1st Edition
Re-imagining Democracy Legacy, Impact and Lessons of Spain's 15-M Movement
This interdisciplinary book draws on leading scholarship on one of the most influential and consequential social movements of the past decades: Spain’s 15-M movement. The volume explores the legacy, impact and outcomes of the movement, and the lessons it offers for understanding mobilization in times of crisis.
The book opens with a theoretical reconsideration of the positive ways social movements can impact democracy, moving the field forward significantly. It also offers rich case studies to explore a range of areas of interest to social movement scholars. Chapters explore the biographical consequences of participation in social movements; how memories of the movement inspired new mobilizations; the reciprocal influence between the 15-M movement and feminist economics; how urban democracy was transformed by municipalism arising from the movement; how the movement generated a “Caring democracy” in the face of the Covid pandemic; and how it gave rise to a new radical democratic media ecosystem. The book explores the movement’s political economy as well as reflects on one of its unintended consequences: the rise of the penalization of counter-hegemonic protest in contemporary Spain. Although focused on a single emblematic movement, it offers significant insights and lessons for scholarship on contemporary politics and movements.
Re-imagining Democracy provides a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in the challenges faced by contemporary democracies, the dynamics of social movements in times of crisis, and the profound impact of social movements on contemporary democracy. The chapters in this book were originally published as a peer-reviewed special issue of Social Movement Studies.
Introduction—Re-imagining Democracy: Legacy, Impact and Lessons of Spain’s 15-M Movement
Cristina Flesher Fominaya
1. Reconsidering social movement impact on democracy: the case of Spain’s 15-M movement
Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Ramón A. Feenstra
2. What has become of the Indignados? The biographical consequences of participation in the 15M movement in Madrid (2011–19)
Héloïse Nez
3. 15-M movement and feminist economics: an insight into the dialogues between social movements and academia in Spain
Astrid Agenjo-Calderón, Lucía Del Moral-Espín and Raquel Clemente-Pereiro
4. Transforming urban democracy through social movements: the experience of Ahora Madrid
Fabiola Mota Consejero and Michael Janoschka
5. Caring democracy now: neighborhood support networks in the wake of the 15-M
Carlos Diz, Brais Estévez and Raquel Martínez-Buján
6. The rise of a new media ecosystem: exploring 15M’s educommunicative legacy for radical democracy
Ángel Barbas and Emiliano Treré
7. The mobilising memory of the 15-M movement: recollections and sediments in Spanish protest culture
Manuel Jiménez-Sánchez and Patricia García-Espín
8. 15-M Mobilizations and the penalization of counter-hegemonic protest in contemporary Spain
Kerman Calvo and Aitor Romeo Echeverría
9. The political economy of the Spanish Indignados: political opportunities, social conflicts, and democratizing impacts
Eduardo Romanos, Jorge Sola and César Rendueles
Biography
Cristina Flesher Fominaya is Editor-in-Chief of Social Movement Studies, a Founding Editor of Interface Journal, and author of Social Movements and Globalization (2014) and Democracy Reloaded (2020). She is Professor of Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She publishes widely on European and global social movements, hybrid parties, digital politics and media, collective identity, democracy, autonomy, and political participation.
Ramón A. Feenstra is Associate Professor at the Universitat Jaume I of Castellón, Spain. He has published the books Kidnapped Democracy (2019) and Refiguring Democracy. The Spanish Political Laboratory (co-authored with Simon Tormey, Andreu Casero and John Keane, Routledge, 2017). He is a former editor of Recerca. Revista de Pensament I Anàlisi.
