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This illustrated chapter analyses the political character and contested ‘thematic framing’ of Spain’s Huelga General Feminista, a multi-faceted protest/labor event organized since 2017 on International Women’s Day (Campillo, 2019: 253; Comisión Feminista, 2019). In the course of this discussion, I follow the Spanish practice of marking the political significance of an occasion by combining its numeric designation with the letter of the month. In this case, International Women’s Day appears as ‘8M’ (8 March), while the organized withdrawal of industrial/domestic labor associated with 8M is, for the sake of convenience, called Huelga General Feminista (HGF), though in interviews, the organizers of these events tend to refer to the ‘Feminist Strike’, while the state-owned broadcaster RTVE1 identified the day as ‘8M: Huelga General’.

This Introduction, 14,500 words in length, is intended as a substantial intervention debates about the role of journalism in 'democratic' cultures. It was written in order to provide context for an edited book of 14 chapters, so had to be produced once all this material had been through a final edit.

This chapter examines the representations of austerity measures and anti-austerity protests in the British national press between 2011 and 2015, in order to identify some of the underlying attitudes that produced the UK's 'Brexit'vote of 2016. Based on the content and discourse analysis of a selection of news articles covering a variety of events, particular attention is devoted to the ways in which Britishness and the strength of the British state is represented in public discourse.

This chapter examines the response of the transnational liberal elite to the rise of ‘populist’ appeals, arguing that the apparent disapproval of this development is not an indication that leading establishment figures are socially progressive, but rather that they object to a form of politics that threatens their own ability to maintain the conditions needed for capitalist accumulation. The chapter examines the use of the term community, and relates this both to the rhetoric used during the UK’s 2017 General Election, and to the form of political discourse introduced by Tony Blair. It also considers the attempt to conflate the populism of Right and Left, arguing that the elite is just as prone to the use of populist tactics as its insurgent rivals.

This article, which focuses on a strike and ocupation that took place in Barcelona in May 2015, is part of a larger enquiry that attempts to locate public expressions of dissent in their sociopolitical, discursive and spatiotemporal context. The methods used to conduct this study include the standard collection of observational and media data, but also encompass an attempt to investigate the control of space by public and private authorities. Discursive manifestations of dissent and the arguments posed by social actors are therefore considered in conjunction with the physical impact and material setting within which goals are pursued. The case study used in this article is the workers’ occupation, in 2015, of the Telefónica building, the famous landmark identified in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia as the epicentre of the internecine struggle that took place within the Republican camp in 1937.

This chapter identifies the ways in which the Athenian polis is conceptualised as both a cultural site and as the origin of democratic practices. The Acropolis and its environs is often presented as the embodiment of an ‘ideal’ city-state, a tradition which persists in museum guides, photographic studies, archaeological reports and European ‘mediascapes’ in general. The dominant notion of a cultured demokratia, inseparable from the physical site of the Parthenon and other monuments, has its origins in ancient literary sources. Adherence to this tradition tends, therefore, to obscure other aspects of Athenian history, including the imperial character of its fifth century dominance, the political and military symbolism of its building programme, and the fact that a polis did not necessarily have to be linked to a particular physical domain. The major part of the enquiry is focussed, however, on those modern interpretations which draw attention to the cultural significance of the Acropolis as both a physical site and an urban ‘imaginary’.

This paper deals with one contemporary ‘myth’ circulated within mainstream cinema; the validation of masculine purpose through ‘heroic’ action. This is exemplified within Hollywood narratives by the recurrence of particular scenes, interludes which attempt to dramatise the experience of male characters (usually middle-ranking veteran officers) who are presented as traumatised and also, in some cases, apparently ‘conscience-stricken’. The representation of these supposedly ‘psychological’ phenomena are the subject of controversy; quite apart from their uncertain status as references to a ‘post-traumatic’ and the concentration of emotional resource on male rather than female sufferers, they produce ambivalent accounts of American military power. Using reference to The Last Samurai (Zwick, 2003), Windtalkers (Woo, 2002), and Glory (Zwick, 1989), the work investigates the discursive purposes of such typification, asking to what degree it may represent a series of expressive or ‘ideological’ acts in th...