investigate struggles for visibility in the media arena. Focusing on the structural aspects of the discursive opportunity structure, however, this approach seems to neglect the importance of activists' feelings in the construction of discursive opportunities (Bröer and Duyvendak 2009). In this chapter, moreover, I showed that non-institutional political actors are aware of media diversity. They, thus, engage in struggles for visibility in other layers of the media environment. The discursive opportunity structure should be elaborated further as a concept, taking into consideration media proliferation, diversity and porosity, and thereby including media organisations other than analogue mainstream media. Constraints and opportunities related to the discursive opportunity structure, indeed, cross the whole media environment. Alternative and radical left-wing media organisations, for instance, also turned out to be the source of constraints for certain social movement groups. The perception of opportunities and constraints, moreover, could lead to an active intervention at the level of discursive opportunity structure. As I show in the next chapter, for instance, some activists involved in the Precari Atesia collective physically met with journalists from it manifesto because they were dissatisfied with how they were covering their struggles: since activists perceived the existence of a strong constraint in the media environment, they decided to change that situation through interacting with radical left-wing journalists in the newsroom. Overall, in this chapter I point out that media knowledge practices in the case of Italian mobilisations against precarity revolved around the political

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Conclusions

In this chapter I maintain that activists construct semantic maps of the media environment where they situate different media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals. They do so according to their experience as news audiences, news producers and news sources of mainstream, radical-left wing and alternative media outlets. Since individual activists and social movement groups have a threefold role in the media environment, they experience an ongoing tension between what they think media outlets, from the mainstream to the alternative, should report about mobilisations and how media outlets actually cover protests. This tension, however, also produces knowledge about the media environment in general and, more in particular, about the creation, diffusion and recombination of communication flows related to contentious issues. Activists, therefore, develop perceptions about specific objects and subjects that populate the media environment: from mainstream to alternative media and from print press to informational websites. Media knowledge practices unfold the relationship between activists (as subjects) and other objects and subjects that constitute the media environment. In other words, they contribute to the construction of an `epistemic environment' (Knorr-Cetina 200 1) in which power relations between activists and media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals become visible. Media knowledge practices enable activists to understand how to interact with a media environment that is far from neutral in that it is, in fact, crossed by a number of techno-political cleavages. In this regard, activists can be seen as `knowledgeable agents' who continuously observe and track their interactions with the different objects and subjects that populate the media environment, and evaluate what other subjects such as political parties and trade union confederations do with the media at large (Giddens 1986). To highlight the agency of social movement actors, with regard to the media environment, leads to further reflections on the notion of `discursive opportunity structure', used by some scholars in social movement studies to understand mechanisms of visibility in mainstream media and, more generally, to link the political opportunity structure approach and the framing perspective on social movements (Koopmans and Olzak 2004). Similarly to the political opportunity structure, the discursive opportunity structure includes both stable and volatile dimensions, amongst which structures, norms and practices that characterise mass media (Ferree et al. 2002). It has an explanatory power when investigating why some social movements' narratives, discourses and frames are able to obtain more

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dimension of media organisations, which granted different degrees of visibility to social movements' discourses and claims related to precarity. At the same time, activists tended to associate specific media organisations and outlets with certain technological supports (and not with others). The result was a map of a technopolitical media environment in which political orientations and technological channels are the two most important dimensions that activists employ to situate media organisations and media outlets. Social movement actors do not, obviously, limit themselves to mapping the media environment. They interface with the subjects and objects that populate the media environment and, as a result, develop different forms of grassroots political communication. The following chapter addresses this topic by analysing relational media practices in Italian mobilisations against precarity.

Chapter 5

Surfing Media Diversity; Relational Media Practices

Introduction During the Euro Mayday Parade in 2004, Carlo was one of the activists engaged in the creation of live radio broadcasts of the protest event for Global Project. He alternated running commentary of the parade with interviews with precarious workers from different Italian cities. During the live radio broadcast, Carlo contacted an activist from Leon, Spain via e-mail. He then met the activist in a chat room where they exchanged their phone numbers. At that point, he called the activist for an account of the Euro Mayday Parade held in Leon, Spain. Carlo also had conversations with activists based in other European cities where the Euro Mayday Parade was taking place. These accounts composed an articulated narrative about precarity in Europe that was also aired during the Euro Mayday Parade in Milan so that protesters could hear the voices of activists based in other European cities while parading. Activists who organised the protest event released interviews to mainstream journalists in order to appear in the newspaper articles to be published the next day. And mainstream journalists, who were often precarious workers themselves, asked protest participants to narrate their own experiences of the parade. In the meanwhile, a mainstream local radio station was able to relay the live broadcast of the Euro Mayday Parade by using the programme produced by Global Project. Activists who organised the Euro Mayday Parade interacted with a variety of technological objects and supports such as mobile phones and chat rooms to shape the live broadcast of the parade. They also interacted with distinct subjects, like journalists working for mainstream media and activists based in other European cities, to speak about the parade in Milan and learn about those outside Italy. Boundaries between different breeds of media organisations, outlets and technologies were sometimes crossed, as in the case of the mainstream local radio station that relayed the alternative transnational radio programme produced by Global Project. And even when these boundaries remained intact, activists interacted with a number of media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals during, but also before and after, the Euro Mayday Parade. From a more abstract perspective, social movement actors who engage in mobilisations usually interact with several distinct media objects and subjects. These interactions are intrinsically relational, since they imply an exchange of information, knowledge and messages. For this reason, they form a specific category of activist media

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practice, that I name relational media practice, broadly defined as those activist media practices implying interactions with objects and subjects populating the media environment. With some notable exceptions, investigations on how social movements interface with the media usually take into consideration just one kind of media organisation and/or technological support: the result is a dichotomy that generally represents mainstream media as constraints and alternative media as opportunities for social movement actors. The previous chapter, however, showed that this dichotomy can be nuanced and enriched when considering activist media practices in the media environment. In the case of knowledge media practices, for example, social movement actors involved in Italian mobilisations against precarity pointed out the important and, sometimes, challenging role of radical left-wing media organisations, outlets and professionals. Activists, moreover, outlined the existence of different types of alternative media that could act as constraints for certain social movement groups since they represent partial points of view on mobilisations against precarity, and privilege the voices of some social movement groups and not others. In this chapter I follow the direction of the previous one and looks at how grassroots political communication develops in the media environment, focusing on relational media practices towards distinct media organisations, outlets and

journalists would report about protest events. In doing this, activists were seeking to cope with their `asymmetric dependency' on mainstream media (Gamson and Wolfsfeld 1993) by engaging in negotiations at the micro-level of interaction between activists and journalists, as is frequently the case during mobilisations (Gitlin 1980; Couldry 1999; Couldry 2000; Sobieraj 2011). Activists involved in mobilisations against precarity tried to establish social ties based on mutual trust so as to increase the possibility of being recognised as valuable news sources and legitimate political actors.' This was even more important regarding grassroots mobilisations against precarity, based mostly on participation, lacking in material resources and revolving around a substantially horizontal pattern of organisation. Neither official spokespersons charged with responsibility for interviews with journalists nor paid activists responsible for relations with mainstream media were usual. An exception to this was social movement organisations like the traditional and radical trade union CUB that contacted journalists in different ways, as Luca, a member of the CUB described:

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technologies. I begin by focusing on social ties between activists and media subjects which lie outside (mainstream journalists), at the boundaries of (radical left-wing journalists) and inside (alternative media practitioners) the social movement milieu. I then turn to interactions involving activists and technological objects before, during and after protest events and show that information and communication technologies usually combine with other technological su,)ports and/or face-to-face interactions within the physical spaces of conflict. I finally discuss four categories of relational activist media practices and argue that they are frequently combined during the same protest event, and that they can be directed towards mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media.

Activists Meet Media Professionals and Practitioners

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Relational media practices involve interactions between subjects who produce messages to be spread through different media organisations and subjects who participate in the diffusion of these messages within the media environment. During Italian mobilisations against precarity, both social movement groups and individual activists engaged in interactions with journalists, employed either in mainstream or radical left-wing organisations, and with alternative media practitioners. Journalists working for mainstream media organisations were usually external to the social movement milieu. The negative perceptions activists held of mainstream media pushed them to look for efficient ways of controlling, at least partially, what

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More recently, there is the participation of a person who works, to some extent, as a press officer. The possibility to have a constant relationship [with journalists] is improving, rendering [ ... ] our relationships with information channels simpler. [ ... ] In general, it was useful to invest in the website, which we didn't have before, and not to have only fax or e-mails to send to journalists from various newspapers. But to prepare events with ... or even organise a press conference. You can also do that directly in the streets in no time, but it is clear that if there is someone who dedicates half a day to it, maybe only 5 journalists will come as usual, but then the news is published because they all knew about it and were ready for it.

The radical trade union CUB decided to employ a part-time, paid member of staff to run a press office, which they also used in order to promote the Euro Mayday Parade. What Luca explained was clearly a process of news source professionalisation: from launching a protest event `in the streets' to having a press officer able to organise real `press conferences'. Overall, however, grassroots political communication in mobilisations against precarity relied on other resources than professional and paid staff taking care of social ties with journalists. The Time Dimension in Social Ties with Journalists In relational media practices, the time dimension played a relevant role in the creation and development of relatively stable social ties between the two types of subjects, which tools place over the long-term. This was evident, for instance, in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade, as Francesco states:

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See also interviews with Goffredo and Andrea.

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Media Practices and Protest Politics [The list of journalists] slowly grew, in the sense that we had an interview with Odeon and said to them: give me the interview so we can keep it in our archive. And gradually ... then I also worked for the weekly journal Diario, so I also met some people for other reasons. And then we know each other because I also did some press conferences for the Mayday. So, when we need to put together some contacts, I had some and someone else also had some and we put them together.

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This quote highlights that the creation of social ties was not only a lengthy process, but also a collective one: each activist that had some contacts shared them with other social movement groups within the network supporting the Euro Mayday Parade. This relational media practice, therefore, was spread among various nodes and then socialised in specific moments of the mobilisation. The above quote also points to the relevance of working ties when establishing contacts between activists and journalists. As I show in the methodological appendix, many of the precarious workers I interviewed were or had previously been employed in the information and communication sector. This was an infol„iational resource (Edwards and McCarthy 2006) in itself for precarious workers, who thereby increased the likelihood of forging social ties with journalists. The latter, moreover, were frequently precarious workers as well. Activists and journalists, therefore, often experienced the same living and working conditions. Some of the activists I interviewed told me that this created temporary moments during which boundaries between journalists and activists were broken down. Cecilia, for instance, told of what happened to her during the Euro Mayday Parade: It is really a meeting in the streets: `Ali, you're ajoumalist, the one I met during the other demonstration? And he said: `Yes, you know, I've been a precarious worker for four years and today I'm also here to demonstrate. And in the meanwhile he interviews you because he's a precarious worker and could not take a holiday for the First of May. According to Piero, one of the journalists I interviewed, some activists linked to the Euro Mayday Parade became journalists, as also happened in past cycles of struggle. The difference between the past and present situations, however, was that those activists who became journalists in the past often changed their lifestyles as well, since they felt they were `entering adulthood'. On the contrary, those activists who became journalists in more recent years did not change their lifestyles because they often remained precarious workers. The condition of precarity, therefore, had the potential to create another space for communication between activists and journalists, as in Cecilia's case. Although none of the protest events under investigation specifically addressed the problem of precarious journalists, the Euro Mayday Parade used, among other expressions, that of `knowledge workers', which includes journalists.

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Early in 2006, moreover, the Federazione Nazionale della Stampa Italiana (FNSI) addressed the problem of precarity in the media industry.2 Journalists

organised a series of strikes in order to push for the renewal of their national collective agreement and protest against the widespread use of short-term contracts in the journalistic profession. It was not, therefore, by chance that from 2006 onwards one of the activist groups involved in the Euro Mayday Parade, the Chainworkers Crew, began to work with precarious journalists in order to support their mobilisations. They did so by publishing a false free press newspaper, named City of Gods, distributed for free in Milan on one of the days the journalists were on strike and no newspapers were printed in December 2006. Activists distributed approximately 50,000 copies of the fake free press City of Gods, which was entirely devoted to the journalists' struggle, and was produced through an informal network of activists, including students and precarious journalists. The Territorial Dimension in Social Ties with Journalists Another important dimension was the territorial level at which activists created and developed these social ties. Social movement groups may have had good contacts at the local level but scarce and less valuable connections at the national level. The shift from the local to the national level created the need to transform the quality of social ties with journalists in order to increase the likelihood of receiving national coverage. An example is the national demonstration against the Ddl Moratti. Although La Sapienza University was the centre and symbol of the mobilisation, small-scale protest events took place in many other universities in Italy before the national demonstration. Social movement groups based in Milan at first employed their own contact lists of journalists to promote local protest events designed to launch the national demonstration. Barbara, for instance, told of how the (ex) Disobbedienti network acted in this case: During the demonstration we contacted some journalists from the Corriere and la Repubblica, but ... we have contacts with journalists at the local level, who mainly write in the Milanese section of the newspaper. [ ... ] So there we were beyond [the local level] and there were journalists writing in the national sections of newspapers. So our students' network coordinated itself in order to speak with these journalists and to push the issue. Once these activist groups gathered in Rome with others from a number of Italian cities to organise and participate in the national demonstration, they focused on journalists writing in national media outlets and, hence, used the inforrnational resources of the whole network in order to construct a contact list of journalists.

2 The FNSI is the national federation of the Italian press.

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The Unexpected in Social Ties with Journalists Sometimes new social ties were established in a rather unexpected way while mobilisations tools place. This happened, for example, during the period leading up to the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti when different social movement groups organised a variety of small-scale protest events. Among others, the RNRP was particularly active in promoting opposition to the proposed law through a series of official communications spread through their website and some protest events. One of these consisted in the temporary occupation of the CRUI's head offices in Rome. The only journalist who was present was employed by the mainstream national newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, owned by Confindustria. A rather unusual occurrence for this kind of direct action, Mario explained how they met: From the very beginning [of the mobilisation against the Ddl Moratti] we wrote pretty precise and detailed press releases, there were people studying the Ddl really painstakingly. And she did that article and the only positions which were reported were from the CRUI, on one side, and the RNRP, on the other, bypassing trade union confederations and professors' associations. And she said: things are this way: there is a more institutional, academic, baronial opposition [ ... ], but the only group that is acting concerning universities which is related to the precarity of research is the [RNRP]. And since that moment, she periodically reported our positions in the Il Sole 24 Ore articles she wrote. We said that we wanted to get to know her. We phoned her, we met her and from that moment ...

Mario also told me that it is not usual to meet with this type of journalist. Activists knew that this window of opportunity was rare: they usually have to spend time and energy to convince media organisations that their mobilisations matter. As the story reported above shows, however, even mainstream journalists may occasionally cover mobilisations by reporting the points of view of each social actor involved, including social movement groups such as the RNRP.

The Political Dimension in Social Ties with Journalists Relational media practices, including interactions between activists and journalists, were different in the case of radical left-wing media organisations and outlets. Sometimes activists invited radical left-wing journalists to contribute to alternative media outlets as experts about specific contentious issues. This collaboration rested on a common political viewpoint and, in particular, on the fact that journalists were recognised as important news sources for their technical, specialised knowledge, which many activists did not of course possess. In addition, radical left-wing journalists sometimes also produced alternative media texts directly related to a particular protest event, as the journalist Nadia explained:

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There is a very strict relationship between our journalists and movement radio, so we intervene, they tell us things, and they ask us to tell things. We also do some correspondence. [ ... ] Since demonstrations are often in Rome and maybe they don't have the possibility to have someone in Rome, they ask for a correspondent. So you do the correspondence, pass the mobile phone to someone, I let you speak with this one and that one, and you do a normal report.

These relational media practices between activists and journalists working on radical left-wing media demonstrate how boundaries between different types of media organisations and outlets blurred, at least on a temporary basis. On the one hand were activists who sometimes wrote pieces about demonstrations in which they were involved in order to provide an internal view from the social movements in radical left-wing media, as in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade. On the other hand there were j ournalists who occasionally provided alternative media coverage of protest events since they acted as correspondents for movement radio stations, websites and so forth. In the case of radical left-wing media, boundaries were also blurred because journalists sometimes participated in the preparatory stages of many protest events against precarity, as clear in the words of Mirella when speaking about the Euro Mayday Parade: These media were also close to us during the organisational passages, so sometimes they reported national assemblies which occurred. So, rather than external observers, sometimes some of them were subjects who tools part in the construction of mobilisations, especially in the Mayday's construction. [ ... ] So I considered them, rather than subjects of information, as subjects that participated in the construction of mobilisations.

Some sympathetic journalists were actually involved in political reflections on precarity as well as in the active construction of protest events related to it. Activists tended to think about themselves as persons directly engaged in the struggle against precarity, rather than simply journalists. Relationships of trust were frequently based on shared political belongings that were also due to biographical reasons, as the journalist Nadia stressed: We have a political experience, so clearly there are also personal relationships at stake and I think that this is true for all, not only for my newspaper. Those who have political experience are those you know and then as the years go by you strengthen [these relationships] and, beyond personal ties and friendships [ ... ], you continue to refer to them and maybe they give you the contacts with other people.

A common past of political participation created social ties that formed the starting point for constructing a network of relations between activists and journalists based on mutual trust. The latter, in particular, maintained contact with

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other activists because of their previous social ties rooted in their pasts as activists. The political nature of this network, and the creation of an atmosphere of reliance, did not always guarantee the development of uncontentious interaction between activists and journalists. But it often led to a certain degree of collaboration. For instance, during the mobilisations against the Ddl Moratti, some of the activists involved played a twofold role, as Nadia explained:

Writing media texts for radical left-wing media also created the opportunity to reflect on the protest event activists organised, as well as to understand the news-making process from a more internal point of view. Activists were no longer just active audiences of radical left-wing media, which they could criticise (or not) while remaining on the outside. Instead, they temporarily assumed the role of radical left-wing media producers or at least collaborators. For a while, they became a part of these outlets and reflected on their roles as activists from a different perspective. Exchanges and patterns of collaboration between activists and journalists also produced mechanisms of self-reflection with regard to journalists. The two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions provide a good example of this. Mainstream media immediately depicted these protest events as extremely radical and violent, comparing them to protest events of the previous cycle of protest in the late 1970s, the so-called '77 movement. The discursive context was, from the very beginning, hostile to the activists that organised and participated in the direct actions. In the days immediately after the actions, a sympathetic journalist from Rome met with a group of activists who were very disappointed about the way in which mainstream media had depicted the protest events in his newsroom. Journalist Piero told me what happened during that meeting in the newsroom:

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We have different researchers who are activists and also collaborators in our newspaper. So it was also a period in which they were frequently here [in the newsroom], so we could speak with them because [...] in the afternoon they came, proposed articles, we discussed them. The fact that activists involved in the mobilisations against the Ddl Moratti were both collaborators in newspapers and university researchers facilitated a fruitful exchange and an overlap between two usually separate places: the place of information, that is the newsrooms of radical left-wing media, and the place of conflict, that is the occupied La Sapienza University, which was one of the most important centres of this struggle. In a similar vein, those media organisations that were directly linked to left wing political parties frequently asked for contributions from activists participating in mobilisations against precarity who were also members of their political party, as Mirella recalled when speaking about the Euro Mayday Parade:

With regard to the Euro Mayday, the contacts I had with the media were with more political media. It could happen that Liberazione, the newspaper of Rifondazione, asked for an article or an interview about the Mayday. Because I lived here in Milan and so it was easier for me to follow all the organisational stages of the Mayday Parade.' Sometimes, even activists who did not collaborate with radical left-wing media on a regular basis were involved in the construction of media texts related to mobilisations against precarity, as Maya made clear when speaking about the Euro Mayday Parade in 2004: They asked for pieces on the Mayday's organisation and not about theories, because for theories each had their own journalist [ ... ] It was a peculiar experience because I was not used to writing for newspapers and before the Mayday I was there asking myself what is the Mayday? What do I usually do when I wake up in the morning before going into the streets, what do I have to do, what are the relationships which surround me. It was really funny as an analytical passage.

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Rifondazione is the colloquial name for PRC.

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They came into my room and we began to speak. I said: `listen, this evening I'm going to say this and that'. And they said to me: `well, then we will write it together'. I have to say that [the article] was published with my signature since I wrote some things they didn't agree with. But it was a great experience, because I was writing and they were behind me [ ... ] and commented. They said: `in my opinion you are wrong in doing this' and so on and so forth. And that was a text that, how to put it, I took a lot of time to write it. And then there was this wonderful element of respect from them. They said about what I wrote: `You think this way and we do not completely agree with you, but we think that this thing also belongs to us, this corresponds to the feelings many of us have.' The story told by the journalist illustrates a very interesting moment where the invisible, though tangible, wall that usually separates media producers and media consumers broke down. The journalist had the opportunity to write an article alongside a section of his audience, who were at the same time his news source. Activists, in addition, had the opportunity to directly enter a newsroom and directly observe how an article was conceived. Furthermore, they contributed to writing the article, transfoiining themselves into media producers. Radical left-wing media proved to be sites where interactions between activists and journalists could assume a particular meaning, contributing to unveiling media power mechanisms by participating in media production and discussing the understandings of political actions with journalists.

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Blurring the Boundaries with Alternative Media Practitioners While relational media practices involving activists and journalists working for radical left-wing media often occurred at the boundaries of the social movement milieu, those involving activists and alternative media practitioners often occurred within those boundaries. For this reason, it was frequently difficult to distinguish activists organising protest events from activists involved in the creation of alternative media outlets, as Mirella explained: About movement media I think that the majority of the people that construct ... I'm thinking about some media in Milan and Lombardy, that constructed those media, also contributed to the construction of the Euro Mayday. So, it is difficult to signal the distances, it is difficult to refer to the same person and say when she/he is a political activist and when she/he is passing on information. I think that there was a continuum between the two things. For many activists, making a distinction between the two roles did not make much sense. It was not possible, therefore, to speak about the presence of a media-activist with a role separate from other protest activities in mobilisations against precarity. Among the interviewees, all of those engaged in the creation of alternative media outlets were also involved in mobilisations against precarity, but not all activists engaged in mobilisations against precarity were involved in the creation of alternative media outlets. Media-activism, therefore, was better understood as a specific type of relational media practice, rather than a fixed role that certain activists assumed. This issue was also raised during some interviews with activists, who told me that the expression `media-activism' had lost its original meaning in media-saturated societies, due to the diffusion of portable digital devices, as Carlo said: When, in a demonstration, there is someone in charge of doing videos, that person is a media-activist. Well, here we are. Because she/he is doing media activism. But when there is a demonstration, everyone has a mobile phone able to take pictures. If something is going on at that very moment and someone has a mobile phone, she/he can take a picture of a truncheon coming down on the head of a protester. There is no need for me [media-activist].... Fortunately there is no longer any need for me, media-activism does not exist anymore ... everyone has an MP3 recorder in her/his pocket. Carlo underlined the massive spread of new portable technologies that allow multimedia recordings of social realities. Anyone can record what is going on during a protest event and for this reason the category of media-activism is best understood as a relational media practice in which individuals taking part in protest events interact with technological objects to produce media texts related to that specific event. This set of interactions, however, implies different degrees

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of engagement in the creation and support of alternative media organisations and outlets. Some activists involved in mobilisations against precarity engaged in a form of `democratic media activism' (Carroll and Hackett 2006; Hackett and Carroll 2006) that creates alternative media channels and content to alter power asymmetries in the media environment and, hence, democratise the media according to participatory processes of production. While some activists were involved in the creation and daily technical support of established alternative media outlets, many others only used these as a space for communication. The former also participated in the production and maintenance of an efficient infrastructure for alternative communication, while the latter produced and spread alternative media contents through them.

Technological Supports for Grassroots Political Communication Relational media practices also included interactions between subjects such as activists, and the technological objects that populate the media environment. With the emergence and establishment of ICTs, social movement actors began to employ internet applications and web platforms, albeit without abandoning the use of analogue media. Social movement groups involved in mobilisations against precarity frequently engaged in relational media practices that combined the use of ICTs with other technological supports and/or with interactions with other subjects such as other activists. In the following section I explore relational media practices that occurred at different stages of mobilisations and, in particular, before, during and after protest events. Protest Preparation Between Face-to-face and Computer-mediated Communication Before protest events, relational media practices were particularly important for the organisation of strikes, pickets, demonstrations, parades and other forms of resistance against precarity, as it already happened in the organisation of transnational mobilisations against corporate globalisation (Bennett 2004; Bennett 2003; Van Aelst and Waalgrave 2002; della Porta and Mosca 2005; Kahn and Kellner 2004; De Jong, Shaw and Stammers 2005). Usually, relational media practices involved the use of computers and laptops to interact with other activists: through private e-mails, semi-public mailing-lists, public forums and other online spaces of communication. These technological objects were almost never employed alone, however. Rather, they were used in different combinations with face-to-face interactions with other activists. The Precari Atesia collective, for instance, created a website hosting an online forum were precarious call centre operators could interact, but assemblies and informal meetings remained central to coordination and increasing participation. The creation of a self-produced magazine, named Sfront End, was also an important means for communicating with other call centre

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operators. In general, traditional and radical unionists especially complemented the use of e-mails with flyers distributed within workplaces in order to reach those precarious workers who did not or could not use the internet. In other protests on and offline interactions complemented each other. The best example here was the Euro Mayday Parade. At both the national and transnational levels computer-mediated communications were important in organising the parade. Among other tools, the use of an ad hoc mailing list proved to be particularly important for coordinating the protest campaign.' National preparatory meetings were moments used to write common calls for action, to define the aspects of precarity to be emphasised during the parade and to decide the order of floats at the Milan parade. Many activists also pointed out that, through the mailing list, many activists from all over Italy could collectively discuss suggestions, ideas and proposals about the parade. Computer-mediated communication was also very important for local activist groups who organised their participation in the parade through their own, smaller mailing lists, also used for the collective writing of documents, as Maya remembered:

Mayday mailing lists all year long, although numbers of messages peaked in the months immediately before and after the parade.' The national demonstration against the Ddl Moratti relied on a combination of face-to-face interactions and computer-mediated communication. The latter was most heavily employed at the national level of organisation, while the former played a more relevant role at the local level of the La Sapienza University, which was transformed by its occupation into a public and common space crossed by thousands of individuals for at least three weeks. Mailing lists, in particular, were important to promote the mobilisation and tell other, potentially interested people what was happening in different cities, as Mario explained:

I wrote a draft, then I posted it on the [mailing] list and there it was: read, corrected and revised. Everyone could work on it, so actually the production [of leaflets] was quite collective, by starting from a draft, and official declarations were produced collectively as well.

Empathy among activists in this case passed through the diffusion of the same report via a variety of mailing lists which created a temporary network of communication to support the mobilisation. The report became the node which connected various information channels which then transformed into something different: a place in which the voices of activists could circulate and reach a high number of people interested in the contentious issue of precarity. The call for action of the national demonstration, produced during assemblies at La Sapienza University, also travelled through various mailing lists and websites. The preparation of the Serpica Naro fashion show was also based on the extensive use of a mailing list, although the ultimate success of this protest event depended directly on the ability of activists to keep it secret. In line with this, access to the mailing list was moderated and, thus, not open to everyone, and access to its archive was restricted to those people subscribed to the mailing list. In the Serpica Naro fashion show, other interactions with ICTs also proved to be important. Activists used the web, in particular, to collect information about the Milan Fashion Week and to construct a credible identity for the false fashion designer and her collaborators. Carolina, for example, explained the role that ICTs played in the elaboration of Serpica Naro's press agent, Nadia Fortuna:

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Both face-to face interactions and computer-mediated communication played a role in the preparatory stages of the parade and, hence, provided a dual space of interaction where offline and online realms fruitfully intertwined — as had also happened in previous transnational protest events based in Italy, including the Genoa anti-G8 demonstrations in 2001 and the Florence ESF in 2002 (della Porta and Mosca 2005). At the transnational level of the Euro Mayday Parade, face-to-face interactions during preparatory meetings were certainly important, but computer-mediated communications proved even more relevant, as Maya explained: First of all, Euro Mayday was, from the very beginning, a European [mailing] list that continues to work. Obviously, you cannot afford a monthly meeting at the European level, because it becomes a far too substantial waste of energy. The [mailing] list is active and continues to work and all the cues that are developed during the year are published, for instance information about everything that happens. These are the opportunities for information exchange.

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When we did the demonstration from La Sapienza, on October 13 ... then it was posted on mailing lists and from movement mailing lists to those of groups of precarious workers. And then people [from various Italian cities] said to us `there in Rome you are having fun, it works'. And there was this network of communication ... how to say it. Empathetic.

Serpica is made up only by technology. Because if we didn't use these types of technologies and knowledge, above all individual and personal knowledge, and

The transnational mailing list allowed continuity in discussions among dispersed activist groups between preparatory meetings. Activists used the Euro

5 For instance, in 2006, the messages were distributed as follows: 15 in January; 68 in February; 98 in March; 155 in April, 71 in May, 28 in June; 6 in July; 42 in August; 33 in September; 21 in October; 21 in November; and 8 in December. In other years, the

4 The Precog mailing list was established in 2003 and used at the national level; the Euro Mayday mailing list was established in 2004 and used at the transnational level.

message distribution followed a similar pattern, with an intensification of mailing list traffic in March, April and May.

Ì

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also professional knowledge, we would never have been able to construct the character of Serpica. We would never have been able to construct the characters around Serpica, like Nadja, because if you have an exclusively virtual character which is only a voice, it is easier to let her interact via e-mail and so on ... because she may be me, but also you. So, for us it was a collective way of managing a series of responsibilities and things that otherwise would have fallen to only one person.

media texts. Social movement groups also engaged in relational media practices oriented at the creation of specific types of media texts, like official declarations about protest events, then distributed to a number of media outlets so as to reach different audiences, including but not limited to, journalists, as Andrea stressed:

Like Serpica Naro, the press agent Nadia Fortuna did not exist. However, there was no one particular activist who always embodied the character. Through ICTs, such as mobile phones and e-mails, Nadja Fortuna could exist thanks to the collective efforts of various activists who communicated, through the same avatar, with specialised journalists and other fashion professionals. While on the day of the fashion show Nadia Fortuna had, for the first time, a real face and body, during its preparatory stages her identity was simply a name circulating on the web and a voice transmitted through mobile phones. The maintenance of a certain degree of secrecy about when and where the direct actions were to take place was also important for the success of the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions. They were, therefore, also launched through mailing lists and websites, although activist groups employed a figurative language, and references to practical details were vague, evoking the direct actions in a general way only so that only those activists, bystanders and potential participants in close contact with the organisers had an idea of what exactly was going to happen. The role of computer-mediated communication was, therefore, important, but in a less transparent way. Interacting with Technologies to Attract dournalists'Attention

Before and during protest events, relational media practices that involved interactions between activists and technological objects also aimed at involving mainstream and radical left-wing journalists in the protest event, as Michele told me when speaking about the Euro Mayday Parade: We created a real radio station in the streets, which everyone could use to express her/his own opinion about the Mayday and in doing so contribute to the construction of a communication that was completely open, direct with regard to that event. A communication which then might be used by everyone, in the sense that also journalists could go there, take those things and use them to construct their news pieces. Relational media practices, in this case, aimed at producing a physical space within which to overcome the separation between alternative and mainstream media outlets: activists involved journalists in the parade and let them use the multimedia texts activists had created in order to construct their own mainstream

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The so-called press release was not really a press release for a long time. It is a communication which is sent to mainstream media, as they are defined today (laugh), and to my friend who reads her web mail everyday and receives the release through the Euromayday mailing list. Social movement groups aimed to interact with the media environment as a whole since they judged that journalists were no longer the central gatekeepers in society. In a similar way, media texts originally sent to journalists were also published in existing alternative media outlets, as Barbara explained when speaking about the Global Project website: We always publish a link to every release that we send to all the journalists. Because on Global we put all our leaflets and the releases that we send to the journalists. And before [the protest event] we put the feature with all the preparatory stages of the demonstration and after we put the audio files, pictures, descriptions of the demonstration. Therefore [the Global website] is a useful tool for journalists as well. According to us it is really handy, useful and used. The website was considered a useful tool for journalists, who could find pictures, video and other material related to the protest event there. It was also considered a useful means for overcoming the usual personifications of protest events and contentious issues. Social movement groups often felt that journalists tended to look for a spokesperson to interview, while they in their daily protest activities sought to avoid appointing such figures. The use of websites as news sources and, therefore, to some extent, as ways of mediating interactions with mainstream journalists, was also intended to promote the views of the entire social movement group or network of social movement groups rather than privileging the voices of individual activists. Andrea, for instance, explained why he found it extremely important that alternative media outlets, in this case a website, functioned as news sources: It is a simplifying element and anyway, when I am doing an interview I can miss something and in that very moment I am doing an individual job, while the website is a collective production. Global Project, for us, is a very collective production and hence it is much more precise. If a journalist is looking for something, she/he will find it there and it is much easier. The alternative media outlet represented a collective social actor engaged in the mobilisation. Since it was this, not individual voices, that groups wished to

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be represented in mainstream media, it should have been the reference point for journalists covering protest events. These attempts to control the news-making process were, however, difficult. Social movement groups involved in the Global Project, therefore, also engaged in relational media practices which aimed to render the website a more stable news source for journalists. For instance, this activist from Milan remembered how a CD-ROM was created to be distributed among journalists before a protest event occurred:

Thanks to a piece of software named the Phone Indy Media Patch, developed in Australia, short phone calls and text messages could be immediately published on Indymedia Italy, reconstructing a multifaceted live broadcast of the parade. About 20 short reports, either in text or audio format, were posted by protesters .6 This remained experimental and was not applied in following years, although it may be judged as important when looking at social movements in retrospect. Nowadays, this mode of reporting public events is more widespread than in the past: mainstream web applications such as Twitter are now available to support this type of reporting. Similarly to the concept of `prefigurative politics' (Epstein 1991; Polletta 2002), according to which activists experiment those social changes they aim to obtain through mobilisations, the experimental use of Indymedia Italy and Phone Indymedia Patch (PIMP) software during the Euro Mayday Parade in 2004 can be considered examples of prefigurative communication: social movements engaging in new types of interactions with the media, experimenting with new technological applications and combining different physical supports in order to communicate. Other social actors then implement and diffuse these types of interaction with the media on a broader basis and enlarge their scope. The Euro Mayday Parade also showed that social movement groups experimented and adopted emerging technological objects year after year, as Andrea illustrated:

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There was a period in which we made a CD-ROM. I give you the CD-ROM, you click, it opened automatically, there was the intro and everything was easier. There was a button to click for the releases, the pictures, the videos. We already knew the [IP] address of the forthcoming news. So that when the journalist was coming to his/her newsroom, we were already uploading everything to that address. So, we educated them from this point of view. It was an important shift, since pictures are seldom published, also because they have a different quality from professional ones. But sometimes they were. You, as a journalist, could see that during that occupation, that demonstration, that action there were so many people and so you evaluated the weight of the news. You can also see the banners and the videos.

Although in some cases activists involved in social movement groups and organisations train themselves in order to interact with journalists (Sobieraj 2011), in this specific case activists attempted to `train' journalists to use alternative media outlets as news sources. From the analysis it emerged that these types of interaction were limited in time, and only some social movement groups performed them. However, such attempts were an example of a more general trend in grassroots political communication (Gillan, Pickerill, and Webster 2008; Mosca 2007).

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This was the real strength of the movement, malting videos, radio broadcasts, making news directly on websites live from the demonstration. I can't hide that there was also positive competition, since each year we invented something new. There was the year of the UMTS boom and so each track had an internet connection, then there was the year in which mobile phones could take pictures and videos ... and everyone attempted to find a way to post videos from her/his mobile phone directly to the website.'

Mixed Media Technologies During Protest During protests, activists usually combined more traditional means of communication such as radios or megaphones, with more modern means of communication such as mobile phones, wireless internet connections and digital cameras, in order to provide live coverage of protest events. Social movement groups produced live broadcasts of the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, combining traditional radio and informational websites. They did the same during the Euro Mayday Parade in 2004, as Michele recalled: At a certain point we also made this attempt ... nowadays there are more sophisticated techniques to do so, but at that time it was not at all banal to record an MP3 file with a mobile phone and send it to a website directly. And we created this structure which was based on a PC connected to an internet network and connected to a phone number and a modem. And then we spread this [IP] address.

In 2004 and 2005, activists involved in Global Project prepared and carried out live broadcasts of the parade in Milan, as well as other parades. They connected activist groups participating in the transnational network supporting the Euro Mayday Parade in the same mediated and temporary space. Carlo, who participated in the live broadcast from Milan, spoke of how it happened:

6 The following is an example of an SMS message published through the PIMP software: `This precarious SMS has been sent from a mobile during EuroMayDay 2004. Picket at the Upim in Como. Action just finished. It lasted 30 minutes. Not many workers behind us. In a short time, there will be the adopted train to Milan. 50 people from Como'. Source: www.italy.indymedia.org 01/05/04. 7 Andrea refers to the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UTMS) employed by mobile phones.

~

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We were within the Euro Mayday Parade as Global Radio and we constructed these two days through a website and a satellite radio, which was used not only by ourselves, but also by the various European groups. [ ... ] And we had this broad radio programme, directed in Milan. Moreover, there were a lot of forays, which crossed each other, from other European cities: from Spain, France, Germany, Great Britain, Norway and even from Finland. [ ... ] Then there was the Global Project website together with the Indymedia one, where audio files were uploaded and each had its own web page and then there was a common web page in which the complexity of the Euro Mayday Parade was explained.

2009) such as social centres that usually sustain social movement processes during latent stages of mobilisations. After protests against precarity, moreover, live broadcasts of mobilisations were usually recorded and then published on alternative media outlets. The web, in particular, functioned as a repository for public records of mobilisations. The recordings of protest events allowed activists to self-reflect, thanks to video and audio texts uploaded online. For instance, Cecilia explained how she used the Global Project website:

In order to actually construct the live broadcast, activists interacted with different media, combining different technological objects in a creative and tactical way. As also happened in 2000 during protests against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank conference in Prague (Chesters and Welsh 2004, 54), and during transnational protests against the war in Iraq in 2003 (Gillan, Pickerill, and Webster 2008), the combined use of different technological supports, including satellite radio, the web, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels and mobile phones, allowed the construction of a dynamic transmedia text which evolved with the parade, and in which narratives from all over Europe imparted a composite and multifaceted picture of the Euro Mayday Parade. The live radio broadcast was, moreover, diffused during the protest event, as Andrea described: Sometimes the radio line was taken from Global's truck, so there was this double shift [ ... ] The things that were going on were diffused from the truck, at 30,000 watts in the streets. Also because the truck was at some point in the demonstration and you were interviewing someone else at some other point in the demonstration. While precarious workers were participating in the parade, they also became interviewees, and their interviews became part of the live broadcast which was in turn relayed through trucks participating in the parade. Through alternative media and a combination of interactions with different technological objects, the voices of precarious workers were carried from the parade to the radio and back to the parade again. After Demonstrations: the Web as a Repository of Social Movement Artefacts

Social movement groups and social movement organisations create alternative informational websites functioning as spaces for the dissemination of information about contentious issues, social movement actors and mobilisations (della Porta and Mosca 2006). The construction of alternative websites linked to specific struggles, like the Euro Mayday Parade website or the Serpica Naro website, was important in order to provide continuity for discourses about precarity. In this sense, the web enriched the network of people and places (Leach and Haunss

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At the level of collective imagery, it is so great to connect [to the internet] in the afternoon. You come back from school, you connect [to the internet] and you see: demonstration in Vicenza, demonstration in Trento, students from Alessandria are mobilizing ... to look at yourself in the pictures, to look at a clip of yourself in the demonstration. It really is a new communication, a new way to look at yourself. Cecilia used the web to find out what other activist groups belonging to the same network were doing in different cities. Yet it was more than simple information because the immediacy of video and audio media texts allowed her to feel as if she was in those other places and to think about herself as part of a whole network of activist groups. Cecilia was able to enlarge her view so as to include other activists, experiences and actions. In a sense, relational media practices oriented to the recording and online storage of video and audio files about protest events contributed to the creation of a collective memory about mobilisations, as Michele explained: The images, the audio, the most experiential devices, let's say, they are used by the people who came [to the protest event] and they use them as a sort of mechanism of memory externalisation. In the sense that you need this [device] to remember something in which you participated and that gave you something. At a more practical level, the web functioned as a repository for materials that activists used again in other alternative media. Renzo, for instance, explained how he made flyers: When I want to create a flyer I look for images and often I find images on the internet, on movement websites where someone has posted images [of demonstrations]. Maybe this person was not even a media-activist, maybe this person was just someone who had a camera and took some pictures. And I download them and use them [for the flyer]. Activists also interacted with media texts circulating in alternative media outlets on the web to repair and restore biased mainstream media coverage about protest events. Mainstream media, for instance, framed the two Reddito per Tutt* direct

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actions as `violent robberies' in contrast with what activists perceived as symbolic, large-scale and non-violent contentious perfoji,iances. Lorenzo explained the role that alternative media outlets played in this difficult discursive context:

recognised the peculiarities characterising these media organisations and adjusted their interactions with them accordingly to spread their messages through these media outlets. Less linked to the social movement milieu, however, mainstream media organisations required more careful planning for social movement actors seeking to gain media coverage. The most common type of adaptive relational media practices towards mainstream and radical left-wing media organisations consisted in organising press conferences before and/or after protest events against precarity. Press conferences served to introduce forthcoming protest events to journalists and, through them, the general public. In some cases, social movement groups held a press conference as similar as possible to those usually held by institutional political actors such as political parties. More often than not, however, they adjusted press conferences to the framework of mobilisations against precarity. In 2002, for instance, the Euro Mayday Parade promoters organised a press conference in the streets, in front of a temporary employment agency, where about 15 activists gathered to make public declarations and distribute press releases related to the parade. While the structure of the press conference was not that unusual, and activists also distributed press releases to journalists, the place in which it took place was unconventional. Some elements of the setting, therefore, fitted the implicit rules of interaction between news sources and joumalists, while others were more matched with the peculiarities of the protest event. Social movement groups also adapted the press conference to the geographical level of the mobilisation. In 2006, when the Euro Mayday Parade was also a transnational mobilisation, they held a press conference in Brussels that was followed by a small creative direct action: activists from a number of European countries dressed as pink, rabbits, one of the icons used in the parade poster, and peacefully invaded the European institutional quarter in Brussels. In other cases, activists transformed protest events into communicative actions in the strict sense. Instead of organising press conferences, they planned small-scale protest events to launch bigger mobilisations. The 2001 Euro Mayday Parade, for instance, was launched with a direct action in a supermarket in Milan. Sometimes, a protest event itself functioned as a communicative action to which journalists were invited. This was the case for one of the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, that was carried out in a mall in the morning. Apart from communicating with customers and workers, activists invited journalists to reinforce the symbolic nature of the direct action. Journalists were understood as a necessary audience for the protest event. After protest events, activists decided to organise press conferences to repair any actual or potential distortion created through mainstream media coverage. The demonstration against the Ddl Moratti, the peak of a mobilisation generally characterised by a lack of interaction between activists and journalists and, hence, deploying abstention relational media practices towards mainstream media, saw some marginal clashes between protesters and the police at the very end of the day of protest. According to activists, these clashes were intentionally provoked by the

They were one of the few ways to say what you were blamed for and to reply to those accusations. Clearly, movement media don't have the same levels of diffusion as Corriere della Sera or TG1. But, let's say that they grant you the opportunity to answer and to construct a discourse that exists beyond the media wave. Obviously, being conscious about all the limits that there are [related to alternative media diffusion].' While activists did not agree on a common strategy to face mainstream media, they used alternative media to reconfirm and reinforce the narratives of direct actions, to somehow balance out the dominant, misleading representation that was circulating in mainstream media outlets.

Four Styles of Relational Media Practices Drawing on the Quadruple-A model (Ruckt 2004) already outlined in Chapter 1, I contrast four categories of relational media practices that deployed different styles of interactions between activists and media subjects, on the one hand, and activists and media objects, on the other. They are labelled adaptive, abstention, attacking and alternative: each category rests on a certain knowledge of the media environment obtained through knowledge media practices, but they are not mutually exclusive. Social movement groups frequently combined them in the same protest event and this trend mirrored the existence of multifaceted perceptions of the media environment. Moreover, each category was deployed towards mainstream, radical left-wing and/or alternative media. Adaptive Relational Media Practices Social movement actors engaged in Italian mobilisations against precarity saw the media environment as crucial in order to obtain visibility within and beyond the social movement milieu. As outlined in Chapter 4, they recognised mainstream, radical-left wing and alternative media as relevant venues to convey their messages about precarity. For this reason, they engaged in adaptive relational media practices according to which social movement groups adjusted their interactions with media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals to the assumed implicit and explicit norms and rules governing subjects and objects populating the media environment. Adaptive relational media practices were certainly at work in the case of radical left-wing and established alternative media. Social movement actors 8 TGI is the television news of the first public television channel.

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police to turn a peaceful demonstration into a violent one. They organised a press conference to state this, as Antonio said:

The same activist told me that in 2004 the location of the press conference was a source of tension, since holding the press conference in one place rather than another risked indicating some `paternity' of the protest event. In 2005, finally, different social movement groups organised separate press conferences, occurring on the same day and place, to launch the Euro Mayday Parade. In protest campaigns like this one, which became more and more important as the years passed, adaptive relational media practices towards mainstream media seemed to represent the breaking point in internal struggles related to the imposition of one specific point of view on mobilisations against precarity. Engaging in adaptive relational media practices towards mainstream and, to some extent, radical left-wing media organisations also led to continuous negotiations with regard to the news values governing news-making processes. Social movement groups considered the journalistic need to identify symbols and icons in order to represent protests as particularly dangerous — especially when these symbols and icons were embodied by individual activists. In grassroots mobilisations against precarity, for instance, social movement groups decided not to appoint spokespersons in order to stress their horizontal nature. This was particularly evident with regard to those protest events that involved a variety of activist groups, like the Euro Mayday Parade, the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions and the national demonstration against the Ddl Moratti. Speaking about the Euro Mayday Parade, for instance, Goffredo explained that:

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The only thing we did was a press conference, the day after, here at [the faculty of] political science. I introduced it. It was a press conference attended by many journalists. It denounced the attacks of the previous evening. It was when we came home indeed, that the worst crime occurred. Therefore, it was only the day after that we organised a press conference which spoke to the media ... [ ... ] I remember that that was the only moment in which different students from different faculties tools the floor to speak to the media directly.

In this case, social movement groups unanimously accepted to engage in adaptive relational media practices towards mainstream media. On other occasions, however, the need to take similar decisions proved a source of internal divisions, disputes and strains. The two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions were depicted as extremely violent and activists involved in them knew that they risked being charged with serious crimes such as robbery. Social movement groups, however, were not able to organise a common press conference to repair the mainstream media narrative, as Antonio explained: The problem was that some released declarations to the media and others preferred not to speak [with the media]. Within this difference, the problem was how to use the media when you produce an action. Therefore, there were some groups who wanted to come out into the open in order to explode the mechanisms which caged us in the past. Other groups, instead, said that with such an action either activists speak collectively, and hence you explode the role of the spokesperson which is a mechanism of representation of a struggle, or you do not speak [with the media].

Instead of organising a common press conference to repair the misleading representation, social movement groups indulged in a massive intra-movement debate that resulted in a lack of coordination. The adoption of adaptive relational media practices towards mainstream media also led to competition between social movement groups who sometimes perceived press conferences as an opportunity to impose their own viewpoints on precarity. Francesco, for instance, explained that this happened during the Euro Mayday Parade: I remember that everyone attempted to slip in and catch [journalists] ... Since the journalists arrived on time and we were late. And there was a guy from a collective against precarity who was trying to catch journalists and tell them how things were according to him. Another activist, indeed, got very angry because of this and he said `no, this is a press conference and we sit behind the table [all together].'

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In such situations [of being interviewed], I preferred to avoid individual visibility. It was not simple, because after a while journalists themselves singled out the people they saw for more years and for more time and about more things. You tend to become, whether you like it or not, a point of reference, so it's not simple. So I think it happened that sometimes my name was linked to some declarations or interviews.

The construction of stable social ties based on trust with journalists could turn into a trap when social movement groups decided to refuse the spokesperson mechanism, which implies the delegation of composite collective voices to specific and recognisable individuals. During previous mobilisations against corporate globalisation in Italy, indeed, spokespersons were part of the communicative strategy of certain social movement groups such as those belonging to the postautonomous area.' The official spokespersons remained in the collective memory and the telephone books of journalists. Manuela explained that they were often also considered newsworthy sources per se during mobilisations against precarity:

9

See interview with Antonio.

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It never happened that the Corriere della Sera called Global Project to know what happened. They can't do it, it's beyond them. They only call Luca Casarini because he is the story, the news.10

Republicart in Austria, Adbusters in the USA and Fuse in Canada. Through the employment of these alternative media outlets, social movement groups involved in the organisation of the Euro Mayday Parade adapted first to alternative media organisations outside Italy and, then, adjusted their communication to the transnational level of the media environment.

It is most likely for this reason that many of the activists I interviewed said they felt uneasy during journalistic interviews in which they clearly saw the traditional news-making process at work, perceiving it as a constraint that led to a strongly biased representation of protests. Social movement groups employed a logic of adaptation towards mainstream and radical left-wing media organisations, but they also adapted to some of the characteristics of the media environment as a whole. The Euro Mayday Parade is an example of adaptation to the existence of alternative media outside Italy. As already explained above, the term `precarity' and the expression `precarious workers' required a `semantic translation' (Appadurai 1996) in other countries to construct a transnational social movement network. Apart from the use of visual tools and the creation of live radio broadcasting (Mattoni and Doerr 2007; Doerr and Mattoni forthcoming), at the transnational level of the Euro Mayday Parade activists were able to employ radical magazines based in countries outside Italy to explain, in English, the meanings of precarity and the conditions of precarious workers in an attempt to move beyond the national level and target transnational audiences of activists. Among others, the Dutch magazine Green Pepper was crucial, as Alessandra explained: The Green Pepper magazine was published at the European level thanks to the collaboration of fellows from Amsterdam. We did a special issue of 20 pages devoted to precarity, with articles written by us, the Italians. We presented it during the European Social Forum in London and the parallel event which was named Beyond ESF [ ... ]. We brought the magazine there and you found people, not Italian people, who began to be interested in it and they asked us `what is precariositysT ... sometimes strange terms came out.

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Abstention Relational Media Practices Some times activists decided to avoid interactions with mainstream, radical-left wing and/or alternative media. The resulting abstention relational media practices often focused on the development of other forms of communication, frequently situated in specific spaces outside established media organisations. The adoption of abstention relational media practices fitted the perception of existing media organisations and outlets as irrelevant for visibility at the political level. Often, activists decided to be absent in mainstream media and to opt for `silence' either as a tactical or a strategic choice during mobilisations (Rohlinger 2006). The Precari Atesia practices were primarily aimed at face-to-face interactions with other precarious workers in the call centre, seen as more important than positive mainstream media coverage, merely a secondary and unintentional objective for activists. Although adaptive relational media practices played an important role during the Euro Mayday Parade, the protest event itself was also an important space of communication, as Michele explained: ... The media mechanism, which always looks for an occasion to criminalise a complex situation with a single event, did not succeed. This was because when in a city with about 1 and a half million inhabitants, there are 100,000 protesters in the streets and 200,000 people looking at this event and seeing it as a participated and joyful event ... each person living in Milan probably had a relative who participated in Mayday, therefore it was difficult for the mechanism of criminalisation, based on a single and isolated action of attack against private property, to succeed.

The magazine was used as a medium to prepare the terrain for further face-toface debates about the concept of precarity, which, thus, began to take its place in the social movement vocabulary in different European countries where it was translated from its Italian origins. As the years went by, the contentious issue slowly continued to spread to a number of countries through radical academic journals and independent publications such as Mute and Fibreculture in Australia,

The protest event itself, as well as its communicative potential, functioned as a means to escape biased mainstream media coverage by privileging face-to-face interactions with those who watched the parade in the streets of Milan. Something similar also happened in the mobilisations against the Ddl Moratti, before the national demonstration, as Antonio stressed:

10 Luca Casarini is an activist linked to the North-Eastern social centres identifying themselves in the post-autonomous tradition and the (ex) Disobbedienti network. Luca Casarini was highly visible in the media environment during the counter-summit protests against corporate globalisation and, especially, during the G8 demonstrations in Genoa in 2001. To some extent, the media contributed to transform activists like Luca Casarini into `celebrities' (Gitlin 1980).

Especially on the part of struggling subjects, there has been a refusal [of mainstream media]. Since, to some extent, the all-pervasive and almost impenetrable dimension of media was assumed, especially after the defeat concerning those media of the no global movement. So the problem was more related to the field of social communication, to the city. So, there was much more communication outside the space of big media.

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Activists did not refuse outright to speak with those mainstream journalists who wanted to know more about the ongoing mobilisation, but they mostly focused on the `metropolitan space' as a space of communication in which the mobilisation materially occurred. In addition, more experienced activists recalled that younger generations of university students preferred to focus on the creation of their own blogs, rather then on interactions with journalists." According to some activists I interviewed, however, the logic of abstention also brought some risks, as Mario stressed:

This quote suggests an enlargement of the mainstream media concept and, at the same time, that the quality press played a less central role in the media environment. Radical left-wing media like it manifesto also seemed to lose their centrality in relational media practices. In this case, indeed, it was more important, according to Antonio, to be visible among ordinary, non-politicised people than to participate in a political debate managed by institutional political actors through mainstream and radical left-wing media. This quote, therefore, clearly shows a pragmatic attitude (Barker-Plummer 1995) to the media environment: groups attempted to exploit all the opportunities that recent changes in the mainstream media market offered in order to spread their collective action frames to as many people as possible.

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There was no capability to answer this question [by mainstream media]: `why are 50,000, 100,000 people blocking Rome for one dayT Since we began the thing in the morning and we came back to La Sapienza at eight in the night. They [the mainstream media] did not take into consideration the fact that there was a movement which had been occupying faculties for three weeks. In the mainstream media reception of the 25 October [demonstration] this was missing and it seems to me that it was missing because of our mistakes. Apart from the national demonstration, which probably attracted the attention of mainstream journalists because of the high number of participants, mainstream media did not generally report on the mobilisations before the protest event in point. According to Mario, this was due to the logic of abstention that activist groups followed. In the examples above, abstention relational media practices were directed towards mainstream media in general, but social movement groups also exercised them with regard to specific mainstream media organisations, usually well established, neglected in favour of new types of mainstream media outlets. Social movement groups mobilised against precarity sometimes considered the free press as valuable mainstream media outlets to launch mobilisations. From a different perspective, however, this attitude can be seen as the adoption of adaptive relational media practices, since social movement groups adjusted to emergence of the free press as is clear in Antonio's words: We have some contact with the free press, little newsrooms that sometimes give us little spaces and that many many people read. Now, one of the free press newspapers with which we relate more is E-Polis. Since 3 million people read them [the free press newspapers] I sincerely prefer, to put it in an unconventional way with respect to the old left-wing tradition, to release a declaration to E-Polls than to it manifesto, that publish it in a negative manner and where it will only be read by 10,000 people, 5,000 of which live in another world. So we exploit the intemet and the metropolitan free press newspapers more.

11

See interviews with Aldo and Alessio.

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Attacking Relational Media Practices

Social movement groups sometimes reacted to the negative perceptions they had of mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media organisations and outlets by deploying attacking relational media practices. The Precari Atesia collective, for instance, was against the managers of the call centre and, at the same time, strongly critical of traditional trade unionists who were blamed for failing to represent the interests of precarious workers. In such a context, the social movement group considered the positions assumed by some radical left-wing media to be too much in line with those of trade union confederations. As activists recalled, this situation led to a direct confrontation between some of the Precari Atesia collective activists and a journalist working in the radical left-wing newspaper in question.12 Direct confrontations were, however, rare and social movement groups usually employed their knowledge about the media environment to subvert some of its mechanisms. Activists criticised mainstream media in a fairly subtle manner, attempting to destabilise the news-making process on which journalists rely. This usually happened during face-to-face interactions between activists and journalists during protest events. A relevant example was a press conference organised to present Precog, a mailing-list established by various activist groups involved in the Euro Mayday Parade in 2003. The press conference that launched the mailing list was held at the end of a meeting related to squatted spaces in Italy called the Metropolitan Assembly, held in Milan. Francesco, who participated in the assembly, explained how the press conference developed: Precog did the press conference about its birth during the Metropolitan Assembly, with about 15 people sitting in a circle, one for each activist group. And we said to ourselves: we'll say ten words each and then pass the microphone to the next one. And the journalists who were there got crazy, because there were some people with cameras running around the circle and they didn't know who to

12 See also the interviews with Sergio and Lorenzo reported in the previous chapter.

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shoot. Then I remember that the microphone remained with one of us and people interviewed him. [ ... I We tried to do things that upset them, I don't how to say it.

as Alessandra told me, but also against mainstream media as a whole. Attacking relational media practices had positive outcomes for activist groups, regardless of the consequences of their interactions on the media environment and, in this case, the fashion industry. All the activists involved in the Serpica Naro fashion show that I interviewed spoke of the protest event in a joyful manner, and many of them said that they had so much fun organising the protest event that they were able, for a while, to overcome the sense of frustration derived from living in a constant situation of uncertainty.

This particular kind of press conference criticised the news-making process in a subtle and ironic manner. Activists imposed their own interpretation of the press conference and forced journalists to follow the order established by activists if they wished to understand the content of the press conference itself. At the same time, they tried to escape the spokesperson trap discussed above. In a similar vein, Antonio explained another attempt to disrupt one of the traditional mechanisms of the news-making process in an even more hidden way: I remember that I gave an interview to the TG1. They asked for an intervention by a researcher and another by a student. And so there was someone who played the part of a researcher and someone else who played the part of a student. It was a sort of role play that we tried to break. But then, only three seconds of the interviews were broadcast. Using a university student to respond as a precarious researcher and vice versa was an ironic attempt to destabilise the constant search for a particular kind of social actor to symbolise a specific role. That said, it is clear that these kinds of subversions remain rather implicit: even if the activists who engaged in these disruptive interactions knew of the subversion, the journalists involved may either have failed to recognise the sabotage or simply overcome it during interviews and press conferences. The first of the two quotes above, for instance, underlines this. As Francesco explained, the last activist who spoke was interviewed by journalists, who, thus, found someone to speak about the Precog mailing list. The individual level of the interview substituted the collective level of the press conference. The mainstream media news-making process regained ground on activists. In sum, these kinds of interactions did not actually subvert mainstream media, although they were important to activists since they put into practice the deconstruction of mainstream media codes, recognising and questioning media power to name social realities. The Serpica Naro fashion show was to some extent a set of attacking relational media practices that employed activist knowledge about the media environment to reveal the weak points of mainstream media. Activists succeeded in inventing a false fashion designer, Serpica Naro, who conformed to the mainstream standards of the Chamber of Fashion in Milan. To do so, they employed a variety of communication tools usually used in the fashion industry such as a public relations manager to maintain contacts with journalists and an official website to present the fashion designer. Activists, therefore, engaged in relational media practices that, apparently, followed an adaptive style. These interactions, such as the creation of a fake public relations manager named Nadia Fortuna, were in fact a front for a protest event that was, as a whole, a subtle attack against the Milan Fashion Week, in order to `render more precarious those who render us more precarious',

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Alternative Relational Media Practices

Social movement groups involved in mobilisations against precarity often employed existing alternative media channels and created further radical means of communication. In this sense, they adopted alternative relational media practices towards mainstream and radical left-wing media. Alternative media ranged from small-scale and low-tech media such as flyers distributed in the streets before demonstrations, to large-scale and high-tech media outlets like informational websites internal to the social movement milieu but potentially available to broad audiences. This category of media organisations and outlets served different aims. They were, first, a site for discourse production and diffusion that challenged common dominant frames and narratives about precarity and precarious workers. They were also important means for supporting the organisation of protest events, since they spread information about forthcoming mobilisations against precarity, explaining the contents, reasons and logistics of demonstrations, direct actions, parades and strikes. In sum, alternative media organisations and outlets were employed for both symbolic and instrumental reasons in Italian mobilisations against precarity. Alternative relational media practices were also at work with regard to established alternative media like Indymedia Italy and Global Project. This was to some extent consistent with the perceptions held by many activists about more established alternative media outlets, considered as difficult to access for several reasons as I stated in Chapter 4. Oreste, moreover, explained: Indymedia is always Indymedia. Global Project, we know that it is Global Project. But they have more difficulties concerning change; it is a structural thing, because more time is needed because they are based on organisational forms involving a lot of people, stable, which have technological infrastructures which require a lot of work. If you want to change the structure of a website like Indymedia, it is not like changing the structure of a little website constructed for one specific moment. The long-lasting nature of some alternative media organisations and outlets, thus, appeared to impact on their capacity to adapt to new protest events such as mobilisations against precarity.

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Social movement groups engaged in Italian mobilisations against precarity, thus, frequently created channels and means of mediation used in addition to existing alternative media and were, therefore, in a sense alternative to them. The result was the creation of `fleeting or ephemeral alternative communication' (Dagron 2004): small-scale media outlets, usually short-lived and strictly linked with a specific protest event. At the local level of the Precari Atesia strikes, for instance, the use of protest event related media was important. The Precari Atesia collective created a magazine, named the Sfront End, to be distributed in the call centre, and a website on which they posted relevant materials connected to their working and living conditions, including the magazine. Although the web was important, the Precari Atesia collective thought that the magazine, in particular, was useful, as Sergio and Michela explained:

Crew, invented the expression media sociali and created two in 2004 and 2005: the patron saint of precarious workers, San Precario and the Imbattibili sticker cards. From the very beginning, San Precario was highly symbolic. Significantly, he was `born' on 29 February, a date that recurs only once every four years and, hence, evokes many forms of discontinuous work (Tari and Vanni 2005, 26). More importantly, activists took the strong Italian Catholic tradition, characterised by a dense presence of saints, subverted its main codes and provided a floating signifier able to reproduce strong imagery in different contexts (ibidem, 27). The Chainworkers Crew invented this icon to produce a common image for precarious workers who were not reflected in the older categories of workers that lay at the centre of previous cycles of protest in Italy. The inventors of the small saint card had intended it as a special kind of leaflet in which to present precarity with simple words and a catchy aesthetic. This in turn intended to facilitate the involvement of even those precarious workers who were not socialised in political struggles. According to many activists, San Precario was more than a simple icon, since it had the potential to become a vehicle for political socialisation and the organisation of struggles. The Imbattibili were 19 sticker cards distributed during the Euro Mayday Parade together with an accompanying album. At first glance, this media sociale may appear to be a simple evolution of the San Precario icon: the language maintained an ironic register, an eye-catching aesthetic and the attempt to stress a positive attitude about precarity. Various political and social subjects, however, participated in this common project, as Michele explained:

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[Sergio] You know about our journal. It is one of the means we still use and when it is published it is a kind of event in Atesia. It is a way to speak to the firm directly. [Michela] We published ironic articles which were leaving a message, a provoking message. And it really worked. According to Sergio, the magazine was not only a means through which the PrecariAtesia collective spoke with other precarious workers within the call centre, or a way to bypass trade union confederations and try to create a network of people to join the protest events. The magazine was, indeed, a means of communicating with the management of the call centre, who did not recognise the collective as a valuable political actor able to represent the interests of precarious workers. Immediately after the Serpica Naro fashion show, finally, activists established an ad hoc website in order to explain the contentious issue of precarity and the real meaning of Serpica Naro. The use of protest event related media also flourished during the occupation of La Sapienza University before the national demonstration against the Ddl Moratti: activists created a variety of blogs and websites to spread information about the mobilisation. As was the case for interactions with journalists, more experienced activists recalled that, during the mobilisation, younger university students preferred to focus on these forms of communication, substantially ignoring the existence of more established alternative media like Indymedia Italy and Global Project. The contacts with these were instead maintained by activists who had participated in previous cycles of protest." In the case of the Euro Mayday Parade, social movement groups based in Milan created Radio Mayday and established a website from which activist groups could download, print and distribute postcards, posters and other visual tools. Another relevant example of fleeting alternative communication was the creation of the so-called media sociali. A specific social movement group, the Chainworkers

13

See interviews with Aldo, Alessio and Antonio.

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We had to invent something else to activate a series of relationships, since we had the problem that we were collaborating with a lot of different groups and we wanted to do something with them. But obviously no one wanted to create a cartel, a board, the organisation of the organisations. We knew that this was the wrong path. We had to create a mechanism to involve these people. Besides pre-existing relationships among groups of activists, ordinary people who were not socialised at the political level also contributed to create the sticker cards, as Tamara remembered: There was this character, Piger Man, which is by a group from a neighbourhood, friends of mine, who were from my neighbourhood and who are not usually activists. But they had this particular interest and on that occasion they participated. And however [the creation of Piger Man provided] a form of relationship which is in contrast to human misery. Even with regard to socialisation in peripheral zones, since they are from a peripheral neighbourhood of Milan, Baggio. Similarly to puppet-making in other demonstrations (McDonald 2002, 124), the Imbattibili created strong, though temporary, relationships oriented towards spreading the precarity issue amongst a select network of individuals, different in

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Surfing Media Diversity: Relational Media Practices

many respects but linked by a common short-term goal: the creation of the media

relational media practices towards existing established alternative media. Or they may engage in attacking relational media practices towards radical left-wing media organisations. Media knowledge practices and relational media practices cast light on grassroots political communication from the viewpoint of social movement actors. The latter consider interactions between activists and media subjects, like journalists, and between activists and media objects, like web applications. The former consider perceptions that activists hold about the media environment, pointing to the knowledge that social movement actors develop about distinct media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals. The media environment, however, is also crossed by a broad and diverse range of communication flows in which media contents and messages travel from subject to subject and from object to object, acquiring different meanings and interpretations. The following chapter focuses on contents created during Italian mobilisations against precarity that were subsequently circulated within the media environment.

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sociali (Mattoni 2008).

Conclusions

In this chapter I explored how activists interacted with the media environment with regard to different types of media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals. In the first section I showed how interactions between activists and J ournalists rested on the creation of social ties based on mutual trust. These, in turn, were constructed through long-lasting acquaintances between activists and journalists in the case of mainstream media organisations and similar political viewpoints in the case of radical left-wing media organisations. The common condition of precarity, which both journalists and activists frequently shared, also opened temporary spaces of communication. Finally, I have pointed out that activists' interactions with alternative media practitioners implied a new notion of media-activism. Overall, this chapter focused on the agency that social movement groups exert over the media environment as a whole. Activists addressed the structural constraints and opportunities related to the media by starting from their own perceptions of mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media. In some cases, they succeeded in transfouning the given discursive opportunity structure through relational media practices, as it happened in the case of the Precari Atesia collective and the newspaper it manifesto. The creation and employment of media outlets alternative to Indymedia Italy and Global Project also demonstrated the presence of dynamic agency able to transform the time and space of radical communication and, at the same time, to increase the number of outlets available to activists. Activists tend to combine different technological objects and supports in their relational media practices. As a consequence, multi-modal communication flows emerge in the media environment. At the same time, activists do not exhaust relational media practices in technological objects and subjects, since they tend to integrate face-to-face interactions in physical spaces with computer-mediatedcommunication, especially when organising mobilisations. To some extent, therefore, boundaries between the physical and virtual realm of communication disappear in the development of relational media practices. Drawing on the Quadruple-A model (Rucht 2004) outlined above, relational media practices rest on four styles of interaction with the media environment which are consistent with the perceptions that activists develop about different categories of media organisations: adaptive, abstention, attacking and alternative relational media practices. The four categories are not mutually exclusive and frequently combine or follow one another in the course of different stages of the same protest events. Moreover, a single category of relational media practice is not exclusively oriented towards a specific category of media organisation or outlet. Social movement actors may, for instance, engage in abstention or alternative

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Chapter 6

The Construction of Public Identities: Media Representations of Protest

Introduction

The day after the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, activists faced a negative mainstream media coverage. They were not able to escape the construction of narratives that evoked the violent nature of the direct actions while overshadowing the message that activists intended to convey: the need of a basic income for everyone in Italy so as to face the marginalisation of precarious workers in the labour market and the exclusion of precarious workers from the welfare state system. Mainstream media, through the voices of politicians, represented social movement groups and social movement organisations that sustained the two direct actions as violent protestors to be stopped as soon as possible. Part of mobilisations against precarity was, as a result, criminalised. But the day after the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions other narratives, different than those maintained by mainstream media, circulated in the media environment. Radical left-wing media attempted to provide a more nuanced version of what happened during the two direct actions. They spoke about the social problem that the two direct actions wanted to render visible in the Italian society: precarity. Alternative media interpreted the two direct actions as a positive moment of struggle that rendered precarity visible as a social problem. Indymedia, in particular, was the place where a debate internal to the social movement milieu took place. A common press release was circulated that underlined the communicative nature of the two direct actions and refused any type of connection with the `proletarian expropriations' of mobilisations in the 1970s. The case of the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions is similar to many other mobilisations on which literature about social movements and mainstream media focuses. Mainstream media, indeed, are far more than neutral channels of communication in that they name, frame and order the social realities they represent (Couldry 2000). They participate in the `making and unmaking' (Gitlin 1980) of social movements: by emphasising some aspects of a demonstration and ignoring others, they construct representations of protest events that suggests to audiences how to interpret the social movement actors sustaining them. Interaction between social movements and mainstream media results in the construction of `public identities' that will then inform the general public about the qualities of social movements (van Zoonen 1996; van Zoonen 1992).

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The Construction of Public Identities

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Amongst others, mainstream media are an important site where struggles for recognition and visibility occur today (Hobson 2003; Ferree et al. 2002). The same struggles, however, take place in the media environment as a whole. Social movement actors seek recognition and visibility also in other media organisations and outlets than mainstream media. As Chapter 5 on relational media practices showed, Italian social movement groups sustaining mobilisations against precarity interacted with mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media organisations to increase visibility in different layers of the media environment and hence to reach a number of audiences. Since media organisations, outlets and professionals are not neutral channels of information, but rather social actors that intervene in the news-making process, patterns of recognition and visibility vary within the media environment. The construction of public identities during Italian mobilisations against precarity rested on different media representations that, in turn, consisted of the amount of media coverage, the quality of media coverage and the communication flows related to media contents about mobilisations against precarity. The first part of the chapter compares three categories of media organisations and six categories of media outlets looking at the amount of media coverage they granted the five protest events. I then shift to a more interpretative analysis of media coverage in discussing the role that mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media had in the formation of public identities with regard to mobilisations against precarity in Italy. Finally, I look at communication flows involving the passage of media contents related to protests from one media outlet to another. I focus, in particular, on media contents going from alternative to radical left-wing and mainstream media and, on the contrary, going from mainstream and radical leftwing to alternative media.

Amount of Media Coverage The literature shows that the amount of mainstream media coverage assigned to protests is usually scarce (Smith et al. 2001; Oliver and Maney 2000; McCarthy, McPhail and Smith 1996; Mueller 1997; Snyder and Kelly 1977). There is less knowledge, instead, about the amount of space that other categories of media outlets, like radical left-wing and alternative outlets, grant to mobilisations. In this section I compare the three categories of media outlets with regard to the struggles of precarious workers. Overall, mainstream media devoted less space and attention to Italian mobilisations against precarity than radical left-wing and alternative media. Figure 6.1 illustrates that the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions and the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti where the two protest events that received more attention in mainstream media and, together with the Euro Mayday Parade, in radical left-wing media.

127 ■Premri Ataóle ■Serpica Nam t, Reddito per TLW W Odl Moraal ■Eum Mayday Parade

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Figure 6.1 Media coverage of mobilisations against precarityr

The type of protest events concerned seemed to play a role in the amount of media coverage received. In particular, the presence of violence was a feature that attracted media coverage. The Reddito per Tutt* direct actions and the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti involved a certain amount of either supposed or actual violence. The first was represented in mainstream media as a violent protest event recalling the `proletarian expropriations' occurring in the so-called `77 movement. A debate followed in both mainstream and radical leftwing media that involved politicians, intellectuals and journalists in discussing the `real' nature of the two direct actions and of social movement groups that took part in them. The demonstration against the Ddl Moratti was also framed as partially violent since some policemen beat a group of protestors at the end of the protest, which was substantially peaceful also when participants decided to siege the parliament where the government was discussing and approving the Ddl Moratti. But the relatively high amount of coverage that mainstream and, even more, radical left-wing media devoted to the demonstration was also due to the fact that it was the peal, of a long-lasting protest campaign in which several minor protest events, such as university occupations and local rallies, occurred in different Italian cities both before and after the national demonstration took place in Rome. The long-term nature of the protests was, indeed, the second aspect that seemed to influence the extent of media coverage. The Ddl Moratti and the Euro Mayday Parade were not isolated protests, but were part of a long-lasting wave 1 Here and in the following figures data related to the Euro Mayday Parade refers to 2004. The only exception is Figure 6.2, in which I consider mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media coverage of the parade from a cross-time perspective.

Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Construction of Public Identities

of mobilisation, in the case of the former, or a chain of recurrent protest events, in the case of the latter. Figure 6.2 shows the shifts in media coverage across different categories of media outlets in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade. The attention of radical left-wing and alternative media changed over time and, more importantly, cannot be taken for granted. The Euro Mayday Parade was, in fact, largely absent in mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media when it began in 2001, and also in 2002. From 2003 onwards it became more visible in radical left-wing and alternative media, while media coverage from mainstream media remained quite stable. The diachronic perspective on the same protest campaign shows that even radical left-wing and alternative media paid scarce attention to the parade at its very beginning. But when the social movement network sustaining the Euro Mayday Parade enlarged and became national, in 2003, and then transnational, in 2004, radical left-wing and alternative media coverage also increased. This was particularly evident in the case of the latter, as the Figure 6.2 points out. The great amount of news texts registered for 2004 matches the increased number of protestors travelling to Milan to take part in the parade, which became a central protest event among Italian mobilisations. This led to the use of Indymedia Italy by a high number of individual activists and social movement groups and to the increased number of media texts about the Euro Mayday Parade in the alternative informational website. If alternative media have a strong link with a specific social movement actor, it is more likely that they will cover protests that the social movement actor organised or supported. This is partly because social movement actors are aware of the existence of alternative media, especially in the case of Indymedia Italy, and partly because alternative media practitioners are not

only aware of the existence of the social movement actor, but also aim to support and diffuse its alternative system of meanings. As Figure 6.3 shows, the Precari Atesia strikes and the Serpica Naro fashion show are a counter example in the same direction. The series of three strikes that occurred in 2005 were, indeed, barely covered within the alternative informational website, Global Project. This was due, once again, to the lack of connections amongst the social movement group organising the strikes and the national social movement network managing the Global Project website. The Serpica Naro fashion show also received a small amount of coverage within the same alternative infoicnational website. And this was probably because the social movement network sustaining Global Project was not involved in the preparation of the media hoax. The three case studies, taken together, show that alternative media organisations and outlets may be as partial as mainstream and radical left-wing media when representing social movements: differences between Indymedia Italy and Global Project in terms of the number of media texts published, where the former produces more contents than the latter, are due to the kind of publishing system that the two adopted. Potentially everyone can post contents on Indymedia Italy, based on open publishing. Global Project, on the contrary, is based on a close community and a horizontal editorial team that belong to the same social movement area. But the reasons leading to a lack of alternative media coverage were also linked to the position of the alternative media in the social movement milieu in relation to the position of social movement groups that organise protest events and protest campaigns to be covered in alternative media. Apart from variations due to forms of protest, the construction of narratives and the spread of logistic information

128

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Figure 6.2 Media coverage of the Euro Mayday Parade

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Figure 6.3 Alternative media coverage of mobilisations against precarity

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Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Construction of Public Identities

took place in Indymedia and Global Project, especially in the case of those protests that were organised by the social movement groups that were also involved in the management of the two alternative media outlets. This was evident in the case of the Precari Atesia that received some media coverage in alternative media only after the protests occurred, but not before or during them. Being internal to the social movement milieu, alternative media organisations and outlets are, indeed, partial in the treatment of struggles. Although they gave voice to precarious workers struggling against precarity, they always did so from a specific viewpoint that reinforced certain narratives more than others and gave voice to certain social movement actors more than to others.

The timing of media coverage of protest events and campaigns varied across the three categories of media organisations and outlets. As the figures opposite show, mainstream media outlets concentrated the majority of media texts after the mobilisations occurred, except in the case of the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti that was preceded by a number of minor protest events all over Italy; radical left-wing media provide some information about protests also before they take place and, in doing so, they contribute to introduce them to their audiences; alternative media, finally, produce a significant amount of media texts about protests before they occur, often inserting the protest at stake in a broader context of mobilisation and spreading logistic information that facilitate the participation of potential protestors. The three categories of media organisations and outlets participated to the constructions of public identities of social movement groups struggling against precarity in different moments of mobilisations and from different perspectives. Alternative media contributed to the construction of public identities before and, in some cases, also during protests from a perspective which was usually internal to the social movement milieu; radical left-wing media partially contributed to the construction of public identities before protests form a position which was at the intersection of the journalistic and political realm; together with alternative and radical left-wing media, finally, mainstream media contributed to the construction of public identities after protests occurred, maintaining an external point of view about them.

■Euro Mayday Parade ® Ddl Moratu ❑ Reddito per Tutti ® Serploa Nam ■Precari Atesia

Figure 6.4 Timing of mainstream media coverage

E Euro Mayday Parade E Ddl Moretti ❑Reddito per TuV D Serpica Nato ® Precari Atesia

Figure 6.5 Timing of radical left-wing media coverage The Construction of Public Identities in the Media Environment Differentiations amongst mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media are also present when considering the quality of their media coverage about mobilisations against precarity. More importantly, their role in constructing public identities varied, not only because they intervened at different stages in

The Construction of Public Identities

Media Practices and Protest Politics

132

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Figure 6.6 Timing of alternative media coverage

mobilisations, but also because they exerted a `description bias' (Bennett 1988) that consisted in narrating protests according to different viewpoints. Mainstream Media Misunderstandings of the Language and Forms of Mobilisations

Mainstream media usually portray protests in a mostly negative way (Gitlin 1980; Halloran, Elliott and Murdock 1970). Also in the case of Italian mobilisations against precarity, mainstream media organisations intervened in the construction of public identities of protestors and activists who organised collective action. They did so, impacting on the language and imagery produced in the framework of mobilisations, but also describing the form of protest according to social categories and stereotypes evoking violence. In some cases, mainstream media attempted to take into consideration the novelties of discourse and language frequently associated with mobilisations against precarity that to some extent reinvented traditional workers' movement struggles. The claims and demands of precarious workers, indeed, often differed from those of trade union confederations that represented full-time and openended workers. Social movement groups struggling against precarity, moreover, attempted to engage in the active construction of meaning about their own living and working conditions. This was particularly evident in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade. Mainstream media reported, quite accurately, catchphrases and slogans associated with the parade, though their discursive contexts were frequently missed. In 2001, for instance, the local edition of la Repubblica

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reported the slogan `Stop the precariat',2 but the concept of precarity as conceived by activists was not explained in the text. In 2002, moreover, the national edition of Corriere della Sera explained new expressions related to precarity and used during the parade, such as `chainworkers' and `brainworkers': according to the article, the former referred to `workers in big commercial chains and fast-food', while the latter meant `co.co.co employed in the communication, professional and advertising sectors' .3 Even the name of the parade itself was sometimes explained, since it was not immediately comprehensible to all Italian native speakers. But when it came to more sophisticated forms of language and communication, mainstream media outlets had difficulties in recognising and explaining the new imagery associated to precarity. In the framework of the Euro Mayday Parade, for instance, social movement groups invented San Precario in 2004. The patron saint of all precarious workers quickly became the icon of precarious workers, but was also conceived as a means to diffuse awareness about precarity among less politicised precarious workers through the subversion of language used in the Catholic tradition. One piece of commentary published in the national edition of la Repubblica, however, shows that mainstream media did not understand the message behind San Precario, and instead regarded the icon as a patron saint invented by some Catholic associations: [May First is] a poor feast, made up of numerous conflicts, few certainties and no trust in the future. The feast of `San Precario', as the Catholic associations call it, which today will demonstrate in order to say no the `savage flexibility' of collective contracts.' Something similar happened with the Imbattibili, a series of sticker cards invented in 2005 to address precarity from an ironic perspective, which were distributed during the parade. Both the creation and distribution of the Imbattibili were meant to function at the level of political socialisation also outside the social movement milieu (Vann 2007; Mattoni 2008). Mainstream media, however, oversimplified the meaning of the Imbattibili, as the following description shows: [ ... ] They became a rarity: they are the `Imbattibili' sticker cards, the superhero created by precarious workers: from San Precario to Pigerman. A lot of children on Sunday, like in a treasure hunt, having got hold of the album, collected the images [...].5

2 la Repubblica, 1 May, 2001. 3 Corriere della Sera, 1 May 2002. (co.co.co is the acronym of coordinated and

continuous collaboration, a contract of temporary employment.) 4 la Repubblica, 1 May 2004. 5 la Repubblica, 3 May 2005.

Media Practices and Protest Politics

The Construction of Public Identities

Children, not precarious workers and activists, were considered as the target of the sticker cards that the article portrayed as novelty gadgets distributed during the parade. The newspaper article imparted a naïve and folkloristic representation of precarious workers, missing their attempt to use new ways of speaking about themselves and representing their claims. During the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti, mainstream media outlets frequently missed the link between the public university reform and precarity. Apart from the involvement of precarious researchers, active against the Ddl Moratti already in 2004, university students that occupied universities organised local rallies and finally participated in the national demonstration against the Ddl Moratti, theorised on their identity of precarious workers. The public identity resulting from manstream media coverage, however, was mostly centred on students protesting against the transformation of universities. In one case, moreover, the public identity of protestors was similar to the stereotyped image of the digital native generations: they were depicted as the `video electronic generation' of 20-somethings, activists who were similar to Lara Croft' and knew the tactics of protest thanks to video-games with the whole article revolving around the idea that the young protestors against the Ddl Moratti relied entirely on ICTs to organise the protest event and imagine protest tactics.' Mainstream media also played a role in the construction of the public identity of protestors through the production and diffusion of narratives concerning the forms of protest. In some occasions, mainstream media outlets imparted a quite accurate image of contentious performances. This seemed to occur either when activists had a voice in mainstream media texts or when they organised a press conference to launch the protest event. This happened after the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti, when activists organised a press conference to denounce police violence against a small group of protestors long after the demonstration had finished.' Rather paradoxically, police violence and its subsequent denouncement by activists opened a window of opportunity for activists to speak about the content of the demonstration and have a voice in mainstream media texts at the local level.' The press conference seemed to be useful, in terms of mainstream media coverage, also for the Euro Mayday Parade. In 2003, for instance, the local edition of la Repubblica presented the parade as follows:

global vocation of this demonstration, now in its third edition (6,000 participants in 2001, 30,000 the next year), which gathers rank-and-file trade unions such as CUB, SinCobas and COBAS, associations like Chainworkers, Indymedia, Critical Mass (the movement born in San Francisco which meets every Tuesday in Mercanti Square) and many others."

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The Mayday Parade, a name which evokes the workers feast, contains a pun (Mayday, the international SOS call) and expresses the Anglophone and new 6 Lara Croft is the main character in Tomb Raider, an early 3D adventure video game which sees Lara Croft, a British archeologist, trying to defeat several enemies and solve a number of puzzles in order to find rare artifacts at the end of the game. The first edition of Tomb Raider was released in 1996 and soon became a worldwide best-seller. 7 la Repubblica, 27 October 2005. 8 la Repubblica, 27 October 2005. 9 la Repubblica, 26 October 2005.

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That said, in the following years mainstream media never mentioned the transnational nature of the Euro Mayday Parade: despite the name of the parade, none of the media texts I collected spoke about the parallel parades occurring in other European cities and sustained by the same social movement network. In this case, therefore, the public identity of the social movement network that sustained the Euro Mayday Parade focused on the national level and ignored the existence of a European social movement network that mobilised against precarity in a number of other countries than Italy. Mainstream media outlets also reported on the Serpica Naro fashion show, speaking about a media hoax that the activists had organised to enter the Milan Fashion Week and speak about precarity. However, the contentious issue was pushed to one side as a result of an emphasis on the media hoax. For instance, ironic clothes for women facing precarity were only briefly mentioned, with no deepening about the claims they wanted to raise. In a similar vein, the presence of independent fashion designers, who proposed their collections thanks to the Serpica Naro catwalks, were also briefly mentioned, but claims about the importance of autonomous production against mainstream fashion were missed." As it happened also with past social movements (Gamson and Modigliani 1989), the focus on contentious performances overshadowed some of the messages that social movement groups wanted to convey to the general audience of mainstream media. Most frequently, however, mainstream media provided accounts of contentious performances centred on violence and confrontations with the police. This happened even when the social movement groups did not include violent or radical contentious performances among their means of protesting against precarity. In many mainstream media texts, for instance, the Euro Mayday Parade was frequently described with words such as `vandalism', `damage' and `violent claims'. In 2004, one article published in the Corriere della Sera local edition reported that the parade displayed `a lot of music, a lot of beer, 41 trucks equipped with happiness, but also a lot or too much vandalism'.12 The same happened in 2005, when the newspaper described the parade as follows: May Day with damages in Milan. In the centre of the city, the precarious workers' demonstration left behind broken windows, dirty walls and soiled la Repubblica, 18 April 2003. Corriere della Sera, 27 February 2005. 12 Corriere della Sera, 3 May 2004.

10 11

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Media Practices and Protest Politics

cash dispensers. Among the outcomes of the vandalism, perpetrated by a small number of protestors, there were also some brawls and a deal of violent graffiti, such as that which appeared on a bank: 10, 100, 1000 Nassiriya.13 While recognising the nature of the parade, represented as a sort of celebratory feast, these two quotes are representative of a more general trend in mainstream media texts, which usually place particular emphasis on violence, even where the protest event as a whole was neither conceived nor carried out as a violent contentious perforinance. The demonstration against the Ddl Moratti is another example of this tendency. It was a rather peaceful demonstration ending in a long sit-in in front of the Parliament where members were discussing the law, eventually approved late that afternoon. The mainstream media, however, foregrounded the verbal violence of one right-wing deputy, a member of the political party Alleanza Nazionale, during the sit-in in front of Montecitorio, and physical violence by the police against a group of protestors at the very end of the day of protest.14 The focus, therefore, immediately moved away from the content of the protest event. In the case of the Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, mainstream media were even more direct and clear in describing the protest event as violent and highly illegal. They did so by using words such as `razzia' (`sacking') when speaking about the `redistribution of goods' outside the supermarket.15 The link with past cycles of protest in which violent actions were more diffused amongst protestors was also explicit, as is evident in this typical quote from la Repubblica: Proletarian shopping is back. Assaults on the shelves, the sacking of food products (but also cameras, computers and phones), distribution to a small bunch of customers and retired people and an escape by metro. A revival of the 1970s under the impassive gaze of police, military police and Digos agents.16 There was, indeed, a fast shift in the mainstream media representation: while the day after the protest event two opposite positions regarding the direct actions were still present," as the days went by the emphasis on violence became more and more prominent. The national edition of the Corriere della Sera is representative of this. At the beginning, declarations by radical left-wing deputies framed the direct

13 Corriere della Sera, 3 May 2005. Nassirya was one of the Italian bases during the Iraq war. In 2003, on November 12, 12 Italian military police, five soldiers and two civilians died after a terrorist attack. Nine Iraqis also died. While the victims were proclaimed national heroes in the dominant discourse about the war, the composite anti-war movement in Italy framed the disaster as the natural collateral damage of being part of a highly contested war. 14 la Repubblica, 26 October 2005. 15 la Repubblica, 7 November 2004. 16 la Repubblica, 7 November 2004. 17 la Repubblica, 7 November 2004.

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actions as part of the repertoire of action used by social movements practicing 'civil disobedience', as the PRC deputy Giovanni Russo Spena declared: Obviously they are illegal actions. But I say that the legal grammar has to be rewritten, since some illegal acts aims at raising mass awareness. [ ...] Direct action has always been present in the history of the workers' movement. Civil disobedience belongs to it, according to different forms.'$ In the following days, however, mainstream media gave more and more space to the position of institutional political actors such as representatives of the government and political parties. The Minister of Justice, Giuseppe Pisanu, strongly condemned this kind of protest event, promising immediate arrests where other direct actions similar to those that had already been carried out to take place. The former secretary of the PRC, Fausto Bertinotti, also condemned this fonn of protest, though from a different perspective, as the Corriere della Sera reported: Actions such as the expropriation in the Panorama supermarket and in the Feltrinelli bookshop are counterproductive. [ ... ] It was a vanguard action which was not understandable to the majority of the people.19 In a similar vein, another article published in the same edition of the Corriere della Sera openly contested the way in which activists presented the two direct actions: What kind of `reappropiation from below of primary goods'. What kind of `new rights for precarious workers', what kind of `distribution of drugs and books'. What really happened this Saturday in the huge mall would give Luca Casarini and Francesco Caruso the shivers.20 Mainstream media depicted protest participants as violent protestors, more than precarious workers: as deviants more than activists. The `criminalisation' (Gitlin 1980) of social movement actors in mainstream media reflected the viewpoints that representatives of the political and judicial power had on the two direct actions, whose voices were extensively represented through interviews and articles. In this case, the reconstruction of protests as violent and criminal events happened after they occurred. With the Euro Mayday Parade, instead, mainstream media defined the parade as violent before it occurred. They prepared the ground for further coverage, focusing on violence proposing an `inferential framework' (Halloran, Elliott, and Murdock 1970) that anticipated the characteristics of the protest event and its participants. Shopkeepers, the Milanese prefecture and local 18 19 20

Corriere della Sera, 8 November 2004. Corriere della Sera, 9 November 2004. Corriere della Sera, 9 November 2004.

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politicians acted as `primary definers' (Shaw 2005) of the Euro Mayday Parade, who were worried and described the organisers through words that evoked violent and/or illegal actions such as `autonomous', `squatted spaces', `anarchists', `no global' and `Disobbedienti'.

they acted as resources in the organisation of the parade: they spread important information about protests which facilitated the gathering of social movement groups willing to participate in the parade, but not directly connected with the organisers. In the Serpica Naro case, radical left-wing media had an even more prominent role in supporting the media hoax, especially at the local level. In the weeks before the protest event, indeed, it manifesto published articles about the fashion show and the fashion stylist as if they were genuine, therefore contributing to raising the profile of the sham controversy between activists, who mostly belonged to social centres in Milan and Serpica Naro. The day before the fashion show, the local edition of the newspaper launched the forthcoming protest against the fashion stylist:

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The Political Media Coverage of Radical Left-wing Media The quality of radical left-wing media coverage changed considerably in comparison to the one of mainstream media organisations. They, indeed, assured a certain amount of logistic support to mobilisations and enriched public identities produced in the framework of mobilisations against precarity through the explanation of the language and imagery used by precarious workers. Radical leftwing media frequently supported the viewpoints of social movement groups that organised collective actions against precarity and, in doing so, they operated as political actors near, when not within, the social movement milieu. Their position in the political realm, however, also imparted commentaries and expositions of mobilisations against precarity that reproduced the interests of certain political actors while overshadowing the viewpoints of others. Radical left-wing media produced contents about protests before they took place to a greater extent and, in doing so, they did more than participating in the construction of public identities of social movement groups involved in mobilisations against precarity. They sometimes granted a logistic support to activists, especially before protests occurred. This is evident when considering the Euro Mayday Parade. Radical left-wing media, for instance, sometimes published contact mobile numbers for receiving information about how to reach the parade from other Italian cities.21 In 2003 Liberazione published short reminders about preparatory assemblies and press conferences to organise and launch the Parade, in the section named `Meetings'." During protests against the Ddl Moratti, it manifesto published the call for action for the national demonstration that underlined the linkage between precarity and the opposition to the university reform: The Italian public research, already weak and without financial support, will undertake a dramatic process of precarisation [ ... ] Specialised and fragmented knowledge produce precarious [workers] who may be blackmailed, have no rights and contractual power. 23 Although not uniformly and not always, radical left-wing media seemed to be positioned within the social movement milieu. Similarly to alternative media, 21 il manifesto, 30 April 2002. 22 Liberazione, 17 April 112003; Liberazione, 22 April 2003; Liberazione, 29 April 2003. 23 il manifesto, 23 October 2005.

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The entrance onto the scene of SerpicaNaro, the Anglo-Nippon fashion designer who made her fortune cannibalising the most ruffled street style [ ... ] she will be disturbed by a bunch of stylish precarious people, they are also ready to parade anywhere in the Isola [neighbourhood] in order to ruin the party to the Milan of the fashion." The same article also contained a declaration by Serpica Naro, who affirmed that: Saturday there will be my presentation and I'm ready to clarify the value of my work to everyone. Even to those who are always against me, when they have no reason to be that way.25 The dispute between social movement groups in Milan and the sham fashion designer was fake, invented to create additional expectations concerning the fashion show so as to attract both specialised and non-specialised journalists. As confirmed in some interviews with activists,26 it manifesto helped social movement groups to publicise the false dispute and revealed its complicity with activists in an article published after the protest event, which explained how the media hoax had been developed, the role of the newspaper in supporting it and the reasons why the Milan fashion week had been chosen as a place to speak about precarity.21 In this particular case, radical left-wing media assumed the role of political actors that took part in the organisation of the protest event. Part of the articles published before and, especially, after mobilisations, contributed to the construction of public identities of social movement groups struggling against precarity in a rather opposite manner than mainstream media. 24 il manifesto, 26 February 2005. 25 il manifesto, 26 February 2005. 26 See interviews with Alessandra, Tamara and Michele. 27 il manifesto, 28 February 2005.

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While the latter frequently oversimplified discourses related to precarity, radical left-wing media tended to deepen them. Concerning the Euro Mayday Parade, for instance, they left room for discussions about precarity, especially in 2004 and 2005, when the parade involved a large number of social movement groups. They also adopted some of the terms used in social movement generated documents. In 2002, for instance, it manifesto explained who the protestors were, clearly adopting the three categories of precarious workers proposed in the call for action that I introduced in Chapter 2.28 Liberazione also did so by interviewing some activists that organised the Euro Mayday Parade .21 Radical left-wing media also recognised the transnational dimension of the parade. In 2004, for instance, it manifesto announced the Euro Mayday Parade as follows: `a parade with 40 trucks, which will reverberate in half of Europe, connected in real time thanks to mobiles and computers'.3 ' As for the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, Liberazione, for instance, spoke about `metropolitan shop-surfing' and `income re-appropriation actions'.31 In a similar vein, it manifesto quoted interviews with activists and the call for action to explain how these direct actions intended:

This quote shows that radical left-wing media texts actively participated in the debate, criticising the way in which mainstream media framed the two direct actions. In doing so, moreover, they attempted to change the focus of the discussion from the form of protest to the social problem they spoke about and the claims activists raised through them. A shift in the role of radical left-wing media, however, occurred in the days after the two direct actions: at the beginning they employed the language and style of social movement groups in describing the protest, but then radical left-wing media shifted the attention away from the content of the two direct actions. They focused instead on the debate about violence versus non-violence in collective action when they gave voice to the then national secretary of the PRC, Fausto Bertinotti. This was especially true with regard to Liberazione, the official newspaper of the PRC political party. However, it manifesto also contributed to this debate.34 The focus was not on the supposed violence and illegality of the two direct actions, but on the opportunity of performing such disruptive contentious performances. Radical left-wing media intervened in defining precarity as a social problem, and precarious workers as a social and political subject, according to their political standpoint. In covering the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti and the local protest events preceding it, Liberazione granted extensive space to university collectives involved in the organisation of the demonstration, that were linked to PRC: there, reports were written by some of the participating activists who expressed their specific narratives about university students struggling against the law proposal. When reporting about the Euro Mayday Parade in 2002, the same newspaper gave broad space to those activists who were directly connected with either PRC or the Young Communist organisation.35 In 2003 Liberazione stressed the lack of `granted works' in Italy:

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A large delegation [of the Big Precarious Alliance] will be present within some supermarkets to verify that a 70% discount on goods prices will be granted to customers .32 Radical left-wing media, therefore, attempted to explain, and in certain cases even translate, the meanings and discourses that social movement groups produced in the framework of mobilisations. In this way, they rendered more complex and nuanced the public identity of precarious workers mobilised to improve their living and working conditions. In a similar vein, radical left-wing media texts never raised the comparison with the `proletarian expropriations' of the 1970s used so extensively by mainstream media texts, as is evident in this commentary published by it manifesto: It may not seem much, but nowadays in Italy the presence of a still exiled movement about precarity is a political and social novelty that deserves attention. Putting the `ghosts of the past', the ritual call for bon ton about how to demonstrate or the refrain that social shopping is bad for the cause before understanding is indeed to deny the problem not solve it.33

il manifesto, 30April 2002. Liberazione, 3 May 2002. 30 il manifesto, 1 May 2004. 31 Liberazione, 6 November 2004. 32 il manifesto, 5 November 2004. 33 il manifesto, 9 November 2004. 28 29

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The main aim is to communicate, within the context of national labour day, that a large part of youth (and nowadays even not youth) are not part of the so called `granted work', there are millions of people more and more constricted by precarity. 36 On the contrary, il manifesto explained precarity and precarious workers through the words of an activist involved in the organisation of the parade, also contained in the call for action: Alex, from Chainworkers, says a simple thing: `the precariat is to post-Fordism what the proletariat was to Fordism'.31 The point of view of social movement groups involved in the organisation of the parade was also reinforced through explicit and partisan comments, as the following quote from il manifesto about the Euro Mayday Parade in 2003 shows: 34

35 36 37

il manifesto, 9 November 2004. Liberazione, 3 May 2002. Liberazione, 18 April, 2003. il manifesto, 18 April 2003.

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The left we love less has slow reflexes. We wonder how many times (Mayday 004? Mayday 005?) it will take for it to realise that the real First of May feast is 'precarious' .38 A similar appeal was also published after the national demonstration against the Ddl Moratti: Yesterday something new happened: an autonomous, self-organised, determined, radical, unexpected from most people, without big and recognisable leaders said that it own its own destiny. [ ...] But where are the others, the presumed natural allies of someone who struggles for one of the main pillars of the democracy in this country? Where are unions, where is the Unione?39 In publishing such pieces, radical left-wing media made clear the cleavage between precarious workers, autonomously organised to struggle against precarity, and established political actors, like trade union confederations and radical leftwing political parties. They, hence, reinforced a public identity revolving around a neat distinction between grassroots political mobilisations against precarity and more conventional workers' struggles. This was not always the case, though. In fact, the Precari Atesia strikes received an opposite treatment at the very beginning After the first strike that precarious workers organised, the focus of the media coverage was on internal quarrels amongst the three trade union confederations with the CGIL struggling against CISL and UIL in favour of precarious workers. The voices of the Precari Atesia collective were represented, but without mentioning the name of the social movement groups and, overall, the fact that they were also blaming the behaviour of trade unions confederations, CGIL included.40 Things changed, however, after the second strike when a newspaper article was published that cast light on the role and the reasons of the Precari Atesia collective.41 In between there was the active intervention of precarious workers that protested against the first article published by the newspaper and the journalist who wrote it, blamed for supporting the position of CGIL, a traditional trade union, and ignoring the role of the Precari Atesia collective.

38 il manifesto, 3 May 2003. 39 il manifesto, 26 October 2005. The Unione was a political coalition established in 2005. It included a number of political parties from the centre to the radical-left of the

political spectrum. 40 il manifesto, 18 May 2005. 41 il manifesto, 23 May 2005.

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The Construction of Imageries in Alternative Media Coverage

Alternative media are usually positively biased in favour of mobilisations that cover more extensively and more in-depth than mainstream media do (Bennett 2004; Almeida and Lichbach 2003; Bennett 2003). Overall, this was true also in the case of Global Project and Indymedia Italy with regard to Italian mobilisations against precarity. Apart from accounts, reports and commentaries published after protests occurred, they proved particularly important supporting social movement groups struggling against precarity before and during mobilisations. They did so at a threefold level. Especially in the case of Indymedia Italy, they provided a space for public discussion about forthcoming demonstrations. Both the alternative media outlets, Indymedia Italy and Global Project, contributed to the diffusion of logistic information about protests and sustained their coordination. They, finally, had an important role in the elaboration of public identities related to mobilisations against precarity from the viewpoint of social movement groups. Alternative media contributed to the elaboration of common narratives related to protest events. The two alternative media outlets worked as public discussion forums where activists exchanged narratives about protest events, commented on them, andthereby continuously redefined and negotiated the discursive construction of precarious workers and precarity. This happened more in Indymedia Italy than in Global Project, due to the former's publishing system, more open than the latter's. An interesting example is the Euro Mayday Parade. In 2005, quarrels among activist groups occurred which provoked a physical encounter among activists before and after the parade. As a result, a huge debate tools place on Indymedia Italy, where activists posted official declarations, reports about assemblies after the parade and personal testimonies of what happened during the protest event. Intra-movement disputes, therefore, were transferred to alternative media texts. Public discussions, however, also took place before the parade. For example, in 2004, when the issue at stake was whether to connect the Euro Mayday Parade with struggles in Melfi, where many activists from all over Italy had demonstrated together with workers, or not.42 The initial proposal was to organise the parade not in Milan but in Melfi, so as to render visible connections between the `social precaritt' and workers involved in struggles within their workplaces, as is evident in this quote from Indymedia Italy:

42 Melfi is a small town in Basilicata, a Southern Italian region. The national car firm Fiat established one of its biggest plants in Melfi in the 1990s. At the end of April 2004, workers based in the Melfi plants embarked on a tough strike, blocking the entire plant. They were calling for better working conditions and higher salaries. After interventions by police to end the strike, the protest in Melfi became well known all over Italy and many workers organised protest actions in solidarity with their Fiat colleagues.

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We precarious workers know what domination and life exploitation are, therefore we instinctively feel that Metfi is our struggle. 43

team of our inspectors will personally ensure, in one or more shopping malls, that the discounts are applied' .47 In the case of the Serpica Naro fashion show, social movement groups used alternative media in a more tactical manner. Before the media hoax occurred, they tools advantage of alternative media to further bolster a sham public controversy between social movement groups and Serpica Naro, circulating media texts against the fashion designer. In the case of the Euro Mayday Parade, moreover, alternative media also formed the place in which social movement groups coordinated the media coverage of the parade. In 2002, for instance, Indymedia Italy was used to foster coordination among those activists willing to cover the parade:

Even though this proposal was eventually discarded, the debate that developed around it added nuances related to the discursive construction of precarious workers, and their potential allies, in the making of the Euro Mayday Parade, as yet another quote from Indymedia Italy suggests: The Mayday parade will support by every means the Melfi workers and the block on Fiat production lines. [ ...] We are with the Melfi and the Basilicata Rsu, MOM and LOBAS [ ... ] Unfortunately we have been organising the parade in Milan and Palerm for months, and we cannot abandon everything. With every means, Milan and Palermo are ready to support the sisters' and brothers' arrival from Melfi.44 This kind of public discussion, which certainly mirrored face-to-face debates among activist groups organising the parade, to some extent rendered public collective identification processes and, in particular, the definition of potential allies in the mobilisation against precarity. The elaboration of public discussions about protests was complemented by the diffusion of logistic information about forthcoming mobilisations. Alternative media, indeed, granted extensive space to the material produced by social movement groups before protest events. They published calls for action, posters and leaflets created in the framework of mobilisations. The kind and extent of information that social movement groups disseminated was selected on the basis of the type of protest event. Social movement groups, indeed, employed alternative media in a tactical manner when it came to forms of protest in which partial or total secrecy before mobilisations was important for the success of collective action. In the case of the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, for instance, alternative media published information about how to take part in the protest event: the means of transport that were available to reach Rome, the mobile numbers of local organisers and other practical information. Due to the kind of protest event, however, alternative media texts declared neither the exact locations where the direct actions were going to take place nor defined the type of contentious performances that protest organisers had in mind. Rather, they used vague expressions and metaphors to avoid the presence of police or the closure of the places of consumption in which they were planned to take place. Articles published in alternative media, indeed, spoke about `knowledge reappropriation''45 `big self-training workshop for precarious survival', `70% discount day in every commercial chain of the metropolis146 or `a 43 Indymedia, 26 April, 2004. 44 Indymedia, 26April, 2004. 45 Indymedia, 3 November 2004. 46 Indymedia, 4 November 2004.

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A little media centre (will be constructed) at the Arco della Pace, where communication and media activists who take part in the parade will be coordinated. Within the media centre there will be a radio transmitter which will broadcast via the web in coordination with Onda Rossa radio, Indymedia UK radio and Indymedia NL radio programmes. This radio will broadcast interviews and impressions collected during the parade itself" In 2003 there was a common effort to organise a live broadcast of the parade thanks to the use of ICTs and the involvement of people who lived along the parade route. In this respect, the Milanese Indymedia Italy social movement group organised a campaign named `adopt a media-activist' whose goal was to grant internet access points along the parade route, as this quote explains: Why don't you put an access point on your balcony using your ADSL [internet] connection, so that your adsl could become a publishing point for all mayday media activists?49 Besides their active intervention in the spreading of logistic information about protests, alternative media also supported the creation and diffusion of public identities from the viewpoint of social movement groups. This usually happened even before protests against precarity occurred. In the days before the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, for instance, alternative media contributed to the definition of the social categories that would engage in the protest events, as the following quote shows: We are those without voice, without rights, without income who, in Rome, will claim rights, stability and income against the flood of precarity along with the other struggling social sectors. 50 47 Indymedia, 4 November 2004b. 48 Indymedia, 30April 2002. 49 Indymedia, 20April 2003. 50 Indymedia, 4 November 2004c.

I

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Alternative media also explained the meaning of the day of protest for social movements struggling against precarity all over Italy:

Mayday Milan calling Mayday Barcelona. How are the preparations for May Day getting on? Hi, here it is going pretty well, there are many more people than expected, the largest group is migrants with different banners. One of them reminds us that we are all migrants. Then there are various groups of precarious workers, different from one another, but that have found common ground in the Mayday parade."

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The 6 of November is our day. A day for income, a day of expression, a day of conflict by grassroots unionism and a spreading social precariat, of work disputes and struggles related to the home, migrants and knowledge. It is an important moment, after significant months of struggle raised all over the Italian and European territories: from transport workers to struggles in restricting firms, from social cooperative workers to precarious researchers, from students to the Southern unemployed.51 As the two quotes reported above illustrate, both Indymedia Italy and Global Project extensively used the language that activist groups used to describe, analyse and criticise their working and living conditions. Both the content and the timing of alternative media texts contributed to the creation of a broader context for protests providing a coherent narrative about struggles against precarity. In reporting the viewpoints of social movement actors, they enriched the public identity of social movement groups, providing the idea of continuity in mobilisations and associating different protest events with a long-lasting wave of protest related to precarity. This also happened in the case of mobilisations against the Ddl Moratti: both Global Project and Indymedia published information about university occupations and other forms of protest that occurred at the local level in different Italian cities. The flow of information about different struggles imparted a sense of continuity in approaching the national demonstration against the Ddl Moratti that finally occurred in Rome the day in which the law proposal was discussed, and eventually approved, in the parliament. Social movement groups, however, also focused on the use of alternative media during protest events. They usually did so by elaborating a multimedia discourse about precarity and protest events: this was possible due to an extensive use of the internet, whose technological platforiu allows the circulation of textual, visual and spoken texts. Alternative media, therefore, formed a space where mediation processes occurred, with a hypertext structure in which the textual level of discourse was completed by the use of other forms of communication such as pictures, live radio broadcasts and even short films about protest events. This was particularly so for the Euro Mayday Parade, the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions and the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti. In 2004, for instance, alternative media framed the Euro Mayday Parade as a transnational protest campaign that also aimed at the construction of a European space of contention related to precarity. Thanks to the contributions of many activists from all over Europe, Indymedia Italy published a number of reports about the parade as it unfolded in other European cities, while Global Project provided live coverage in which reports from Milan were mixed with those from other European cities: 51 Global Project, 6 November 2004.

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From early in the morning, correspondents from different Italian cities updated news from trains arriving in Milan, and, once they had arrived in the city, reported on direct actions as well.53 In a similar vein, the independent video website, NGVision, provided long video reports that gave feedback of the most important moments of the parade'54 Here, moving images were more important than texts and seemed to enrich the public identity in terms of atmosphere, emotions and visual memories of the parade. Similarly to what they did for the Euro Mayday Parade, alternative media, and in particular Global Project, provided live coverage of the two Reddito per Tutt * direct actions, broadcast both on the web and some free radio stations. This imparted an accurate description of the protest event from its very beginning, when activists occupied trains to reach Rome from other Italian cities. Global Project held numerous interviews with activists, who explained what was going on as this quote from a report about the situation at the Bologna train station, where protestors gathered and attempted to board the train notwithstanding police intervention: The situation in Bologna is becoming rather tense, the precarious multitude, coming from various Italian situations, is trying to get on the train, but the medieval tax collectors have lined up at track number 6 from which the San Precario Express is supposed to leave. After a tough charge, the demonstrators looked for another way to reach the train that would bring them to the tomorrow's big day. While crossing the tracks, they found themselves face-to-face with the police line-up." In a similar way, another activist described the direct action in the Panorama Mall, explaining that what was going on was a:

52 Global Project, 1 May 2004. 53 Global Project, 1 May 2004. 54 Ngvision is a `network of dedicated ftp servers and a peer-to-peer file sharing system able to overcome the bandwidth problems related to the size of video files' as written on the NGVision website available at: www.ngvision.org. 55 Global Project, 6 November 2004.

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Big redistribution to customers in front of the mall entrance and subvertising against the over-priced-euro and forced flexibility. Solidarity from the majority of the shoppers, a little less solidarity from the cashiers and shop assistants.5ó

media outlets, although sometimes they published contents directly produced by social movement actors. In the case of the Euro Mayday Parade, for instance, besides commentaries and articles about the parade, activists had the possibility to produce media texts to be published as newspaper articles. Therefore, activists were able to transfer their own narratives about protest events and discourses about precarity without apparent filters, as in this article published by it manifesto in 2005 shows:

In both the Euro Mayday Parade and the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, live and direct narratives produced during live broadcasts imparted a clear definition of the protest events and attached specific meanings to them. In the quote above, for instance, the activists speaking from Bologna used the term `precarious multitude', evoking the lexicon of the post-autonomous political culture (Negri and Hardt 2000). The development of live narratives about mobilisations seemed to be functional in the construction of public identities from the viewpoint of social movement groups, in this case even while the protest event was taking place rather than after it.

Communication Flows in the Media Environment The construction of public identities in the media environment also passes through communication flows in which media contents related to specific protests cross different categories of media outlets. This, in turn, passes through relational media practices that involve subjects, like activists and journalists, and objects, like media texts that subjects can manipulate. Communication flows related to media contents about Italian mobilisations against precarity were highly asymmetrical. On the one side, mainstream and radical left-wing media did not publish alternative media contents produced in the framework of mobilisations against precarity. On the other side, alternative media reproduced mainstream and radical left-wing media contents more frequently and, especially, after mobilisations occurred. In the case of mainstream media, alternative media texts were sometimes present through the voices of activists involved in the organisation of protest events. The role of Indymedia Italy, for instance, was explained in one interview with an activist in the local edition of la Repubblica: Indymedia is a network of individuals and collectives with two goals: the construction of a communication tool from below in order to share struggles and experiences, and the experimentation of political organisation forms within the web- Blicero explains, a 27 year old biologist and computer science expert." This interview extract, however, was the exception to a dominant trend according to which mainstream media outlets did not report on mobilisations against precarity explicitly employing alternative media texts. Also radical leftwing media generally avoided publishing the contents published in alternative 56 Global Project, 6 November 2004. 57 la Repubblica, 18 April 2003.

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The San Precario devotees need to put on the stage the overlap between life and work, thanks to a carnival and communicative event like May Day. Moreover, there is the necessity to overcome the traditional relationship between territories and production.58 These articles were a temporary space accorded to activists to make public their point of view about precarity. In 2004, for instance, the weekly magazine Carta gave away a DVD produced by some activist groups involved in the organisation of the parade.59 The same year, Liberazione asked two activists linked to the (ex) Deposito Bulk to write an article about the Euro Mayday Parade that was actually published in a special section of the newspaper on May First.60 In this way, activists were able to use their own spoken and visual language to explain the meaning of the parade, including its transnational nature, showing previous parades in Milan and some related protest events against precarity that had occurred in other European cities. In the case of protests against the Ddl Moratti, moreover, radical left-wing media allowed activists to speak for themselves through the newspaper: right before the national demonstration in Rome, it manifesto began to devote a section to activists who wanted to provide narratives about their own experiences of protests." Two weeks after the national demonstration, moreover, it manifesto published the official declaration of university students and precarious researchers that mobilised against the Ddl Moratti.62 Apart from the textual level, radical left-wing media frequently published the icons that social movement groups elaborated in the context of the parade, leaving room for visual innovations such as San Precario and the Imbattibili that represented precarious workers.63 In the case of the Serpica Naro fashion show, for instance, besides explaining the media hoax, radical left-wing media stressed the ironic clothes to face precarity invented by precarious workers and then exhibited during the fashion show. Liberazione, for instance, used the texts read during the 58 il manifesto, 20April 2005. 59 Carta, April 2004. 60 Liberazione, 1 May 2004. 61 il manifesto, 22, 23, 25 and 27 October 2005; il manifesto, 9 November 2005. 62 il manifesto, 9 November 2005. 63 Liberazione, 29 April 2004; Liberazione, 30 April 2004; Liberazione, 1 May 2004; Liberazione 4 May 2004.

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fashion show to introduce clothes like the `job on call overall' and the `pregnant lady dress' to link the protest event to broader issues related to precarity. The former was employed to blame the Law No. 30/2003 for introducing a variety of short-term contracts, including the on-call contract. The latter was used as a starting point to speak about problems of maternity leave suffered (still) by women employed on short-term contracts.64 While in this case the window of opportunity was a direct channel of communication between activist groups and radical left-wing media audiences, in the majority of the cases the infounation flow was more indirect, since radical left-wing media only published references to websites related to the parade. The opposite trend was at work, in alternative media outlets. They, indeed, frequently published mainstream and radical left-wing media, especially after mobilisations. Besides the establishment of communication flows going from mainstream and radical left-wing to alternative media, this type of public discussion usually involved activists in reflexive thinking about media coverage that contested the public identities represented especially in mainstream media, as it also happened in other countries in the case of Indymedia (Milioni 2009). This self-reflection also played in the deconstruction and reconstruction of meanings attached to mobilisations against precarity. This was especially relevant for the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, whose representation in mainstream and, to a lesser extent, radical left-wing media led to a misleading and negative representation of contentious performances and discourses about precarity. The day after the protest events, a broad discussion on the topic took place on Indymedia Italy, leading to opposite interpretations and evaluations of the two direct actions. Some activists blamed mainstream media coverage, as is clear from this quote:

Apart from being a place for self-reflection about mobilisations against precarity, and, more generally about protest activities, alternative media were also used to repair public identities constructed in mainstream media. Social movement groups sustaining the two direct actions published a joint bulletin in a variety of alternative media outlets and mailing lists that stressed the real nature of the protest event, defined as a `participated and communicative initiative of social bargaining' that:

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They said any old thing. On TV, in the newspapers, on the radio. Like always they just gave their side of it. A day of mobilisation by precarious workers has once again been used as an excuse to criminalise the movement.65 Some others, instead, blame participants in the two direct actions for choosing the wrong kind of contentious performance, as reported in this other quote: If my aim is to raise the theme of precarity and tall, to the people, well, the image of a bunch of kids robbing a supermarket like football hooligans in a motorway service station doesn't seem like the right way to do things. And if the retort is that doing stuff like this is the only way to get into the papers. Well then. I don't know it's worth the bother."

64 Liberazione, 27 February 2005. 65 Indymedia, 7 November 2004. 66 Indymedia, 7 November 2004.

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Now, a political and media attack without precedent is attempting to obscure the true nature of last Saturday. The protest initiatives on prices and against exclusion from access to fundamental goods such as knowledge are being overturned and instrumentalised to halt a process of denouncements and social struggle, deleting the objective result of the success of the demonstration on the 6th. They are trying to lynch a participatory and communicative initiative on the social contract with one of the big commercial chains to obtain the symbolic result of a reduction in prices on widely consumed goods, publicly announced, carried out by hundreds of people with uncovered faces who spoke with managers and police present: they are even selling this as a robbery and a `criminal' and `violent' episode.61 This quote from the joint bulletin as it was published on Indymedia Italy shows that the activist groups that carried out the two direct actions attached other meanings to it than those circulating in the mainstream media. At the same time, the mainstream media's power of naming and framing reality was put into discussion and disrupted. The joint bulletin, however, was only published in alternative media outlets, and largely ignored by mainstream and sympathetic media which continued to deny recognition to protestors' viewpoints on the two direct actions, giving voice, instead, to institutional political actors and leaving no room for a public discussion. Alternative media, therefore, proved to be the means through which social movement groups attempted to overcome misrecognition, although obtaining only a limited visibility in the media environment as a whole.

Conclusions This chapter has analysed the construction of public identities of protestors and activists involved in Italian mobilisations against precarity across three categories of media organisations and outlets: mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative ones. Unless the single protest event is recurrent, as for the Euro Mayday Parade, or part of a long-lasting mobilisation, as for the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti, mainstream media tend to concentrate accounts and reports in the days following protests. On the contrary, radical left-wing media distribute the media 67 Indymedia, 8 November 2004.

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coverage in a more homogeneous manner by publishing articles after, but also before protests. Alternative media, finally, produce a great amount of media coverage long before the protests that are, hence, put into a broader context. The amount of media coverage in radical left-wing and alternative media, however, also vary according to the foini of protest. Social movement groups, indeed, may use in a tactical manner alternative and radical left-wing media when protest events are likely to increase their success if they are maintained at least partially, in the case of the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, or totally secret, in the case of the Serpica Naro fashion show. Also the degree of political nearness between social movement groups and alternative media have an important role in the amount and timing of alternative media coverage, as it was evident in the case of the Precari Atesia strikes. I then considered the contribution of mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media coverage in the construction of public identities referring to protesters and activists involved in the organisation of protest events. Mainstream media sporadically reported the language related to precarious workers elaborated during mobilisations, but they seldom provided a context to explain the terms and expressions employed during protests, as it happened in the case of the Serpica Naro fashion show and the Euro Mayday Parade. As for contentious performances, instead, mainstream media frequently engaged in the use of a violent frame to depict collective action, as it was evident in the case of the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti and, in some years, even in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade. Radical left-wing media, on the contrary, usually deepen the language elaborated and employed during mobilisations against precarity, imparting an enriched and more nuanced version of public identity. This was true also in the case of those protest events, like the Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, that were depicted as criminal and illegal in mainstream media. In certain occasions, moreover, radical left-wing media did more than constructing public identities, since they spread logistic information before protests to facilitate the success of collective action. Or, as it happened in the case of the Serpica Naro fashion show, they contributed to the favourable outcome of the media hoax. Having a strong political standpoint, however, radical left-wing media frequently reported on mobilisations leaning towards certain social movement groups and not others. The resulting media coverage and public identity, therefore, had a strong political flavour that mirrored the competition amongst different political actors, being either institutional or non-institutional, and their interpretations of precarity as a social problem and precarious workers as a political subject. Alternative media shared this attitude with radical left-wing media, although their position was internal to the social movement milieu. Differences were especially evident between Indymedia Italy and Global Project, being the former more open and the latter more biased. This also depended on the type of alternative media outlet. As I stated, Indymedia Italy was based on an open-publishing system. In this case, most of the time the decision to publish something about their

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protest event or not was up to the social movement groups: having a voice in the former, therefore, depended on the social movement group that recognised the alternative media outlet as a valuable means of communication. On the contrary, Global Project was based on a publishing system managed by a horizontal and dispersed newsroom of activists belonging to a specific social movement area. In this case, it was the alternative media outlet that privileged partial media coverage of mobilisations against precarity, devoting more attention to protest events in which activists collaborating with Global Project were also involved. Finally, I have discussed communication flows related to contents created about mobilisations against precarity. The construction of public identities in the media environment, indeed, does not occur in a void. A broad range of political actors from representatives of the government in charge to social movement groups that organise mobilisations raise their voices to speak, interpret and define social movements through different media outlets, seen as channels to communicate in the so-called `media master forum' (Ferree et al. 2002) where mainstream, but also radical left-wing and alternative media organisations work, side by side in the construction of public identities related to social movements. It is interesting to see, therefore, the exchanges in media contents that occurred for mobilisations against precarity amongst different media outlets. Overall, there was an asymmetry between communication flows going from alternative to radical leftwing and mainstream media and communication flows going from mainstream and radical left-wing media to alternative media. The latter, indeed, appeared to be more frequent than the foiuier. Alternative media contents had difficulties in being represented in mainstream and radical left-wing media outlets. And they were certainly more likely to be published in the latter than in the former. In certain cases, radical left-wing media outlets published documents produced by social movement groups, like calls for action that already circulated through alternative media channels, or articles that activists produced on purpose for, and frequently under the request of, radical left-wing organisations. On the contrary, alternative media frequently reproduced contents originally published in mainstream and radical left-wing media. The circulation of these media texts in alternative media outlets functioned as a means of self-reflection for activists who also engaged in the active deconstruction of the narratives proposed by mainstream media. After considering knowledge media practices and relational media practices, this chapter focused on the outcomes of grassroots communication as it developed in Italian mobilisations against precarity. With the next chapter I will conclude the book by combining the findings presented so far in order to explain the dynamics of grassroots communication in a multi-layered media environment.

N1.10; ì

1V

Chapter 7

Conclusions: The Circuit of Grassroots Political Communication

Introduction

Precarious workers involved in Italian mobilisations against precarity produced knowledge about the media environment, interacted with different media technologies and professionals and were the subjects ofinedia outlet representations. Interactions with the media environment were significant in these struggles because precarious workers aimed to become visible in societies dominated by the myth of flexible employment, translated in reality into marginalisation in the labour market and exclusion from the welfare state system. Precarious workers were in any case able to reclaim time and space for collective action in working conditions that were often fragmented, dispersed and scattered. They even attempted to hold common meanings and interpretations about precarity where the experiences of working and living as a precarious worker were diverse and often intersected with other forms of social and political marginalisation. Each struggle had its own peculiarities. Far from being a homogeneous political subject, precarious workers engaged in different organisational patterns, employed a mixture of resources for mobilisation, elaborated a variety of contentious performances and created diverse discourses around precarity. These variations were especially evident at the local level, when struggles aim at obtaining material changes for precarious workers, but become nuanced at the national and transnational level, when the task of social movement groups was to create a shared political framework capable of linking precarious workers. Precarity, indeed, functioned as a captivating activist label (Boumaza and Pierru 2007; Sinigaglia 2007) able to unite different working and living conditions in the same collective action. In doing so, collective action was a generator of resources at the cultural level: mobilisations against precarity contributed to the creation and diffusion of new `symbolic tools' in societies, both `contextual', that is situational, and `public', that is subject to reinterpretation and contention over meanings (Williams 1995, 127). The definitional work necessary to elaborate precarious workers as a composite political subject and precarity as a loose political category, however, included a certain degree of recognition. Precarious workers who were not active politically needed to recognise themselves in the political subject constructed in the course of collective action. Social, economic and political actors linked to the labour realm needed to acknowledge the presence of protesting precarious workers in societies

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not only as carriers of an emerging and diffuse social problem, but also as part of a composite political subject that wished to discuss and face precarity as a distinctive political category evolving the transformation of the productive system in the neo-liberal era. They reclaimed the urgency to name social realities, foster narratives about the world and diffuse systems of meaning related to precarity from the point of view of precarious workers who were not members of trade union confederations. In doing so, they reclaimed the recognition of their social status so as to trigger processes of redistribution of economic resources, whether in terms of more just contracts or the introduction of a basic income (Fraser 2003). The construction of a common imagery capable of taking differences amongst precarious workers into account, of depicting precarious workers as political subjects instead ofinere victims and ofproducing an alternative system ofineanings about the labour realm independently of trade union confederations required a significant effort and attention to the symbolic production of meaning. To become visible as precarious workers, indeed, implied much more than securing a line or two in the local newspaper the day after a demonstration. Unlike other forms of contemporary activism that focus almost completely on gaining the attention of mainstream media (Sobieraj 2011), social movement groups mobilised against precarity did not have a mainstream media-centred approach. Rather, they developed a perspective on the media as tools for visibility in front of different audiences. It is true that, similarly to other social groups in contemporary western societies, such as women and ethnic groups (Amark 1992, quoted in Hobson 2003), in Italy precarious workers were faced with the `institutionalised recognition of interests' (Hobson 2003, 9) revolving around full-time, permanent workers leaving little room for recognition of other types of workers, often and interestingly named `atypical'. Infoinial political participation on the issue of precarity, therefore, reflected the characteristics of other social movements in which `economic and political demands are mixed with the challenge to the very code of political incorporation through representation' (Melucci and Avritzer 2000, 517). Precarious workers' struggles indeed show that today representation increasingly means publicity within and through different media channels and struggles for recognition often become the synonym of struggles for visibility `within the non-localised space of publicness' (Thompson 1995, 247). But the spaces of publicness are not exhausted within the mainstream media for Italian mobilisations against precarity, where the audiences, sites and supports of visibility were varied. As I have illustrated throughout this book, for precarious workers being visible meant, first and foremost, recognising similar experiences, feelings and emotions despite many differences within their group in terms of both jobs and lives. Through a sophisticated mix of adaptive and attacking relational media practices, activists in the Serpica Naro fashion show rendered visible, both to themselves and others, the veiled network of precarious workers behind the preparation of the Milan Fashion Week. The Precari Atesia collective created an alternative

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magazine that spoke about the working experience in the call centre in order to attract other precarious call centre operators to its cause. At the same time, being visible meant being considered valuable political actors engaged in struggles outside the more traditional foins of labour organising. Social movement groups that sustained the Euro Mayday Parade intended to represent themselves independently from trade union confederations, aiming to underline the fact that precarious workers could not struggle through traditional collective bargaining, as precarity is a condition that exceeds the sphere of labour. In an even more direct manner, the Precari Atesia collective organised struggles to make it clear to trade union confederations that precarious workers were a visible force in the call centre that refused be represented by trade union confederations and, on the contrary, wanted to be recognised as a political actor able to negotiate with and make claims to the call centre management. Finally, being visible also meant elaborating and spreading words, images and voices about precarious workers, and shaping an alternative system of meaning about precarity. The appearances of San Precario in supeinarkets and bookshops in late 2004 were intended as strong communicative actions visible at multiple levels: from the local level of precarious workers employed in the businesses where the saint appeared, to the national level of individuals who read the mainstream press the day after protests. The communication flows behind the visibility of non-institutional political actors engaged in grassroots political communication are varied, often complementary and sometimes contradictory, in that: 1) they rest on different sites in the media environment, from flyers distributed during demonstrations to mainstream media press pieces after demonstrations, and from the local level where struggles actually occur to the national and even transnational level where struggles are represented; 2) they address different audiences, from institutional political actors like parties, unions and government representatives to precarious workers with no prior political socialisation; and 3) they travel across different supports, from face-to-face interactions between activists and bystanders during protests to the live web streaming of radio programmes about a strike, and from posters in the streets to announce a forthcoming demonstration to the five lines that a mainstream journalist is able to publish about the occupation of a university. The very notion of visibility in grassroots political communication thereby acquires different meanings, and is sustained by different processes which change according to the site, the audience and the support involved when social movement groups communicate their claims. The tracing of communication flows behind visibility, the transformation that visibility undergoes when transferred from one support to another or the travels of visibility from the local sites of struggles to the transnational realm of the internet are all potential directions of investigation to enrich the understanding of grassroots political communication. In investigating activist media practices in Italian mobilisations against precarity, this book has outlined the many sites, audiences and supports that characterise the visibility of non-institutional political actors today. It has shown that media

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Conclusions

knowledge practices, relational media practices and media representations are significant analytical tools to understand the main features of grassroots political communication. The next section goes a step further, and links relational media practices, media knowledge practices and media representations of protests and movements in the same circuit of grassroots political communication.

1) both routinised and creative social practices that; 2) include interactions with media objects (such as mobile phones, laptops, pieces of paper) and media subjects (such as journalists, public relations managers, other activists); and 3) draw on how media objects and media subjects are perceived and on how the media environment is understood and known.

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The Circuit of Grassroots Political Communication In Chapter 1 I showed that the literature on media and social movements has developed in four clusters: mainstream analogue media, alternative analogue media, alternative digital media and mainstream digital media. Overall, this body of literature highlights several aspects of the multifaceted interactions between non-institutional political actors and different types of media organisations, outlets, professionals and technologies. However, the four clusters seldom meet, and the literature is centred either on specific media organisations or technological supports. This fragmentation obscures the fact that social movement actors engage with the media environment in multiple manners, and casts a shadow over the dynamics behind mediation processes in situations of contention. Drawing on the sociology of practice, the introduction to this book suggested that a more comprehensive approach to social movements and media is possible by adopting `activist media practices' as the leading analytical concept to explore grassroots political communication in the media environment. Two categories of activist media practices proved to be particularly significant in unfolding the meanings and evolutions of grassroots political communication in the framework of precarious workers' struggles: media knowledge practices and relational media practices, discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 respectively. However, the construction of public identities linked to Italian mobilisations against precarity also rested on representations offered by, and circulating amongst, different media outlets, from the mainstream to the alternative, as shown in Chapter 6. This section strives to keep media knowledge practices, relational media practices and media representations together by pointing out the connections amongst the three in grassroots political communication. In doing so, I speculate on the circuit of grassroots political communication introducing the concept of a repertoire of communication. The basic elements of the circuit of grassroots political communication are activist media practices, the guiding analytical tool of this book. Overall, activist media practices are a particular type of social practice defined as the `routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood' (Reckwitz 2002, 250). Although many social practices have a routinised foiin, social actors may also perform social practices in a creative way, either by redefining existing social practices or by inventing new ones (Reckwitz 2002). Drawing on this general definition of a social practice and on the analysis of activist media practices presented in previous chapters, activist media practices can be generally defined as:

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Parallel to activist media practices, media representations of mobilisations circulate within and across different media organisations, outlets and technologies, imparting, but also sustaining, public identities of protest participants and organisers. Grassroots political communication, therefore, consists of a mix of knowledge, interaction and representation. Activists involved in mobilisations against precarity interacted with a variety of media organisations, outlets, professionals and technologies. In certain cases, these interactions followed a simple path, in that activists interfaced with one media technology at a time. Most of the time, however, activists developed more complex interactions involving different media technologies. The cases in this book are awash with examples where multiple media technologies are used. One relevant example is the Euro Mayday Parade live broadcasts at the transnational level, in which one Italian activist based in Milan combined interactions via mobile phone, website, online chat channels and the radio in order to interview another activists participating in the parade in Leon, Spain. They connected `multiple technologies into relatively novel communication structures' (Gillan, Pickerill and Webster 2008, 150-151) and in doing so they shaped the media environment. Apart from the relevant role of interaction with technologies, this book has also described how activists interacted with different types of media texts circulating in the media environment and continuously channelled through a variety of communication flows. The most relevant example is the use of mainstream and radical left-wing media texts transferred from the press to the web when activists upload them to alternative media outlets such as Indymedia Italy. In this book, however, I also show that the opposite process takes place, especially with regard to iconic media texts created in the context of the Euro Mayday Parade such as the patron saint of all precarious workers, San Precario. When such interactions across different layers of the media environment occur, objects are re-contextualised and become something other than their original versions. Due to these interactions, the media environment itself is temporarily reshaped, since boundaries between mainstream and alternative media outlets are blurred as a result of this travelling of objects between different layers of the media environment. In other words, interactions between objects and subjects in media environments change both the objects in point and the media environment in its entirety. Finally, another type of interaction that occurred during the mobilisations against precarity involved mainly subjects, that is, journalists and activists. Most of the time, these interactions tools place in face-to-face settings that activist groups had created for that purpose. Here again, the book unearthed several examples of such

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Conclusions

interactions, how they were prepared and how they actually unfolded. Different forms of press conferences tools place, for instance, oscillating from adaptation to the reinvention of this form of routinised interaction between journalists and news sources, in this case, activist groups. Objects, from more official press releases to less formal leaflets, were also part of such interactions, expressing the collective voice of social and political actors mobilised against precarity. In some cases, the mediation of objects was highly important according to activists. The example of activists involved in distributing a Global Project CD-ROM containing linies to the Global Project website is a good example of this. In other cases, activists tended instead to use media technologies and the media texts created through them as substitutes for face-to-face interactions with journalists, for instance by publishing press releases and leaflets related to protest events in alternative media outlets, considered a way of communicating with different audiences — including journalists — at the same time. Interactions with journalists, therefore, rested on networks of relations among subjects (activists and journalists) and objects (CD-ROMs, pieces of paper, web pages). These networks of relations developed across different media technologies and revolved around different media texts. As such, interactions with the wide variety of objects and subjects operating within and through the media environment often crossed the inner boundaries among mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media outlets. The media environment, therefore, includes dissimilar nodes that include both subjects and objects organised around clusters of more and less stable interactions. The latter contribute to the fluidity and dynamic nature of the media environment, while the former sustain more routinised sets of interactions focusing on specific layers of the media environment. Activists' interactions with different categories of media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals did not occur in isolation. They were instead inserted within the same broad set ofrelational media practices that social movement groups developed before, during and after mobilisations against precarity. Chatting with a journalist who worked for a radical left-wing newspaper, posting updates about protests on an alternative informational website and sharing a mainstream media text about the last demonstration against precarity were all individual and collective interactions that sustained the circuit of grassroots political communication related to Italian mobilisations against precarity. Relational media practices that implied interactions with different subjects and objects populating the media environment were, therefore, connected in the same repertoire of communication, defined here as

Similarly to previous attempts in this direction (Kriesi, Bernhard, and Hdnggli 2009; Teune 2011), the focus on communication during mobilisations expands the notion of the `repertoire of contention' found in social movement studies (Tilly 1978; McAdam, Tar-row and Tilly 2001; Tilly 2006b; Tilly and Tarrow 2007) looking at the communicative side of protests and focusing on mediation processes related to mobilisations. The repertoire of contention and repertoire of communication are obviously strictly linked. Contentious performances contain strong communicative elements that aim at opening channels of communication with a variety of audiences and publics (Alexander 2006; Johnston 2009). As such, the choice of a certain contentious performance already evokes the existence of a certain communication repertoire. According to many of the activists I interviewed, indeed, the most important sites for communication between activists and potential publics were those where contentious performances occurred such as the occupation of La Sapienza University during the mobilisations against the Ddl Moratti in 2005. Similarly to the repertoire of contention, moreover, the repertoire of communication is dynamic. It changes over time, not only in the long term, because social movement actors and the media environment in which they act changes, but also in the short term due to activists' reflections on their own media practices and their perceived outcomes. From this point of view, therefore, the repertoire of communication is a processual element in mobilisations. In the case of the demonstration against the Ddl Moratti, for instance, social movement groups decided to focus more on communication towards potential protest supporters and participants engaging in alternative and abstention relational media practices. They spread logistic information and calls for action through alternative media channels, but they also concentrated on the occupation of La Sapienza University in Rome, whose buildings and squares were crossed day and night by thousands and thousands of people. Before the national demonstration, therefore, they avoided adaptive relational media practices towards mainstream and radical left-wing media. After the police beat some protesters at the end of the demonstration, however, social movement groups decided to organise a press conference to denounce that action. In doing so, they shifted to adaptive relational media practices towards mainstream and radical left-wing media organisations. The repertoire of communication, therefore, consists of situated chains of relational media practices, media representations and media knowledge practices related to the media environment as a whole. Relational media practices occurring at point x in time and related media representations will function as sources of experience and knowledge related to the media for activist media practices occurring at point x+1 in time. Although the repertoire of contention and the repertoire of communication are certainly linked, they also have some substantial differences. While it is true that many contentious performances can be seen as communicative tools consciously employed by activists, the contrary is not equally true. Many activist media practices are not contentious performances. During contentious performances, moreover, activist media practices can take place, but many activist media practices

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the entire set of media practices that a non-institutional political actor (or a coalition of non-institutional political actors) might conceive as possible and then develop in a particular protest context and according to different goals,

amongst which the most general are communication within and outside the milieu of the non-institutional political actor (or coalition of non-institutional political actors) in point.

Ÿ~

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Conclusions

take place outside contentious performances. It is possible to think of the two repertoires as developing in parallel during social movement processes, with some contact and reciprocal influence. The choice of a specific contentious performance also implies certain activist media practices and these, in turn, also affect the contentious performance itself. One example of this is one of the two Reddito per Tutt* direct actions, which took place in a Panorama Mall during the morning. Activist groups organising the direct action decided to stress its communicative nature by inviting journalists. Journalists, therefore, and interactions with them, were conceived as a part of the contentious performance, intended to prevent misleading representations of what activists planned to do in the supermarket, that is, ask for a collective and symbolic discount on the prices of the goods sold in the supermarket. The need to maintain the definition of the contentious performance at the public level pushed activist groups to develop adaptive relational media practices. When studying social movements with a view to mediation processes, the repertoire of communication can be a useful analytical tool to understand interrelations amongst activist media practices. The reconstruction of the repertoire of communication allows us to address grassroots political communication from a cross-media perspective that ranges from activists' interactions with the mainstream press to the establishment of alternative informational websites. The repertoire of communication is, moreover, useful to undertake cross-country and cross-time research looking at how relational media practices shape the media environment over time and in different countries. This, in turn, could enhance the knowledge about mechanisms and processes that sustain grassroots political communication.

has gained dominance online, a model that contributes to the reproduction of hierarchical power relations' (Dahlberg and Siapera 2007, 6). The two trends that I described above are also visible in Italy. Today, much more than in the past, analogue mainstream media organisations such as la Repubblica and Corriere della Sera play an important role in the production of online news. The two newspapers embraced the opportunity to integrate video, audio and written materials, also when covering demonstrations. Other media organisations have also entered the media environment: an important change occurred in 2009 when a new daily newspaper, Il Fatto Quotidiano, was published — first online and then also as a print publication, quickly becoming a relevant mainstream media outlet. Strongly integrated with the web and deeply rooted in civil society, Il Fatto Quotidiano is a mainstream newspaper that gives space to several social movement actors that write blogs for the newspaper. The second trend concerns the diffusion of social networking sites such as Facebook and sharing networking sites like YouTube. These web platforms were created in 2004 and 2005 respectively and were not extensively used in the framework of mobilisations against precarity, whose relational media practices mainly involved analogue mainstream media, analogue radical left-wing media and digital alternative media. Today, on the contrary, social movement groups use social networking sites extensively to sustain mobilisations. Changes in the media environment have not changed the main elements of the circuit of grassroots political communication. Social movement groups still continue to engage in knowledge media practices and relational media practices. The difference is, however, that they do so in a media environment where additional media subjects and objects have emerged that did not exist in the recent past. The range of activist media practices and the repertoire of communication are potentially broader than before. This certainly has some consequences at the level of media representation, and, in particular, with regard to the construction of public identities related to social movements. In this book I showed that communication flows involving the passage of media contents from alternative to mainstream media was almost absent in the case of Italian mobilisations against precarity. With the expansion of the mainstream press on the web, however, this trend seems to be changing. More so than in the past, social movement actors are able to see the content they produce published in online mainstream media, with the extreme case being that of San Precario, which today has its own blog on Il Fatto Quotidiano online. At the same time, online mainstream media more and more often organise live broadcasts of demonstrations and, in doing this, once again acquire centrality in reporting and interpreting mobilisations as they occur. Social movement actors, moreover, increasingly employ corporate social networking sites before, during and after mobilisations. The Euro Mayday Parade, still taking place each First of May in Milan, has a Facebook profile. The fake fashion designer, Serpica Naro, and the protector saint of all precarious workers, San Precario, are both on Facebook. Overall, approximately 173 Facebook profiles, 121 pages and 238

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The Circuit of Grassroots Political Communication in the Web 2.0 Age This book investigated grassroots political communication as it unfolded in a media environment that today has already changed significantly. These changes particularly regard digital mainstream media organisations and outlets. Two tendencies, in particular, seem to have been at work in recent years. First, the expansion of existing analogue mainstream media organisations, like newspapers, radio and television in the online environment. From this point of view, therefore, the internet can be considered an `extension of the mass media' (Dahlgren 2001, 46). Second, the growth of brand new transnational mainstream media organisations in the online environment, like those supporting social networking and content sharing sites: these are `commercial spaces' (Beer 2008), where the boundaries between `exploitation and participation' are fuzzy (Petersen 2008). In general, the world of Web 2.0 platforms and applications is populated by `aggressive entrepreneurial models and goals' with a few exceptions, notably Wikipedia (Langlois et al. 2009). In a similar vein, a `consumer model of politics

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groups devoted to precarity and containing the word `precari' in their name were present in July 2011. Searching for videos related to precarity in YouTube, the result is a group of about 6700 videos, uploaded between September 2010 and July 2011. Established alternative informational websites, including Global Project and Indymedia Italy, employ Facebook profiles to diffuse content online. Social movement groups involving new generations of activists may not participate in the open publishing system of Indymedia Italy, but interact with it through Facebook. One such example is the LabComBo collective based in Bologna and engaged in the production of short video inquiries about precarity. This collective published its material on YouTube and on the Indymedia Italy Facebook page, but not on the Indymedia Italy website. Changes in the media environment and activist media practices obviously have an impact on grassroots political communication. Overall, these transformations also affect the visibility of non-institutional political actors, spread across an even greater variety of sites and supports. In discussing how social movement actors engaged in struggles against precarity interact with the media environment, this book illustrated that activist media practices, and the related analytical tools that emerged in previous chapters, can be fruitfully employed to understand how grassroots political communication works across a number of media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals. Starting from media knowledge practices, relational practices and media representations of mobilisations is a useful way to study Web 2.0 applications and platforms within the media environment at large, and not in isolation from other media organisations, outlets, technologies and professionals. The adoption of the repertoire of communication as an analytical lens, moreover, could foster a comprehensive investigation of the dispersed transmedia visibility that seems to result from grassroots political communication.

Methodological Appendix

Research Strategy and Case Studies The empirical research on which this volume rests dealt with activist media practices conceived as a sensitising concept deeply connected with the realm of meanings declined in different ways. For this reason, I adopted a constructivist theoretical perspective and a sensitising approach in methods. Unlike other theoretical traditions, the sensitising approach starts from general and open definitions of concepts and then refines them through fieldwork (Blaikie 2000). The relationship between theory and empirical research is complementary: the former offers some directions for the orientation of the researcher's fieldwork, but does not impose established concepts or correlations to be tested. The latter assigns these concepts' meanings that are directly linked to and generated by the systematic observation and analysis of the empirical world. The sensitising tradition, thus, implies the adoption of a bottom-up perspective on the empirical phenomenon under investigation: there is no model to assess, hypotheses to test or variables to measure. Rather, there are concepts to refine, meanings to reconstruct and eventually some sensitising hypotheses to propose for further investigation. As a research strategy, I adopted grounded theory (Bryant and Charmaz 2010; Strauss and Corbin 2000; Strauss and Corbin 1990; Glaser and Strauss 1967; Glaser and Strauss 1965). The basic assumption of grounded theory is to develop concepts, categories and theories that are grounded in, and emerge from, the data through a comparative coding process that plays a central role in the analysis. I was especially inspired by `constructionist grounded theory' (Chaunaz 2000) according to which the researcher seeks to `construct categories of the data', which do not simply emerge; focus on an `interpretative understanding of the studied phenomenon that accounts for context'; and consider the point of view of participants as `integral to the analysis and its presentation' (Charmaz 2008, 402). To investigate activist media practices, I decided to focus on a small number of case studies within a homogeneous area of investigation, that is, struggles against precarity in Italy. The case study approach allowed me to start from an exhaustive account of social occurrences so as to impart a comprehensive knowledge about them (Snow and Trom 2002). More generally, the case study approach is useful for `achieving high conceptual validity' and `fostering new hypotheses' (George and Bennett 2005, 19). Some authors in social movement studies have employed the case study approach to investigate causal mechanisms occurring in social reality (Tilly 2008; Tilly and Tarrow 2007; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001). However, I believe that this approach is also a powerful tool for grasping the meanings, perceptions and understandings of social actors and, as a consequence,

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Methodological Appendix

for elaborating new hypotheses with regard to the social practices they engage in, including activist media practices. As case studies I chose five protest events linked to the cycle of mobilisation against precarity that occurred in Italy between 2001 and 2005 and already presented concisely in the introduction. Mobilisations are concrete empirical phenomena with clear borders in space and time, since they consist of a series of protest events which, in specific cases, combine to form a `protest campaign' (della Porta and Rucht 2002, 3). The five case studies that I consider are single protest events, series of protest events and protest campaigns. They tools place at local, national and transnational levels. This granted a significant sample of collective actions in which precarious workers and their claims were broadly represented. In terms of media coverage, mobilisations are usually, or are at least intended to be, more visible to general audiences than other social movement activities. Their nature is always public and frequently disruptive. They do not represent the only moment during which social movements produce discourses and engage in media practices, but because of their focus on visibility they may be seen as moments in which all these activities are condensed. Mobilisations, then, seemed particularly appropriate for understanding activist media practices.

hoc creations linked to specific protest events. For this reason, I did not choose a specific time frame for collecting them. I also used the in-depth interviews to recover some other social movement generated documents: activists I interviewed gave them to me, either spontaneously or after an explicit request. The second data set is made up of three categories of media texts: mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative texts. For each an ad hoc sampling strategy was applied. With regards to mainstream media, newspapers are usually the main data source employed in social movement studies (Rucht and Ohlemacher 1992): they provide continuity of news coverage and are more easily accessible than other types of media such as television or radio, whose archives are generally harder to access or incomplete, where they exist at all. I constructed this data set employing newspaper articles from two national newspapers and their local publications: la Repubblica and Corriere della Sera. The former is a relatively young newspaper, founded in 1976.' From its very beginnings, however, it has been characterised by a strong political and cultural identity and has positioned itself in the media market as an authoritative, left-wing quality national newspaper. Although formally independent of any political party, la Repubblica was the explicit point of reference of the broad left-wing political sphere. Nowadays it is part of the editorial group L'Espresso, which also includes weekly magazines, local newspapers and radio stations. It is still a left-wing newspaper, though it is now more oriented towards the centre-left than in the past. While it maintains its national identity, in various Italian cities, amongst which Rome and Milan, la Repubblica has one section entirely devoted to the coverage of local politics, news, sports and culture. The Corriere della Sera is one of the oldest national newspapers published in Italy: it was founded in 1876 and is based in Milan, while la Repubblica is instead based in Rome. It is owned by the RCS editorial group, which is active in different media market sectors: periodicals, newspapers, advertising and publishing. Due to its long history and tradition, it is one of the most authoritative national newspapers, maintaining a prevalently neutral political position oriented towards the centre. Besides their high symbolic prestige, strong journalistic traditions and stable political identities, la Repubblica and Corriere della Sera are the two most important quality national newspapers in Italy in terms of numbers of copies sold and readerships.' I constructed the sample of media texts by employing online archives for the foinier and microform archives for the latter.

166

Data Sources and Analysis

The fieldwork relied on three sources of data: social movement generated documents; media texts; and semi-structured interviews. Social movement generated documents are all those texts that activist groups use to launch, organise and promote mobilisations.

Table A.1

Social movement generated documents retrieved for each case study Precari Alesia strikes

Call for action

Serpica Naro No Ddl Moratti

fashion show demonstration

Reddito per Tuts direct actions

Euro Mayday Parade

3

1

1

1

7

22

7

5

3

58

The most useful data source in constructing the first data set proved to be ICTs and especially mailing lists, websites and online forums. In these I found a great deal of the data I was looking for: calls for action, leaflets, posters and official declarations on each protest event. Social movement generated documents are ad

167

1 After Italian unification in 1861, the first national daily newspaper was L'Osservatore Romano (1861), the voice of the Vatican State and still published today. Il Secolo was the second daily newspaper to appear in the newly unified Italy. It is based in Milan and was published for the first time in 1866. La Stampa, finally, was published for the first time in 1867 under the name Gazzetta Piemontese. Nowadays, it is owned by the Fiat Group (Gozzini 2000, 184-187). 2 Actually, the most popular national newspaper is La Gazzetta dello Sport, entirely devoted to sport, read each day by about 4,126,000 people in 2011. Corriere della Sera and la Repubblica have 3,056,000 and 3,250,000 average readers per day respectively. The

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Methodological Appendix

Concerning radical left-wing media, I chose two radical left wing national newspapers: it manifesto and Liberazione. The foinier was founded in 1969 by a group of intellectuals belonging to the most left-wing group within the Italian Communist Party, who were expelled as a result. It was first published as a weekly journal and, in 1971, became a daily national newspaper. During the 1970s, it manifesto was embedded in the network, of radical left-wing groups that flourished at that time, the extra-parliamentary leftist groups (Gozzini 2000, 273). From the very beginning it was, and, indeed, still is, an independent cooperative of journalists with no direct political affiliations. Similarly to other media, it was then considered internal to social movements. Indeed, together with other journals, such as Lotta Continua and Il Quotidiano dei Lavoratori, scholars have considered it as an emblematic example of alternative information for that period (Eco and Violi 1976, 99-100). Today, it manifesto remains a point of reference for all institutional and non-institutional political actors that recognise themselves as radical left-wingers, although the activists I interviewed did not classify it as an alternative media outlet. The other national newspaper, Liberazione, has a more recent history. It is directly affiliated to the PRC, a radical left-wing party born in 1991. In October of the same year, the PRC published the first number of Liberazione, a weekly journal which became a national daily newspaper in 1995. Liberazione could be included in the category of party press (Downing 1984), since it expresses the positions and analyses of the PRC. Immediately after the famous battle of Seattle in 1999, this political party strategically opened itself to radical, left-wing social movements in general and the global justice movement in particular. As a consequence, Liberazione followed the same pattern and formed an integral part of the large social movement coalition supporting protests against the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2 00 1, as well as other protest events organised by global justice movement. In alternate phases, these national newspapers were, therefore, close to social movement struggles. What it manifesto and Liberazione have in common, then, is their direct and indirect linkages with contemporary social movement networks. But they cannot be considered alternative media in the strict sense. From the point of view of social movements, they may be considered potential allies and supporters, sympathetic media which are neither alternative nor mainstream. For it manifesto I relied on microform archives and for Liberazione I relied on a private digital archive given to me by one of the journalists I interviewed. The main data source I used for collecting alternative media texts was the internet. Due to the central role of the internet in contemporary social movements, social movement group websites, mailing lists, discussion forums and online archives can be considered a valuable data source not only for gathering information about protests in general (Almeida and Lichbach 2003), but also for

access to alternative media texts. The main data source I used to collect alternative media texts were websites directly managed by activist groups: Indymedia Italy and Global Project. The former is deeply rooted in the movements against corporate globalisation. The Independent Media Centre (IMC), whose corresponding website was named Indymedia, was organised by various activists groups in the run-up to the protests against the WTO summit in Seattle in 1999, and was the main communication channel used to cover those protests.' The first IMC intended to cover the demonstrations from an activist perspective and was based on the previous experiences of some local media centres in Seattle (Morris 2004), as well as on the use of a piece of software invented by Australian activists which allowed an open publishing process and, hence, encouraged grassroots news-making (Coyer 2005). After the first IMC was established, the Indymedia network grew exponentially all over the world at different territorial levels: at the time of writing, over one hundred local nodes are connected to the network, which is a horizontal, democratic and participatory media platform (Coyer 2005; Halleck 2002). Indymedia Italy was started in 2000 before the protests against the OCSE summit in Bologna, and played a central role during protests against the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001.4 From the very beginning the most important, and challenging, characteristic of Indymedia was the adoption of an open publishing system, allowing everyone to post her or his own article on the website. There is no pre-emptive censorship and anonymity is granted. For these reasons, it has been considered a strongly participatory and, thus, democratic medium (Coyer 2005). In Italy it was one of the most important reference points for many of the social movement groups mobilised on precarity. Because of its crucial role, I chose it as the primary data source for alternative media texts. The second data source has a different history. Global Project was first established as a multi-media communication project in 2002 during the European Social Forum in Florence. It was and remains linked to a specific network of social movement groups named the (ex) Disobbedienti network. Its structure is reticular and horizontal, involving a number of activist groups from all over Italy that send contributions to the website and, thus, act as a network of coordinated newsrooms. Despite its links to a specific non-institutional political actor, Global Project was the other national website extensively used to cover many protest events against precarity. The fact that it was oriented towards the national level and, hence, comparable to Indymedia Italy, made it a suitable data source for the collection of alternative media texts. The time range chosen for each type of sub-data set was different, since the news-making process changes according to the type of medium involved. I, thus, worked within two time frames. For mainstream and sympathetic newspapers, the time range considered started 15 days before and ended 15 days after the protest

168

free newspapers, City, Leggo and Metro, finally, have 1,767,000, 1,894,000 and 1,525,000 average readers per day respectively (Audipress 2011).

3 See http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/ImcHistory. 4 See http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2002/10/92716.php.

169

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Methodological Appendix

event in question. For alternative websites, the time range was longer: it stretched from 30 days before to 30 days after the protest event. This is because their newsworthiness criteria as well as their particular formats — partially or entirely based on the open publishing approach — lead to longer coverage periods of social movement mobilisations (Almeida and Lichbach 2003). I used semi-structured interviews to construct the third data set, which consists of narratives about activist media practices in the framework of Italian mobilisations against precarity. I interviewed 34 activists, selected because of their participation in the organisation of at least one of the mobilisations investigated. I chose the interviewees according to snowballing or network sampling (Blaikie 2000; Weiss 1994). First, I contacted some activists that I knew personally before beginning this research project: I interviewed some, while others only provided me with names and contact details for other activists possibly interested in being interviewed by me. After each interview I usually asked for the details of some other activist to be interviewed. I, thus, constructed a sample of interviewees which is not representative in a statistical way, but that covers a broad range of activist groups and provides a tentative picture of those who actively organised protests against precarity. Twenty-two of the interviewees were men and there were nine women. Concerning age, activists in their twenties and thirties form the majority of the interviewees, but some are older and belong to different generations of activists.

of the interviewees participated in two or more of the protest events that I chose as case studies, as the table below shows.

170

Table A.2

Interviewees divided according to type of mobilisation (The sum is higher than 34 due to multiple participation)

Table A.4

Protest

Serpica Naro No Ddl Moratti Reddito per Tutt* Euro Mayday Precari direct actions Parade Atesia strikes fashion show demonstration

Number

>20 3

21-30 11

31-40 13

41-50 4

51< 3

Political affiliations of interviewees (The sum is higher than 34 due to multiple affiliations.)

Political actor Social movement group Number

23

Age of interviewees

Besides demographic information, the political composition of the resulting sample is also worth considering. The following table represents the political affiliations of the interviewees as declared immediately after the interview.

Table A.3

8

7

6

3

In particular, many participated in the Euro Mayday Parades of either 2004 or 2005, when this protest campaign reached its peak. Indeed, the Euro Mayday Parade was a long-lasting protest campaign able, year after year, to attract most of the Italian activist groups mobilising on precarity for the rest of the year on a more local basis. This is why many interviews concerned the Euro Mayday Parade, while fewer interviews concerned other protest events. Finally, it is also important to note what job the interviewees declared when the interview tools place. The following tables present the type of contract and the labour market sector in which the activists interviewed were employed.

Table A.5 Age Number

171

24

Rank-and-file trade union

3

Type of occupation of the interviewees at the moment of the interview High- University student Unemployed student

Number

Table A.6

2

4

5

Activists participating in grassroots groups such as political collectives of students, groups of self-organised workers and social centres form the majority of the sample. The other three political groups to which the interviewees belong are rank-and-file trade unions, trade union confederations and political parties. Some

Selfemployed

contract

3

14

3

Openended

contract 8

Type of contract of the interviewees according to the labour market sector at the moment of the interview (The sum is higher than 34 due to multiple short-term contracts.)

Confederal trade Political party union

3

Shortterm

Occupation school

Communication sector Education sector (teaching, researching) Service sector (shops, restaurants) Political sector Cultural sector International Cooperation Sector

Short-term contract

Self-employed

5

2 0 0

6 2 t

0 1

1

0

1

Open-ended

contract 1 0 0 7 0 0

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Methodological Appendix

The resulting sample is fairly homogeneous interms oftype of contract: the majority of the interviewees had one or more fixed-term contracts when the interview took place, while only a small number of them had open-ended contracts. The majority of the activists I interviewed defined themselves `precarious workers'. Interviewees who had open-ended contracts were all, with a single exception, employed in the political sector. On the contrary, nearly all the interviewees employed in either the communication and information sector or in the education and cultural sector had fixed-term contracts. I completed the interview sample of activists involved in the cycle of protest against precarity with five semi-structured interviews with journalists. Social movements are embedded in a dense network of actors such as bystanders, allies, antagonists and the like (Snow and Benford 1992), amongst whom the media and, hence, journalists play an important role. To gain some of symmetry in this study of social movements and the media, I first investigated media representation through different kinds of media texts: mainstream, sympathetic and alternative. Then I decided to interview a small number of journalists that had covered at least one of the five case studies investigated. 1, therefore, interviewed one journalist formerly employed by la Repubblica, three journalists employed by it manifesto and one journalist employed by Liberazione. I interviewed more journalists working in radical left wing media outlets than in mainstream media outlets because the sensitive concept of radical left-wing media turned out to be crucial to understand activist media practices, and highly multifaceted. Interviews with journalists employed in radical left-wing media were, hence, useful to grasp and refine this concept and related media practices. Interviews were conducted in Italian and lasted between 45 minutes and two hours. They were semi-structured in three parts, each related to one specific thematic area. I first asked general questions about the cycle of protest against precarity, and specific questions about protest event(s). The second and most important part of the interview revolved around activist media practices towards mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media. The third part of the interview was shorter and contained a concluding question about the concept of precarity, its diffusion in Italian society and the way in which the interviewee defined it. Finally, I asked for some relevant information about the interviewee, as presented above, and contact details for other potential interviewees. All interviews took place in locations chosen by the activists and journalists concerned. I interviewed many of them in their homes, offices or at the seats of their reference social movement groups. I, therefore, also visited many social centres and was able to collect interview data and notes about how the media were inserted in the actual physical environments occupied by activist groups. These notes were not structured field-notes, and I used them to complement the other data sets. On rare occasions, and only when no alternatives were possible, interviews took place in restaurants during lunch breaks. The analysis included materials belonging to the three data sets outlined above. According to the grounded theory strategy, I applied open and axial codes

to locate recurring themes for each dimension in order to understand similarities and differences among the case studies. In other words, I developed a `within case' and `cross-case theme analysis' (Creswell 2007, 75) to provide more grounded sensitising concepts and hypotheses related to activist media practices. In order to reflect this constant comparative analysis, each chapter revolves around distinct activist media practices rather than around specific case studies. The coding process took place in three steps. The first consisted of a rough pre-coding of data in which I looked for general macro-areas related to specific sensitising concepts. For instance, I read the interviews and coded all those portions of the texts in which activists generally spoke about radical left-wing media with the label `radical leftwing media'. Then, in a second step, I relied on open-coding within each general label in order to create more specific sub-categories. In this way, I created other, more specific, codes. For instance, I associated codes like `radical left-wing media role protest launch' and `radical left-wing media role political actor' with the general label `radical left-wing media'. Finally, I compared the codes obtained according to each protest event so as to discover similarities and differences within mobilisations against precarity. In the case of interview transcripts, the coding process was carried out in a systematic manner using Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAs), a tool that proved powerful in analysing this data set according to the grounded theory research strategy. In the case of social movement generated documents and media texts, the coding process was instead developed manually.

172

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~I!

189

Index

activist affective ties, 43-44 avatars, 52-53 see also media practices agency belonging, 51 discursive opportunity structure, 88-89 in precarious work, 60 media practices, 86-88, 99 symbolic, 2 alternative media see media, alternative Associazione Italiana Politiche Industriali (AIP), 26 see also labour market flexibility Atesia call centre see Precari Atesia collective autonomous spaces European Social Forum, 44 La Sapienza University, Rome, 45 media as, 45, 47 Middlesex University, London, 44 social centres, 3, 32, 36-37, 44 15, 51, 139

I

Berlusconi, Silvio Forza Italia (FI), 28 demonstrations against, 80 see also labour market flexibility Bertinotti, Fausto Partito della Rifondazione Communista (PRC) left-wing media, radical, 141 protest condemned, 137 Biagiotti, Laura demonstrations against, 6, 65, 78 Bossi-Fini Law, 57 Brunetta, Renato Italian Minister of Public Administration and Innovation, 1

Chainworkers Crew demonstrations against Laura Biagiotti, 6 Prada, 6, 65 Euro Mayday Parade organisation of, 36 Mayday Parade, 3 Nadja Fortuna, 6, 104 organisation of, 46, 61 see also Serpica Naro fashion show Ciampi Protocol, 23 signed, 27 Cipolletta, Innocenzo Confindustria, 27 City of Gods newspaper precarious

journalists, 95 Confederazione dei Comitati di Base (COBAS), 31, 35, 37 Precari Atesia collective, support of, 7 Redditto per Tutt*, 4 Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), 31, 142 Mayday Parade, 3 Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (CISL), 31, 142 Confederazione Unitaria di Base (CUB), 32 Mayday Parade, 3 press office, 93 Reddito per Tutt*, 4 Conferenza dei Rettori delle Università Italiane (CRUI) Ddl Moratti, 5, 96 Confindustria, 27, 28 Il Sole 24 Ore national newspaper, 96 see also labour market flexibility contentious performance choice of, 52 culture jamming, 53 global justice movement, 51-52 negative coverage of, 70, 109-110, 135, 136, 150, 152

192

reinvention of, 49-50, 63 repertoire of communication, 161-162 Contrat Premiére Embauche (CPE), 58 Corriere della Sera newspaper, 67, 133 Euro Mayday Parade, 73, 133, 135-136 Reddito per Tutt* protests as violent, 136-137 Ddl Moratti

Melfi, 143-144 precarity, discursive construction of, 58-59 press conference, 111 protest preparation, 102-103 Radio Mayday, 120 relational media practices, 102, 117 journalists, 93-95 transnational, 114-115 repertoires of contention, 50-53 trade unions, different from, 50-51, 157 social movement networks, 43-44 spread of, 4, 38 technological adaptation of, 107-108 European Social Forum (ESF), 44, 52 European Union (EU), 51, 52, 58

alternative media, 120, 146 demonstration against, 5-6, 11, 35, 36, 44-45 demands, 60 left-wing media, radical, 76, 78, 98, 138, 149 amount of, 127 mainstream media, 71 amount of, 127 misunderstandings, 134 journalists ties, 95, 96 La Sapienza University occupation, 5, 95, 98, 103, 120 protest preparation, 103, 120 precarious worker, construction of, 54-55 press conferences, role of, 111-112 Deposito Bulk social centre, Milan Euro Mayday Parade, 3 6-3 7 Mayday Parade, 3

Giovani Comunisti (GC), 35

Euro Mayday Parade

Giugni, Marco Minister of Labour, Italy,

Facebook, 9, 163, 164 Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici

(FIOM), 31 Mayday, 3, 144 Federazione Nazionale della Stampa Italiana (FNSI)

journalists strike, 95 Forza Italia (FI), 28 see also labour market flexibility

G8 Summit, 51, 52, 102 Mayday, 3

alternative media intra-movement disputes, 143-144 organisational resource, 145 spike, 128 transnational frame, 146-147 criminalisation of, 137-138 demands, 62 establishment of, 3, 51 Global Project, 91, 107 institutional actors, 36, 37 left-wing media, radical, 79-80, 98, 128, 140 mainstream media, 72-73, 128, 132, 133 bypassing of, 75 misunderstandings of, 134-136 t

27,28 Global Project, 81, 119 (ex) Disobbedienti, 82 activist criticism of, 85-86 Euro Mayday Parade, 91, 107, 146 Indymedia Italy, as different from, 85 organisational tool activist, 84-85, 143, 146, 160 journalist, 105 Reddito per Tutt*, 147 Serpica Naro fashion show, 129 Grande Alleanza Democratica (GAD), 4 Grande Alleanza Precaria (GAP) Reddito per Tutt* social movement network, 4, 35 grassroots political communication, 7

193

Index

Media Practices and Protest Politics

defined, 13 diverse, 159 flows, 19, 157 political organisation, relation to, 8, 11 Green Pepper magazine, 114 II Sole 24 Ore newspaper, 96 il manifesto newspaper, 77-78, 116-117 Euro Mayday Parade, 141-142

founding of, 87 Serpica Naro fashion show, 139

violence vs. non-violence debate, 141 Imbattibili Euro Mayday Parade, 121

mainstream media misunderstanding, 133-134 Independent Media Centre (IMC), 169 Indymedia Italy, 81, 119 G8 role, 82 Global Project, as different from, 85 intra-movement disputes, 83-84, 143 mainstream media, 84, 150 Milanese, 145 mobilisations, in favor of, 143, 146 Phone Indy Media Patch (PIMP), 107 institutionalized politics Euro Mayday Parade

absent from, 36 mistrust of, 12, 20 trade union confederations, 31 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 108 intemet see World Wide Web Italian Communist Party, 31 Italian labour market see labour market flexibility Italian Minister of Public Administration and Innovation Brunetta, Renato, 1 journalists activist interactions, 91, 92-93, 106, 116, 159-160 as political actors, 97, 99 attention of, 104-106 left-wing, radical, 96-99 movement bias of, 77-78 precarious, 94-95

City of Gods newspaper, 95 Federazione Nazionale della Stampa Italiana (FNSI), 95 see also relational media practices

violence as focus of, 72-73 la Repubblica newspaper, 26, 29, 67, 132

depiction of protests, 70, 133, 136 La Sapienza University, 5, 95, 98, 103, 120

labour market flexibility, 26-30 defined, 27 Italian labour market, 24, 26, 27, 30 social movement groups, 30-33 Treu package, 29 Law 30 of 2003 276, 23 left-wing media, radical see media, left-wing, radical Liberazione newspaper, 77-80 Mayday Parade Euro Mayday Parade, 3, 11

initiation and growth of, 3, 4 media see also media knowledge practices attention of, 73-74 boundaries blurred, 159 coverage amount, 126-130 influences on, 127-128 timing of, 130, 131-132 hoax, 6, 46-17, 65, 74, 95 mobilisation, 45, 68 precarious worker visibility, 156-157 public sphere, 14-16 repository, 108-110 see also grassroots political communication see also media environment see also relational media practices see also repertoire of communication see also World Wide Web social movement resource, 1, 7, 47, 99 social movement studies of, 13-14, 158 contribution to, 21, 92 media environment, 8, 13, 16-19, 73 activist development of, 86-88 activist perceptions of, 105 left-wing media, radical, 67-68, 75-81 as allies, 76-77

194

Media Practices and Protest Politics

Index

as opponents, 77-78 concept enlarged, 117 as political actors, 79-81 coverage amount, 126-130 mainstream media, 67-75, 68-72 timing, 131 journalists, 72-75 criticisms of, 70-81 changes in, 162-164 misunderstandings of, 133-134 communication flows, 18-19, 148-151, political bias of, 13-14, 67-68, 68-69, 153 70, 73, 84, 89 defined, 16 political intervention of, 69-72, 125 technological objects, 17-18, 91, 101, public identities, construction of, 159-160 132-138 media knowledge practices, 8, 20, 65-67, see also Corriere della Sera newspaper 86-90, 117 see also Il Sole 24 Ore collective memory, 87-88 see also la Repubblica newspaper media, alternative, 13-14, 67-68, 105, 108 violence, 70, 72-73, 125, 127, activist identification with, 81-82 135-136,152 bias of, 143 media practices, activist 8, 86-88, 99 communication flows, 150-151 as analytical concept, 158 coverage amount, 126-130 defined, 158-159 compared, 129 Middlesex University, 3, 44 spike, 128 Milan Fashion Week, 34, 135 timing, 132 Camera della Moda, 6, 46 mainstream use of, 84 see also Serpica Naro fashion show precarious workers, construction of, 143 Minister of Labour, Italy see also Global Project Clemente Mastella, 28 see also Indymedia Italy Marco Giugni, 27, 28 social movement voices, 81-86, 144, Tiziano Treu, 29 146 Molleindustria media, left-wing, radical, 67-68 political video-gaming website, 52 as allies, 76-77 Moratti, Letizia as opponents, 77-78 Minister for Education and as political actors, 79-81, 96-99 Universities, 5 bias of, 78, 141 communication flows, 148-150 NGVision controversial role of, 75-81 Euro Mayday Parade, 147 coverage Nuove Identità del Lavoro (NIDIL), 31 amount, 126-130 political, 138-142 OECD Employment Outlook report on timing, 131 precarious workers, 24 organisational resource, 138-139 see also it manifesto newspaper Partito della Rifondazione Communista see also Liberazione newspaper (PRC), 31, 35 media, mainstream left-wing media, radical, 141 abstention relational media practices, Mayday, 3 115-117 protests condemned, 137 accuracy of, 132-133 university students alternative media, use of, 84, 91 as precarious workers, 55 bypassing of, 45, 75 Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS), 31 communication flows, 148 labour market flexibility, 28

Liberazione newspaper, 79-80 performance contentious, 48-53 Phone Indy Media Patch (PIMP), 107 Pisanu, Giuseppe Minister of Justice condemned protest, 137 political opportunity structure criticism of theory, 89 discursive opportunity structure, 88-89 Prada demonstrations against, 6, 65 Precari Atesia collective, 6-7, 33, 41 attack press, 117 autonomy, 35, 41 Confederazione dei Comitati di Base (COBAS), support of, 7 demand, 7, 35, 54, 60, 64 left-wing media coverage, radical, 77, 142 repertoire of contention, 48-49 Sfront End magazine, 11, 101, 120 social movement groups network, 34-35 spaces of struggle, 42-45 trade unions, different from, 157 precarious employment Bossi-Fini Law, 57 Ciampi Protocol, 23 France, 58 Law 30 of 2003, 23 origins of, 23 see also labour market flexibility stressors of, 59 welfare state, 24-25 precarious researchers see Rete Nazione dei Riceractori Precari (RNRP) precarious workers autonomy of, 42, 47, 49 collective organisation, 24-25 definition, 1, 24 broadened, 56-67 discursive construction of, 2, 29, 41, 53-63,155-156 alternative media, 143-144 gender, 54, 59, 149-150 institutional political actors, 31, 33 journalists, 94

ni

195

City of Gods newspaper, 95 literature about, 24-25 Network of Precarious Workers in the Public Administration, 1 number of, 24 OECD Employment Outlook, 24 origins of, 1, 23 repertoires of contention, 47-53 diverse, 52 innovative, 48-53 positive, 51 transnational, 51-52 San Precario icon, 4 see also Chainworkers Crew see also Ddl Moratti see also Euro Mayday Parade see also Precari Atesia collective see also Reddito per Tutt* see also Serpica Naro fashion show University students, 54-55 visibility, 7, 8, 51, 155, 156-157 precarity activist claims related to, 60-63 activist discursive construction of, 58-60 contentious field of, Italy 31-33 defined, 24 gender, 54, 59, 149-150 post-Fordism, 57, 60, 141 see also precarious workers prefigurative politics, 61, 107 public identities construction of activist, 130-148 alternative media, 143-148, 152-153 left-wing media, radical, 138-142, 152 mainstream media, 132-138, 152 Quadruple-A model four social movement strategies, 16, 21, 110-115 relational media practices abstention, 115-117 mainstream media, 116 adaptive, 110-115 mainstream media, 112-113 alternative, 119-122 Global Project, 119

1

Imbattibili, 121-122

Indymedia Italy, 119 La Sapienza University, 120 Radio Mayday, 120 San Precario, 121 Serpica Naro fashion show, 119-122

Sfront End magazine, 119-122 attack

Euro Mayday Parade, 117-118 Precari Atesia collective, 117

Serpica Naro fashion show, 118-119

sequence of, 115-117 Rappresentanze Sindacali di Base (RdB),

professionals and practitioners, 92-101 protest preparation, 101-104 see also Quadruple-A model repertoire of communication, 9 as analytical tool, 162, 164 conceptualization of, 161 contentious performance, 161-162 defined, 160 repertoire of contention see contentious performance research methodology, 2-3 Rete Nazione dei Riceractori Precari

mobilisation, 34, 45 large numbers, 74-75 of University students, 45 networks, 35, 46 Euro Mayday Parade, 43-44 organisational patterns, 35-36 precarious labour, 32, 33-38 relationship to trade-unions, 37-38 resources, 47 spaces of struggle, 42-45 transnational network of, 38 social movement organisations, 31-32 social movement scenes, 32, 45

(RNRP)

precarious researchers, 32 Ddl Moratti, 6, 36, 44-45, 96 Rete per l'Autoformazione (RA), 55

trade union confederations Euro Mayday Parade absent from, 37 institutionalized politics, 31 Precari Atesia collective, 117 precarious workers different from, 132, 142 target of, 157 repertoires of contention, 50, 51 see also Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallugici (FIOM) see also Nuove Identità del Lavoro

32

Redditto per Tutt*, 11, 35, 44 alternative media communication flows, 150-151 organisational resource, 144, 145 contentious performance, 49-50, 162 demands, 4, 60-61, 125 journalist, involvement of, 111 left-wing media coverage, radical, amount of, 126-127 mainstream media coverage, 70, 125, 136

amount of, 126-127 criticism of, 70-71 press conference, 112 protest preparation, 104 relational media practices boundaries crossed, 8-9, 100 Confederazione Unitaria di Base (CUB), 93 defined, 8-9, 20, 92 face-to-face communication, 101-104, 159-160

journalists activists control of, 92-93, 106 attention of, 105-106 political dimension, 96-99 territorial dimension, 95 time dimension, 93-95 unexpected ties, 96 media-activism, 99, 100-101 mixed media technologies, 106-108

197

Index

Media Practices and Protest Politics

196

San Precario, 4, 6, 50, 121, 147 see also Serpica Naro fashion show Serpica Naro fashion show, 6, 11, 33-34 Biagiotti, Laura, 6, 65, 78

demands, 60-61 gender, 54, 150 Global Project, 129 left-wing media, radical, 78-79 communication flows, 149-150 importance of, 139 mainstream media, 118-119 misunderstandings, 135 media novelty, 73-74 organisation of, 46-47

(NIDIL)

social movement groups, relationship to, 37-38, 41, 80-81

trade unions, rank-and-file mobilisation of, 31-32 see also Confederazione dei Comitati di Base (COBAS) see also Confederazione Unitaria di Base (CUB) see also Rappresentanze Sindacali di Base (RdB) see also Sindacato Autonomo Lavoratori Consolari (SALC)

Prada, 6, 65

protest preparation, 103-104 San Precario, 6 see also Chainworkers Crew

slogan, 65 Sont End magazine, 11, 101, 120 Sindacato Autonomo Lavoratori Consolari (SALC), 32

Sindacato dei Lavoratori Intercategoriale (SdL), 32 Sindacato Intercategoriale dei Comitati di Base (SinCobas), 32 Sindacato Unitario dei Lavoratori dei Trasporti (SULT), 32 Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà (SEL), 31

social movement groups criminalisation of, 137-138

~A

see also Sindacato dei Lavoratori Intercategoriale (SdL)

see also Sindacato Intercategoriale dei Comitati di Base (SinCobas)

see also Sindacato Unitario dei Lavoratori dei Trasporti (SULT) see also Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) transnational movements see Euro Mayday Parade Twitter, 9, 107 Unione degli Universitari (UDU), 78 Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL), 31, 142 Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), 32

White Overalss Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggles (WOMBLES), 3-4 World Bank, 108 World Trade Organisation (WTO), 51, 52 World Wide Web Euro Mayday Parade international activism, 91 Molleindustria, 52 Molleindustria political video-gaming, 52

news source, 105 protest preparation, 101-104 public sphere, 14-15 social movement, 162-164 mobilisation, 101 political flame wars, 83-84 repository, 108-110 resource, 47, 68, 83

studies, 16 YouTube, 1, 163-164