Fabricating Citizenship through Images: making oneself visible through struggle, fighting for visibility in contemporary political controversies – FOCALE

By aiming to study the now central role of images and their circulation in political activities and State-society relations, the FOCALE project seeks to contribute to the necessary aggiornamento of the conceptual frameworks of citizenship in the era of digital democracy. The evolution of social structures and representations, the emergence of social movements, and the advent of digital society have contributed to a reconfiguration of citizen and political expressions. The scope of actors involved in defining, denouncing, and bringing public issues to the agenda has significantly expanded, as has the repertoire of their actions. This new informational reality reshapes the historical dual monopoly of democracies: the State’s monopoly on prescribing and instructing normative citizenship, and that of professional journalists in controlling access to the public dissemination of information. Mobilized collectives, NGOs, moral entrepreneurs, and alternative media are characterized by their ability to circulate textual and visual discourses that reflect contestatory intentions and alternative conceptions of expressing their political participation.
The FOCALE project intends to study the visual dimension of tensions surrounding controversial issues in contemporary French political life, where competing definitions of democratic citizenship are at stake. The team behind the project has chosen to focus the analysis on three struggles for political visibility in contemporary France, selected for their relative longevity in the public sphere. The first issue is the use of police violence and its justifications, marked by disagreements around “manifesting citizenship” and the expression of claims to exercise citizens’ rights to move and protest in public spaces. The second politically controversial issue is the management of secularism in schools, marked by disagreements about “school citizenship” and the expression of claims to have a voice in the functioning of schools and school policies. The third issue concerns environmental preservation policies, marked by disagreements about “ecological citizenship” and the expression of claims to the right to live in a healthy environment and defend desirable political conceptions for this domain, including for future generations. By making schools, streets, and nature “a place of politics” (Neveu, 2005), i.e., a site for actualizing disagreements on our common future, the project questions contemporary modes of citizen intervention in the orientation and methods of State action.
The collective investigation of the FOCALE team aims to measure the role of visuality in the framing struggles between social actors engaged in shaping these political agendas. Developed in the 1980s and 1990s, the theoretical framework of Frame Perspective has likely not yet sufficiently reconsidered the role of images and their uses in the construction of public issues—both from the perspective of policymakers and citizen actions—after the entry into the digital techno-media regime. This scientific program will therefore seek to update Frame Analysis by incorporating visual repertoires. In doing so, it aims to develop and consolidate an analytical framework that enables political scientists to more systematically integrate a visual approach into various research agendas in political science.