FOCAL LENGTH

Provisional summary FOCALE

Democratic societies have long been based on a dual monopoly: that of the state over the definition and teaching of "good citizenship," and that of journalists over the information published, contributing to the institutionalization of a form of citizenship that is supervised and regulated from above. The emergence of social movements and the advent of the digital society have introduced a bottom-up disruption of the configuration of civic and political expression.

Alternative and dissident expressions of citizenship have always used images to support their causes, but their visual component has changed considerably since the end of^{the 20th} century under the combined effect of socio-technical transformations (the internet, smartphones, digital social networks, generative AI). Mobilized groups are harnessing its potential and developing new skills to produce and disseminate audiovisual content. The project aims to develop a conceptual framework capable of capturing this new political economy of images at a glance. To this end, the FOCALE project has set itself the goal of testing three hypotheses: (1) The growing importance of the visual in alternative or protest forms of citizen expression. (2) The emergence of knowledge, practical skills, and conceptual and technical engineering in the tactical management of images, both by mobilized groups and by state professionals. (3) The development of a specific function for images in the processes of desectorization and mediatization of controversies in the contemporary period. The FOCALE project investigates the reconfiguration of democratic citizenship through images in a public space that has become a space for the confrontation of strategies of visibility and invisibility of political issues, based on investigations into three particularly salient areas of political controversy: The repression of religion in the shaping of young citizens; the justification of the use of violence in law enforcement operations; the prescription of a top-down eco-citizen norm as a modality of "ecological transition."