Representations of environmental protest on the ground and in the cloud: The NOTAP protests in activist practice and social visual media

This article advances knowledge on activist technosocial practice by studying the realities and representations of on-the-ground environmental resistance and their intersections with visual representations of protest on Twitter. It does so by focusing on the case of resistance to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, commonly known as TAP, in southern Italy, and on mixed methods for data collection, including ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews and an AIassisted visual ethnography of a large collection of computationally collected and categorised images posted on Twitter. By comparing online and offline representations of protest, the study demonstrated that only a partial overlapping existed between them, thus adding a nuance to the digital criminological literature premised on the existence of blurred boundaries between online and offline experiences of injustice. Themes overlapped in their representations of protest, with images of on-theground visual resistance being used on Twitter to extend and amplify the contestation of everyday spaces and to support offline and online initiatives to stop the pipeline. Differences in the recurring themes were instead reconnected to the inherent secrecy of some of the protest's strategies and to the typical ways in which Twitter tends to be used by social movements.

Automated summary

This article explores the realities and representations of on-the-ground environmental resistance and visual representations of protest on Twitter, focusing on the case of resistance to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline in southern Italy. By comparing online and offline representations of protest, it demonstrates a partial overlap between them, adding nuance to the existing literature on digital criminology. The study shows that visual representations of protest on Twitter extend and amplify contestation of everyday spaces and support both offline and online initiatives to stop the pipeline.