FOCAL LENGTH
FOCALE Preliminary Summary
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 published information, which has helped institutionalize a form of citizenship that is controlled and regulated from above. The emergence of social movements and the advent of the digital society have introduced a bottom-up disruption to the structure of civic and political expression.
Alternative and protest-oriented expressions of citizenship have always harnessed the power of imagery to support their causes; however, their visual component has evolved considerably since the end ofthe 20th century under the combined influence of sociotechnical transformations (the internet, smartphones, digital social media, and generative AI). Activist groups are harnessing these technologies and developing new skills to produce and disseminate audiovisual content. The project aims to design a conceptual framework capable of comprehending this new political economy of images as a whole. To this end, the FOCALE project sets out to test three hypotheses: (1) The growing prominence of the visual in alternative or protest-oriented forms of civic expression. (2) The emergence of knowledge, practical skills, and conceptual and technical expertise in the tactical management of images among both mobilized groups and government professionals. (3) The development of a distinct role for images in the processes of de-sectorization and mediatization of controversies in the contemporary era. The FOCALE project investigates how images are reshaping democratic citizenship in a public sphere that has become a battleground for strategies of making political issues visible or invisible, based on investigations into three particularly prominent areas of political controversy: The suppression of religion in the socialization of young citizens; the justification of the use of violence in law enforcement operations; and the imposition of a top-down eco-citizenship norm as a modality of the “ecological transition.”