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This article traces the intersecting and interstitial spaces of political aesthetics in political street art featuring key activists of the Egyptian uprising of 2011-2013 as well as the following struggle. We argue that the complex political expressions displayed in the images as re-contextualized and embodied afford the images different roles in citizens’ political and social struggles. We develop three modalities of political street art – emplacement, travelling and conversation – that allow different works different roles in the political formation of subjectivity. In order to understand street art’s role in political subjectivity formation, this article applies visual discursive analyses on two expressions of political street art: Firstly, the stencil of a blue bra, referring to sitt al-banat, a woman who was stripped naked in public as she was beaten unconscious by Egyptian military soldiers. Secondly, the mural of then jailed activist Sanaa Seif in the Copenhagen-borough of Christiania., This article traces the intersecting and interstitial spaces of political aesthetics in political street art featuring key activists of the Egyptian uprising of 2011–13 as well as the following struggle. We argue that the complex political expressions displayed in the images as recontextualized and embodied afford the images different roles in citizens’ political and social struggles. We develop three modalities of political street art – emplacement, travelling and conversation – that allow different works different roles in the political formation of subjectivity. In order to understand street art’s role in political subjectivity formation, this article applies visual discursive analyses to two expressions of political street art: first, the stencil of a blue bra, referring to sitt al-banat, a woman who was stripped naked in public as she was beaten unconscious by Egyptian military soldiers; second, the mural of then jailed activist Sanaa Seif in the Copenhagen borough of Christiania.

Archives and archiving have expanded from their once traditional role as restricted and institutionalized domains into a growing host of autonomous, often community-orientated but also artistic resources and practices that act against the exclusions and notions of ‘historical significance’ which permeated their formal counterparts (Schwartz and Cook 2002). These alternative archives, sometimes referred to as counter-archives or community archives, can be invaluable resources for researchers of citizen media, and the alternative archive itself may be seen as an instance of citizen media in practice. Alternative archives are not simply repositories for excluded narratives. They contain documents and enable practices that can bear witness, affirm identities, forge collective memories and new socialities, offering sites for critical engagement with both the past and the present (Flinn 2010; Baldi 2016). In that sense they are anticipatory, even hopeful endeavours (Appaduri 2003). The affordances of digital technologies have enabled the growth of alternative archives and made them more visible to researchers, with a proliferation of online archives and digitization projects now readily available for analysis. However, the counter-archive has a longer history. This entry initially draws on examples of pre-digital counter archives such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York (established in 1974), and then proceeds to engage with more recent counter-archiving activities, including 858: An Archive of Resistance, an online archive of 858 hours of video footage from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. It also engages with some of the vulnerabilities of alternative archives, both online and offline varieties (Bosi and Reiter 2014). References Appadurai, A. (2003) ‘Archive and Aspiration’, in J. Brouwer and A. Mulder (eds) Information is Alive, Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAI Publishers, pp. 14-25 Baldi, L. (2016) ‘Archiving a Revolution in the Digital Age, Archiving as an act of r

This entry engages with activism as a form of citizen-led intervention in public space with the aim of improving society through political, economic, environmental or social change. Until recently, media played a minor role in studies concerning activism. This has changed dramatically over the past 10 years, as numerous studies have been conducted on how activists have used the Internet and, later, social media platforms to mobilize support and organize themselves and their campaigns. Media are appropriated by activists but also possess their own material characteristics, which shape how people engage, protest, resist and struggle. This interaction between control and emancipation has fostered critical investigation into protest and digital media. The entry empirically and conceptually understands activism as a mediated form of resistance – including media technologies as well as material and immaterial artefacts and devices endowed with expressive power to communicate information, emotions, values and narratives. The tension between activist agency and media materialities opens up new trajectories for research, permitting a critical assessment of how activism can bring to the fore calls for social change.