Department seminar: Jan-Jonathan Bock

Seminar paper

Utopian Struggles - Grassroots Politics and Participation in Rome’s Five Star Movement

In June 2016, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (Movimento Cinque Stelle, or M5S) won the municipal elections in Italy’s capital. Governing the chaotic city became a litmus test for a civic platform that promises to reinvent political practice and rekindle participatory democracy. With its aspiration to perform a rupture in Italian political history and refashion the meaning of citizenship, the M5S has a strong utopian component: it combines a commitment to radical horizontality with a firm belief in the emancipatory power of the internet.

Based on fieldwork with M5S activists in an East Roman neighbourhood, this paper examines the M5S’s first year in office. Contrary to enthusiastic expectations for a political revolution, the obduracy of urban life and ingrained political habits of cynicism and self-interest derailed the utopian project. My analysis explores how the Movement began to struggle as activists, supporters, and elected representatives contested the meaning and practice of ‘participation’ as a core aspect of their political revolution.

About the lecturer

Jan-Jonathan Bock is a Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, UK. He received his PhD from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2015, where his thesis examined the aftereffects of the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake in Italy. His post-doctoral research has explored how crisis experiences in Germany and Italy give way to new political forms, from populist groups to refugee-support initiatives. This talk is based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Rome in 2016/17.

Light refreshments will be served in the Corner Room after the seminar. All interested are welcome!