Social media and housing activism in post-crisis Dublin: Geographies of digital/material contention

Abstract

This thesis focuses on housing contention in Dublin since the global financial crisis. More specifically, it is an empirically grounded socio-technical investigation of the relation between contention and the digital?s ambivalent role within this is contemporary housing struggles. The thesis explores housing as digital/material contention, or an emergent contentious mediated culture (Zayani, 2015) which I connect to a digital geographies reading of space as simultaneously digital/material and always-already mediated (Leszczynski, 2015). I outline how housing activists have used digital technologies, and particularly social media, to contest housing in post-crash Dublin, with a particular focus on housing activist community groups and their involvement in temporary political occupation campaigns. In doing so, I use post-crash Dublin as a case study to demonstrate how contention now unfolds as simultaneously digital/material, and the ambivalent potentialities and pitfalls that this creates for contemporary activism in a broader context of de/repoliticisation (Swyngedouw, 2018) under communicative capitalism (Dean, 2005). I outline how digital/material practices impact the ways in which contention is publicised, organised, and mediated, and attune to the ambivalent possibilities and limitations of the digital in struggles for impactful individual, collective, and societal change (Kitchin & Fraser, 2020).