Activist and critical design for social transformation: Other media collaborative protest for the city of Barcelona

Principal Investigator: Raúl Goñi Fernández

We find how protest communication can be a vector of social reflection since it conveys relevant information capable of being codified in a simple way. Citizens can communicate in society, through the new collaborative symbolic activism that lives on the network but that requires physical presence, action and face-to-face encounters. From the activist practice and communication, we wonder about other media protests closer and more collaborative to the voices of interest groups for the co-production of knowledge about the area of ​​study. Protest is inherent in living, its etymology explains being a witness, but what are the real protest needs of the people who live in Barcelona? By broadening the spectrum of research further, we find the possibility of investigating from the community to the international, from the Barcelona metropolis to an emergency and at-risk environment of a Refugee Camp in Athens, Greece, and from the bourgeois to the excluded. It seems pertinent to compare and test the tools and methods in a less comfortable context and to inhabit the research question from the extreme.

Through action research, collaborative interviews and the co-production of knowledge, we propose and test collaborative tools for the creation of new spaces for the communication of groups at risk of exclusion. It is the NGO Open Arms, dedicated to saving the lives of migrants at sea that we had the opportunity to focus, analyze and make visible those other voices at risk of death, illegally, and without help or support once they arrived in Europe and confined in the Ritsona and Malakasa Refugee Camp in Greece. Can we protest in European cities when there are people who have nothing, no tools and no voice? The difference between people and animals is that we have the ability to speak, but these people don’t even have a voice because they are treated like animals. The focus of the research has been changed from analyzing and improving protest tools for the city of Barcelona to conducting interviews and proving that involving and collaborating with migrants in the process that not only co-produces knowledge about the phenomenon, but can also serve as a sensitive way to engage them in political and social struggles, build bridges, and help them process their experiences in a more positive and affirming way.

The incorporation of other methodologies such as action research in which the researcher’s body participates and exposes its safety to the bodily limit, the research interviewer’s relationship with the interviewees as a leading learner, the creation of the interview, its rhythm and interest not only by the experiences of those affected but by revealing the true need to witness a reality, to protest against it, they are helping to inform the discoveries.

The case study of the NGO Open Arms, in which we analyze the manifesto, the operation and the network woven in favor of human rights, as well as the creation of a series of workshops with a team of teachers and students from Elisava Design & Engineering School, reveals the true need not only to witness a reality, to protest against it, but also of discovering other ways of protesting through direct actions in the street that are helping to uncover new means of protest media. Our purpose is directed towards the design of operational tools that are useful for social activism and protest design and communication.

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