My research is based on a processual, flexible multi-sited ethnography, and grounded in micro-politics. I reviewed approaches from social movement scholarship, critical anthropology, European ethnology, and cultural studies, as well as theories of practice, post-operaism, and governmentality. Despite increasing interest for protest media in social movement- and media studies, their culturality had received little theoretical and methodological attention at the time of writing. Mediated repertoires of contention established credible political actors, and circulated struggles across regional and national borders. Using complex media arrangements, activists circulated plurivocal imageries of precarity. Throughout the 2000s, the simultaneous Euromayday Parades on International Workers’ Day in over 40 European cities were highly visible public performances.

Contrasting my own position between the fields of activism and academia with formats of participatory or un-biased research, I come up with the concept of 'reflexive activist scholarship'. Based on a multi-sited and digital ethnography of the trans-urban EuroMayDay movement I show that protest media were constituent in its formation and central to its performativity. I argue that social movements use protest media strategically in creative and productive ways that go beyond representation.

'Performing Protest' offers a cultural approach to protest media.

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