Junho de 2013: atores, práticas e gramáticas nos protestos em Belo Horizonte

Abstract

This research aims to answer the question: what were the actors, the practices and the grammars in the June 2013 protests in Belo Horizonte? It adopts an interpretative methodology and analyses the events of June 2013 in the city through literature and interviews. It is divided in four chapters, besides its introduction and conclusion. The first seeks to situate the demonstrations in relation to the global protest cycle that took place between the end of the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s using three dimensions: economical, organizational and political. From them, it is possible to characterize the collective action as based on fluid and personalized engagement, mediated by digital communication, and distrustful of traditional institutions. It reaches, then, the formulation of the existence of diversity and diffusion as well as ambivalence between left and right-wing in June 2013. The chapter follows to analyze authors who interpret the protests from the division between right and left-wing and, after, those who look for general framings. After evaluating such formulations, the chapter ends with a presentation of the division that is developed in this thesis: between the left-wing and the nonleft-wing. This division guides the following chapters and the development of the field of research with non-left-wing actors. The second chapter presents left-wing political organizations that acted on the city before June 2013, putting light into their participation during the protests and understanding that, at the same time that they influenced the events and their characteristics, they also were not enough to give cohesion to the protests in focus. The chapter, also, systematizes the literature about the daily happenings and gives an analysis of the following events, after June 2013, in the city. The third chapter interprets the interviews made with 18 non-left-wing actors, who were selected through the following criteria: having used the yellow and green colors during June 2013 and/or having acted in right-wing organizations during and/or after the events. Guided by the interviews’ interpretation, it systematizes the happenings before, during and after June 2013, as well as interprets the meanings that the interviewees give to their participation on the protests and looks at the right-wing organizations in which some of them started to participate. Finally, the fourth chapter presents the actors (individuals and organizations), practices (marches; confrontation; use of symbols and performances; collaborative media, personalized content and social media; assemblies) and grammars (horizontality; acceleration; public space occupation; nationalism), with their confluences and tensions. It is, therefore, possible to note that there are approximations that allow broad conceptual formulations to comprehend June 2013’s common meanings, and some distancing that take to the need to put in evidence the conflicts regarding the event.