Period: September 2012 – December 2015
Investigator: Arnau Monterde, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Description: This project is Arnau Monterde‘s doctoral dissertation, wherein Manuel Castells served as director of his thesis.
Abstract: In this Ph.D. thesis, Arnau develops an analysis of the 15M movement, from May 2011 until May 2015, focusing on the relation between the movement and its uses of networked communication technologies. The work recurs to a multi-methodological approach that combines quantitative, network, and qualitative analysis through interviews and fieldwork. The work is structured in three parts: the emergence of the movement in 2011, its evolution and transformation until 2015, and its electoral effects, both in the 2014 European elections, as well as in the 2015 local elections in Spain. The study develops, in a transversal way, analytically and conceptually, the notion of network-movement. More specifically, it does so through the characterisation of several observed properties of the 15M movement, giving continuity to a fertile field of knowledge currently open around movements emerging since 2011, attending to the role of communication networks, as well as to their potential for political and social transformation.
Image by Gorka Linaza under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.