The project “Geography of Resistance – Entangled Spatialities of Contestation” is funded by the National Science Center, under grant number 2023/51/D/HS4/00190. Our research looks at the phenomenon of resistance in the context of space, that is, the places where these activities take place.
Our project analyzes contemporary forms of resistance, especially those that combine traditional methods with new technologies. Today’s resistance often makes use of the internet and digital tools, which allows the creation of new forms of protest – sometimes hybrid, combining physical and digital spaces, and sometimes taking place exclusively online. The COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many people to move their activities online, accelerated the development of digital forms of protest, even among groups previously excluded from the digital world.
The goal of our project is to explore how space – both physical and digital – influences protests, and how protests affect our perception of space. We are looking at how the location of a protest affects the number of participants and their actions, and how digital technologies such as the internet and mobile devices are changing the relationship between protesters and the location of their actions. We are also interested in protests taking place in virtual worlds, such as in computer games.
In our study, we intend to combine two fields of knowledge: the geography of protest and digital geography. To achieve this, we plan, among other things, to analyze documents, create an online map of protests, survey research, analyze visual materials (such as photos and videos) and conduct interviews. This project fills a gap in research on the digital aspects of resistance, which are often studied separately from traditional forms of protest. In our research, we want to show that in today’s world these two aspects are inextricably linked, especially after the pandemic experience, which has created new forms of resistance, such as demonstrations in cars or localized entirely online.