Infrastructures of dissensus: repartitioning the sensible and articulating the political through the occupation of Greece’s public broadcasting service

Karaliotas, L. (2023) Infrastructures of dissensus: repartitioning the sensible and articulating the political through the occupation of Greece’s public broadcasting service. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, (doi: 10.1177/23996544221150077) (Early Online Publication)

Abstract

This article engages with contemporary debates around the politics of space and the spatiality of politics by exploring how the fabrication of emancipatory infrastructures shapes the articulation and reconfiguration of the (urban) political. Moving beyond the prevailing emphasis on urban uprisings, the article focuses on the occupation and self-management of Greece’s Public Broadcasting Service (ERT) in response to New Democracy’s government decision to dismantle it in June 2013. In this juncture, ERT workers and multiple movements and activists in solidarity occupied the Service’s buildings across the country and recuperated its infrastructures to broadcast TV and Radio programmes. ERT’s buildings became key political spaces and nodal political infrastructures in the struggle against austerity. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of politics as a world-making activity, the article reads these occupations as the opening of new spatialities for politics through the fabrication of infrastructures of dissensus. In this, it foregrounds the spatial and infrastructural dimensions of urban politics, explores how such infrastructure spaces reconfigure the partition of the urban sensible and traces the challenges and limitations that emerge from their encounters with the police order.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Early Online Publication
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Karaliotas, Dr Lazaros
• Authors: Karaliotas, L.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Geographical and Earth Sciences
• Journal Name: Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• ISSN: 2399-6544
• ISSN (Online): 2399-6552
• Published Online: 07 January 2023
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 The Author
• First Published: First published in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 2023
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License