Processes of political meaning-making and contentious positioning. Recent Romanian cycles of mass protest and their activists' motives and demands

Abstract

The work investigates a series of mass protest outbreaks between 2012 and 2019 and the dynamics of a simultaneous civil society reconfiguration in Romania, using a political ethnography approach. It strives to make a methodological contribution, bridging interpretivist ethnography and questions of contentious politics, investigating the potential of political difference theories in that regard. In one methodological and two empirical papers, it first conceptualizes the methodological principle of political sensibility (in parallel to the principles of ethnographic sensibility, when tackling specifically political questions). It then tests political difference theory categories (association/dissociation; acknowledging/acting), conceptualizing practices of political positioning; and practices of creating political spaces, as exemplified in the interactions with Romanian political activists. Facing the complex contexts of protest outbreak as a disruption in contentious politics culture, the platformization of protest communication/organization/documentation, and the analytical framework of post-socialism, the work proposes to rethink some of the "classical" concepts of social movement studies. The latter oftentimes operate with presuppositions won in historical contexts of modern, western democracy, and therefore oftentimes do not suit post-modern, non-western societal realities. As the work shows, ontologically turned methodological and theoretical approaches do have potential for that endeavor.