This article explores critiques and reformulations of Habermas’s concept of communicative action as presented by feminist authors. Numerous articles considering communicative action as developed by Habermas from a feminist perspective have been published, but no systematic analysis of these arguments exists. This article aims to fill the gap by providing an examination of various readings of communicative action from a feminist standpoint. If, on one hand, the article collects the dispersed feminist critique of communicative action and offers insight into feminist (...) argumentation, its aim is, on the other hand, to reflect the critique itself. Therefore, attention is devoted both to feminist readings of communicative action, as well as to the potential shortcomings of these readings that are detected by a closer examination of Habermas’s own works. The article’s aim is also to show how feminist critics, in their interpretations and reformulations of communicative action, focus on an explication of the inclusive elements of communicative action. (shrink)

We suggest the “sensitizing concept of mediatization” as an analytical tool to analyze public communication of social movements in times of social, economic and political crisis, and we apply the tool to explore the case of the Slovenian uprisings of 2012–13. First, theoretically, we couple Tilly’s understanding of social movements’ practices with Hjarvard’s distinction between “direct” and “indirect” forms of mediatization. Second, in the empirical part, we categorize and classify movement organizations, activist initiatives and political groups into two distinct groups (...) and observe how they respond to the media logic of newsworthiness and the political logic of office-seeking during the contentious actions of mass mobilization. We observe asymmetrical responses to processes of mediatization, which vary according to organizational structure, practices and movements’ vision of social transformation. The article shows how different protest groups respond to the three media logic techniques: a) personalization of political actors, b) decontextualization and simplification of transformative potential that are inherent to protest cycles, and how the two mobilized groups interact with the journalistic focus on c) spectacle and images of violence. We argue that the more the specific movement/group expresses criticism over the interplay of the media and the political logic, marked by the three discursive modes mentioned, the less it adopts the dominant media logic and the more it seeks for alternative and innovative media action. (shrink)