Binenti, Silvia;
(2024)
Mundane objects of popular geopolitics:
An ethnography of political t-shirts.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Preview |
Text
PhD Thesis_Silvia Binenti.pdf - Accepted Version Download (70MB) | Preview |
Abstract
By drawing on Deleuzean principles of assemblage thinking, this thesis looks at the way political t-shirts form and perform political affect, discourse, and action across different political assemblages. The project consisted of a one-year assemblage-inflected ethnography in Italy engaging with different realities across the political spectrum. This research paid particular attention to t-shirts with political slogans and prints as the most compelling and accessible political object found in the mundanity of everyday life, with a well-established symbolic and material history within social movements. As an accessible and easy-to-print form of popular culture enabled by fast consumerism, t-shirts enable the vehement activist, the fashionista, or the one-off wearer to send up-to-date memos of political partisanship at the level of the everyday. When a particular political t-shirt travels to a square where protesting masses are gathered, into the closet of the current Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, appears on the camera of a local TV station or a satirical meme page, and makes its way into the crypt where Benito Mussolini is buried, the act of following this object productively captures the spatial, territorial and affective complexity of the different modes, places, and scales of politics. Furthermore, this PhD developed and operationalised an innovative ethnographic approach in assemblage thinking. Given the surge of interest in assemblage theory across the social sciences, this conceptual and methodological proposition has implications beyond the scope of this research by encouraging a rethinking of political comparativism. Ultimately, this analysis helped break political dichotomies between formal and informal, public and private, macro and micro, bottom-up and top-down, not only adding to literature on popular geopolitics but also helping rethink the very idea of the political and the way we can study it.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Mundane objects of popular geopolitics: An ethnography of political t-shirts |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10198211 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
