7/29/2019 Re-Assembling Mediated Power: Exploring the moment of crisis and opportunity within anti-austerity politics

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ESRC & SEDTC Politics Postgraduate Conference 2013

Abstract submission for Power Revisited: Crisis and Opportunities

Simon Collister | simon.collister.2010@rhul.ac.uk

New Political Communication Unit, Department of Politics and International

Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Bio

Simon Collister is a senior lecturer at University of the Arts, London. He is

currently conducting PhD research at Royal Holloway, University of London's

New Political Communication Unit on the mediation of power in networked

communication environments. Before entering academia, Simon worked for a

number of global communications consultancies, planning and implementing

research-led campaigns for a range of public, voluntary, and private sector

organisations.

Keywords

Mediated power, immanence, networks, assemblage theory, framing, #Demo2012

Abstract

Re-Assembling Power: exploring the moment of crisis and opportunity within

anti-austerity politics

This paper will take as it starting point the tension identified in the conferences CFP

as to whether recent political events such as the Arab Spring, Occupy and the diverse

range of global anti-austerity movements should be understood as new forms of

power or an intensification of the old battlelines.

It will argue that such political events are an articulation of the trajectory plotted by

contemporary accounts of power, but which the majority of political science

scholarship has arguably overlooked in recent years. Such a reality, I contend,

represents both a crisis as well as an opportunity for political scientists, media and

communications and social movement/activism researchers.

7/29/2019 Re-Assembling Mediated Power: Exploring the moment of crisis and opportunity within anti-austerity politics

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Addressing this moment of crisis/opportunity from the perspective of mediated power

the paper will identify limitations of the dominant theories in play and demonstrate

how scholarly engagement with key themes, broadly arranged along a liberal-critical

spectrum, have failed to maintain conceptual pace with broader sociological or

philosophical theories of power. These contemporary theories encompass such

concepts as new materialism, neo-realism and actor-network theory and have

arguably broken dichotomous divides outlined above. The paper will demonstrate the

particular relevance of such approaches to the emergence of the increasingly

networked logics of contemporary, internet-enabled movements as well as the

political spaces or spatialized practices readily embraced as a central tactic by such

movements.

Having identified and tentatively mapped this crisis, I will then propose a theoretical

and methodological response to this lacuna. This will be achieved by drawing on the

Deleuzian and Delandian concept of assemblages and synthesising it with the

communication theory of framing. This will enable me to articulate a theory of

mediated power capable of bridging the gap between the old battlelines and

contemporary articulations of power. In addition, the paper will aim to include

evidence and examples of a practical application of the model through an analysis of

the most recent UK student demonstrations (November 2012).