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How do heretical social movements build and negotiate their collective identities? This chapter tackles this question by examining the case of an emerging social movement, the left-wing Islamists in contemporary Turkey, that cuts across the durable divide between Turkey’s left and Islam. Drawing on four months of fieldwork in Turkey, I argue that, in addition to activating the typical “us versus them” dynamic of contentious politics, the left-wing Islamists also rely on blurring the social and symbolic boundaries that govern political divides in the course of building their collective identities. Their social boundary blurring includes facilitating otherwise unlikely face-to-face conversations and mutual ties between leftists and Islamists and spearheading alliances on common grounds including anti-imperialism and labor. Their symbolic boundary blurring includes performing a synthesis of Islamist and leftist repertoires of contention and reframing Islamic discourse with a strong emphasis on social justice and oppositional fervor. The case of Turkey’s left-wing Islamists illuminates the process of boundary blurring as a key dimension of collective identity and alliance formation across divides.

The aim of this study is to analyse the level of environmental, economic, and social engagement disclosed by local governments, taking into account factors such as political ideology and media pressure.

The authors analysed 102 large Spanish municipalities, using data from 2011. An econometric model was used based on dependency techniques for cross-sectional data. The Tobit technique is suitable, since it enables the authors to address particular considerations of extreme scores on the dependent variable.

The results show that local governments report less strategic and socio-economic information when subjected to strong media pressure, because the press tends to focus on unusual, negative news, and ignores other issues such as the environment. However, in municipalities governed by left-wing parties, media pressure actually promotes disclosure of this type of information.

It would be interesting to create an information index which includes local governments' disclosure, spanning a period of several years.

Particularly in municipalities governed by a left-wing party, media pressure favours the disclosure of sustainability information, including information about the municipal corporation and strategic and social issues.

This study analyses the impact of the press on the disclosure of sustainability information by local governments and also tests the moderating effect of the ruling party's political ideology. The authors did not find any paper that had analysed this impact before.

Based on a lexical analysis of publications on 529 Facebook pages, published between 2013 and 2017, this research explores how Brazilian left-wing activist groups participate on Facebook to coordinate their opposition and engage in social struggles. This chapter shows how activist groups set up two main digital network repertoires of action when mobilizing on Facebook. First, in direct connection with major political events, the platform is used as a media arena to challenge governments’ political actions and second, it is employed as a tool to coordinate mobilization, whether these mobilizations are demonstrations on the street or at cultural events, such as at a music concert. These repertoires of action exemplify ways in which contemporary Brazilian activism is carried out at the intersection of online and offline engagements. While participants engage through these two repertoires, this network of activists is held together over time through a more mundane type of event, pertaining to the repertoire of action allowing the organization of mobilization. Stepping aside from opposition and struggles brought to the streets, the organization of cultural activities, such as concerts and exhibitions, punctuates the everyday exchanges in activists’ communications. Talk about cultural events and their related social agendas structures activist networks on a medium-term basis and creates the conditions for the coordination of (future) social movements, in that they offer the opportunities to stay in contact, in addition to taking part in occasional gatherings, between more highly visible social protests.

A comparative analysis of ideologically opposed Turkish newspapers’ coverage of the Gezi Park protests, which was a wave of pro-democracy movement in Turkey, is critical because the media not only have a strong influence on opinion formation (Fairclough, 1989) but also provide the most relevant context for observing controversial interpretations and practices of democracy in Turkey. Although previous research on the media framing of social movements (Chan & Lee, 1984; Dardis, 2006; Hackett & Zhao, 1994; McLeod & Hertog, 1999) has shown that the media delegitimized the protests to serve the interests of the political status quo, it is expected that a much more complicated attitude may be revealed in the Turkish media because of the protest issue and polarized media. To this end, I triangulate corpus linguistics with frame analysis to explore discrepancies between the right and left wing newspapers’ coverage of the protests. Contrary to previous studies, no sort of unanimity on the side of the political authority is observed in Turkish media. While right wing newspapers widely use delegitimizing frames to portray the protests as an international plot or a masquerade, left wing newspapers only use legitimizing frames to deem the protests as a reasonable reaction to the controversial policies of the government. The findings of this study provide a new understanding of changing media attitudes toward social mobilizations in an era which has witnessed a series of movements for democracy and equality.