Apathy and hope in times of outrage of social change in Spain : a phenomenological auto-ethnografic tale of conscientization

(1)

(2)

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has”  Margaret Mead (1958)

(3)

Plagiarism Declaration

I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy. I thereby declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper

(4)

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank all my informants and the rest of the people I met during fieldwork in my hometown, from generational peers to older ones, without whom this research would not have been possible. Thank you for your openness, for letting me inside your life and show me your ways of living, for sharing your experiences with honesty, and for listening to mine without judging them. You proved me that there is hope where I thought it did not exist.

Secondly, I am also very grateful for my parent’s vital and economic support, Flor and Obdulio. You received me at home one more time regardless of the differences that might come up in everyday life when we live under the same roof. Despite of the generational gap that produces those conflicts, I am beholden to you. I am confident that this thesis will help us to build some bridges of understanding at the same time that it fulfills the dream you have worked so hard for your whole life: I now believe that I have received the best possible education and I own it all to you. Hopefully, one day you will realize that more things unites us than separates us. At the end of the day I am just a younger version of both of you who lives in a different time and place but our core remains.

Thirdly, I am enormously grateful to all my professors: Anick Vollebergh, Julie McBrien, Sebastian Abrahamsson, Alex Voicu, Oscar Verkaaik, Kristine Krause, and Daniel Guinness as well as to the Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. When I began the preparatory programme I barely knew what anthropology was but my intuition pointed me this path. Thanks to your lessons and guidance I have learned to appreciate and love this discipline to the extent that it has helped me to change personally. Besides, it is refreshing having professors who talk to students from an equal position instead of a position of power as my experience in the Universidad Complutense of Madrid tells me.

Last, but most certainly not least, my special thanks are owed to Vincent De Rooij, my supervisor in this journey but also mentor. Without your profound understanding, patience and support I would not have been able to face this challenge. If writing a master thesis is a painful task that many people compare to giving birth, as I have repeatedly heard throughout this years, writing about one’s life in the middle of the struggle is beyond comparison. Every time I doubted myself or I did not know where the thesis was heading your confidence in my ideas encouraged me to keep on going. You have been the best companionship I could have ever asked for and I need to thank Marieke Brand for bringing you into my life. I am greatly indebted to your words, confidence and teachings, and I will always be.

(5)

Introduction

“We are ordinary people. We are like you. Some of us consider ourselves more progressive, others conservative. But we are concerned and angry about the political, economic and social outlook. Two-thirds of successful system changes in history were non-violent. Today a new generation is rising. This is how: Unite. Occupy. Give hugs. Creative. Get loud. Provoke. Question. Find your way. Peaceful. The rebellion continues in everyday life”.

This is how the trailer of Everyday Rebellion (2013) deals with the art of change. I saw the documentary at the Filarmónica Theater of Oviedo, in my hometown of Asturias–Spain, on January 14, only two weeks after my arrival to the field. I could not hold my tears.

Those moving and encouraging images and words were a prelude of what I was about to experience for three months in the course of fieldwork. Before that, I had never been engaged in any kind of activist movement, and yet, the uprising of the Indignados, which caught me in Madrid in 2011, prompted me to pay careful attention to the wave of global protest around the world. It forced me to ponder its meaning. Until then, my life had been marked by a personal struggle with eating disorders, as well as a persistent obedience towards the values and principles of my familiar and social circles. I was born and raised with stories of safety and security, and I believed them. Shockingly, the uprising occurred at time when I first began to suffer the consequences of the economical and financial crisis of 2008. Not only did it have a strong impact upon my being, it also conditioned all of my future decisions regarding the ways of being-in-the-world from that moment on, of thinking and feeling, and the concerns about making a living.

This thesis is driven by a personal motivation to understand and reflect upon my own existential struggle to make a life worth living in uncertain times since the 2008 crisis. It also aims to shed light upon the importance of the actions taken by a part of my generation, actions aimed at regenerating Spanish society and democracy. This draws attention to the questions of how peers of my generation are experiencing, taking control, and making sense of their lives in a time of social, political, and economic uncertainty? How are their emotional and cognitive processes influencing their ways of being-in-the-world? And whether and how is possible to bracket a generational awareness into a generational consciousness? Following Desjarlais and Throop (2011: 88) who consider bracketing as shifting our orientations from the taken-for-granted reality, this study aims to answer these questions at the same time that scrutinizes my generational struggle.

(7)

In order to examine the above-mentioned questions a comparative analysis of the daily activities and feelings of my generation back home is required. First, I will introduce the sociological concept of generation as a heuristic device. With it I will explore the meaning of the so-called ‘lost’ generation [generation as a label] as well as the experiences that have shaped our existence since the transition to democracy [generation as social process]. Following that I will argue that two different ‘assemblages’ (Zigon 2014a) can be identified within my generation. One will be brought to life through autoethnography while the latter corresponds to that of my informants, the Indignados. I will then denominate ‘asleep generation assemblage’ and ‘awaken generational assemblage’ respectively. Secondly, I will focus on emotions to link them with individual and collective experiences as well as to think of the anxieties produced by uncertain economic and political times in the experiential lives of my generation (Boellstorff and Lindquist 2004) through the concept of feeling-thinking (Jasper 2014). Especial attention is paid to emotional and cognitive processes of the Indignados movement so as to clarify what prompted the upsurge and what motivates them to act. Thus, I can deepen the analysis of the different ways of being-in-the-world (Zigon 2007) of each ‘generational assemblage’ and how these ways influence the moral breakdown (Zigon 2007). Here it is very important to shed light upon the events and activities that each ‘generational assemblage’ engages with in a daily basis and how these activities influence, in turn, the ways to overcome moral breakdowns. Thirdly, I will end this study by linking generational, social movement and politics, emotions, and morality and ethics studies so as to highlight the urge to develop an anthropological framework of morality and ethics suitable to analyze and criticize the moral crisis of current uncertain times in Western capitalistic countries such as mine. I intend to define morality and ethics from a phenomenological standpoint after analyzing the moral dispositions and ethical practices discerned in each ‘generational assemblage’.

But first things first, I will begin by placing this research in its specific historical-social-political-economic context for two reasons. First of all, in order to understand how this context might affect the opportunities to develop a life worth living at the individual and collective level. Secondly, to situate the development of the Indignados movement and its most direct political expression, Podemos [We Can] within a context of social, political and systemic change in Spain. I will do so by using scholars’ descriptions (from different political leanings) of the context of Spain in order to keep some kind of impartiality. Note that the social context is going to be of paramount importance throughout the whole thesis and will implicitly or explicitly drawn on in my analysis.

(8)

Socio-political-economic context

It is first paramount to understand the socio-political-economic factors that generated a collective outburst of indignation since the early days of the global finance collapse of 2008. In his study of the culture of indignation in Spain, Bryan Cameron (2014: 2-3) enumerates the following causes: “rampant dissatisfaction with the monarchy, parliamentary practices, police abuse, budget cuts and the austerity policies, which in turn endanger physical and mental health as well as the ability to gain employment and affordable house”. On top of that, the collapse of the housing market in 2007 left the Spanish economy in a weak state, with an overall unemployment of up to fifty per cent among young people (until 2015). As a result, millions more have had to survive on low-paid or seasonal jobs. Additionally, John Postill (2014a: 5) argues, “the combination of a political class discredited by a string of corruption cases, an electoral law that perpetuates a two-party system (PP and PSOE)1_{, and the precedent of pro-democracy uprisings in Tunisia and Iceland, set the} scene for a spring of discontent in Spain”.

Meanwhile, the Spanish nation continues to age and is losing its population at a pace that breaks statistics. For instance, La Fuga de Cerebros [Spain’s Brain Drain] is an increasing phenomenon suffered by the Spanish society that points out to the high rate of migration to which young people, largely, is subjected to. As a result, this is now jeopardizing the social reproduction, and upward mobility, between generations. My generation, that is, those who were born in the 1980s, is usually presented by the national media as the first generation of Spaniards ever born in democracy. Nonetheless, we are heavily fragmented between those who left school in search of immediate income largely due to great conditions offered by the housing sector on the 90s, and those who stayed in school and are now considered the best-educated and/or prepared generation in the history of the country. In sum, the future wellbeing of the elderly, the youth and the middle classes, heavily fragmented already, is seriously endangered.

It was this complex and entangled context that prompted me to analyze the Indignados movement in Spain together with a personal motivation brought about its appeal to emotion. “The new citizen movement managed to expose the connivance of politicians and bankers on the streets and the Internet as well as to rethink paradigms of democratic citizenship that center on seemingly contradictory principles: outrage, harmony, disaffection, respect, care, ludic strategies, etc” (Cameron 2014: 3). Inspired in part by Stéphane Hessel’s Indignez-vous! (2010), this book became a manifesto for peaceful resistance to the Indignados, and as a result the national media started using the Indignados label. In addition to mistrust of political parties, the Indignados were also reluctant to believe mass media conglomerates, which they suspect as only safeguarding the

1_{PP: Popular Party, conservative right-wing party.}

(9)

interests of the powerful; so, they also created their own channels of communication on the Internet. At the time, their actions and chants were supported by up to eighty per cent of the population. Nevertheless, half of the population did not believe it could change the social situation in the short run (Castells 2015: 127).

In spite of the worsening crisis and poor living conditions of most Spaniards, and in spite of widening social inequalities and poverty, the Indignados movement appears to have managed to imprint a sense of social change and moral responsibility. Other Western countries have also experienced a similar social transformation but, significantly, Spain is one of the first countries that have seen this transformation materialized in the emergence of a new political party. The apparent connivance of corruption and the political system since the democratic transition might explain this singularity. In a compelling article published at the time I was working on this study proposal journalist Guillermo Medina makes an analysis of how corruption, social reproduction of society and morality are connected (Inter Press Service 2014). He first defines corruption as the abuse of public resources, power and position to provide an unfair advantage to individuals, family and friends, thereby affecting the social, economic and political aspects of a society. “The systemic nature of corruption is coinciding exasperatingly with the impoverishment of most of society and the enrichment of a few of its members, leading to a rejection of current politics and institutions that verges on social rebellion” (Medina 2014). Thus, he is able to link the systemic nature of corruption with the upsurge of Podemos, a political party founded in January 2014. Only four months later, Podemos won five seats (out of fifty-four) on the European Parliament, capturing 7.98 per-cent of the votes. With this victory it became the fourth political force in Spain to the surprise of many political analysts and media outlets. By October 2014 Podemos had already outnumbered PSOE on party members while PP kept its predominance in this aspect.

Given all these factors, and its complex but fundamental connection at the individual and collective level, I will continue to present the theoretical approach to answer the research questions. My specific interdisciplinary approach aims to create a dialogue between two disciplines, i.e. sociology and anthropology, to offer new insights into the collective life grounded in individually lived experiences. This approach is backed up by an anarchist praxis that seems to speak to my experience as an ethnographer at home and as a part of my generation that will be further explained in the upcoming pages.

Interdisciplinary theoretical framework

This research is inspired mainly by the anthropology of morality and ethics, as well as and the anthropology of emotions. Yet it also relies on other sociological themes such as generational studies or social movements and emotions so as to highlight the multifaceted nature of the crises

(10)

distressing the Spanish population at all levels: “employment, finance, housing, governance, politics, survival, corruption” (Cameron 2014: 5). Both axes of this framework belong to fields of study that are not quite developed yet and, therefore, offer great opportunities to continue furthering anthropological knowledge without loosing sight of other disciplines.

By following Jarrett Zigon, one of the academics who have done more work to revitalize the anthropology of morality and ethics, this study must start by discerning three important conditions that will be integral for the analysis. Firstly, Zigon (2007: 134) uses Heidegger’ term being-in-the-world to refer to the ways of living in our familiar world, i.e. to be at home. This being-in-the-world has a dual unreflective character, one that is both openly shared and deeply personal (ibid.: 135). Secondly, Zigon argues that being-in-the-world is involved in dwelling among familiarity and this involvement is rarely rational or intentional. It is a relationship between persons, a being-with (ibid.: 136). He explains that “the ever-changing relationship that is being-in-the-world is enacted through, for example, moods and feelings, unreflective and unreflexive activity – or what [he] would rather call ‘doings’- and language –or what [he] would rather call ‘talking’” (ibid.: 136). Lastly, Zigon recognizes that what Heidegger called the breakdown is what allows the dual character of being-in-the-world. He, therefore, argues that being-in-the-world should be the starting point to study morality and ethics (ibid.: 136).

Simultaneously to the examination of the individual ways of being-in-the-world that can be observed within my generation, this study must take into account the wide-ranging and often contradictory moral claims, acts and dispositions among individuals (Zigon 2014a: 17) and generations, while highlights the importance of morality and ethics as social factors in shaping politics (Zigon 2014b: 746) and policies, in my opinion. With that purpose the theoretical framework combines Zigon’s theory of local morality and ethics with the assemblage framework and the critical hermeneutics approach.

In the first chapter, I will analyze the concept of generation as both a label and a social process. Through an exploration and contrast of the experiential realities, the media coverage, and the power struggle embedded in the identification and description of the ‘lost’ generation, I will debunk the idea of its existence. Then, I will switch to examine generations as social processes in the context of the aftermath of the 2008 crisis and the Indignados upsurge. My goal is to clarify the generational historical-social location within the system as well as to present some of the factors that divide my generation such as collective memory or the generational experience. The sociological concept is introduced in this study, and later on merged with the anthropology of morality and ethics, as a heuristic device so as to demarcate two different

(11)

‘generational assemblages’ within my generation: the ‘asleep generational assemblage’ and the ‘awaken generational assemblage’.

In the second chapter, I will try to comprehend how the feeling-thinking processes of each ‘generational assemblage’ influence the ways of being-in-the-world as well as what these processes point at. This way I hope to demonstrate the great weight of the emotional understanding on the ways of being-in-the-world -in what we think, what we talk, what we do- of my generation. Taking the outburst of social indignation as starting point, I will explore and contrast two different moral breakdowns (Zigon 2007) [or ‘moral shocks’ (Jasper 2011)], the different ways to overcome the moral breakdown, and the ‘moral batteries’ (Jasper 2011) that have driven each ‘generational assemblage’. I will conclude that indignation-apathy is to the ‘asleep generation assemblage’ what indignation-hope is to the ‘awaken generational assemblage’.

Lastly, in the third chapter, I will do an in-depth study of morality and ethics and its relation to the moral dispositions and ethical practices found in the ways of being-in-the-world and dwelling of each ‘generational assemblage’. By juxtaposing the ‘asleep generational assemblage’ with the ‘awaken generational assemblage’ and the ways of being-in-the-world, I intend to discover in which level of the spectrum of consciousness can these assemblages be found. Thus, I will be able to attribute a generational awareness to the ‘asleep generational assemblage’ and a generational consciousness to the ‘awaken generational assemblage’. Only then can I define morality and ethics from a phenomenological point of view offered by closely observing my informants as well as how people may bracket, if desired, a generational awareness into a generational consciousness.

Now, I will explain and justify the methodological approach and the data gathering techniques chosen to validate this framework and I will also reflect upon some crucial ethical issues related to it.

Methodological approach

This research is carried out through two main approaches: through the exploration of lives as lived taken from phenomenological branches, and through the contribution of autoethnography taken from anarchist praxis (DeLeon 2010). Therefore, I do not look for statistical, but qualitative representativeness. It is precisely my condition as a member of the ‘best-educated generation of Spaniards born in democracy’ that makes this research feasible. As such, I did not encounter any problem regarding language in the field, but it did pose some problems related to translation during the writing process. Hiring the services of an English speaking professional editor solved this problem.

(12)

My position in the field can be defined as ‘indigenous ethnographer’, which James Clifford (1986: 9) describes as “insiders studying their own culture”. As a person who grew up in Oviedo, moved to Madrid to study journalism, and faced the consequences of the crisis right after finishing her studies, I believe that my account can offer new angles of vision and depths of understandings. Leaving aside old anthropological attempts to understand the other, Katz and Csordas argue (2003: 280), “it is more frequent now for Western ethnographers to work in their home societies to uncover less attractive stories than that put out by the media and governmental agents”. What is more, my place in the field was reinforced by the distant observer position I had adopted after four years of living, working and studying in The Netherlands. These ethnographers are defined by Abu-Lughod (1991: 137) as ‘halfies’ whose “national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education or parentage”. This term resembles DeLeon’s ‘middle ground’ (2010: 405) position, which he uses to describe experiences, social practices, ideologies and beliefs of those caught in the middle of two worlds, or the ‘in-between’ that exists in lived social realities and the institutions that govern us.

This ‘in-between’ position is from where I intend to develop a comparative research of the ways of being-in-the-world of my generation together with the concomitant emotional understandings of each ‘generational assemblage’. The goal is to contrast my ways of being-in-the-world with those of my informants and to align my emotional understanding with theirs to see where it takes me. In regard to the comparative study of emotions, although it is impossible to get a total knowledge of one’s own and another’s emotional understanding, an approximate knowledge can be acquired through introspection and reflection on one’s behavior and observing the behavior of others along with their accounts of their feelings (Heller 1979: 7). The issue at stake, therefore, is the translation of emotions and not truth (Leavitt 1996: 532):

The translation of emotions can seek to convey something of the feeling-tones as well as the meanings of emotions, using the shared affective system of ethnographer and readers as raw material. This means that ethnographers of affect must work on their own feelings, modifying them to model the emotional experiences of people of another society [my own in this case], and must recast this experience in language that can have a parallel effect on others in their home societies (ibid.: 530).

Therefore, after an exploration of my own personal and cultural assumptions about self and emotion both as a Spanish citizen as well as ethnographer, and of the special characteristics of the anthropologist’s social relationships both in the field and at home (Lutz and White 1986:

(13)

430), this study aims to prove not only the methodological relevance of the ethnographer’s emotional response to fieldwork but also the importance of one’s emotional understanding while studying one’s society. While Lutz and White (1986: 431) argue that by introducing emotion “into our picture of people’s daily life in other societies, we might further humanize these others for the Western audience”, I argue that by introducing emotion into anthropological studies at home might help Western audiences to better understand the complexity and entanglement of cultural and social forms.

A phenomenological approach is necessary given the wide range of issues touched upon by this study, from the political to the psychological, in order to portray such social complexity. Its value is already recognized not only in sociology but also in anthropology (Katz and Csordas 2003; Desjarlais and Throop 2011). Hence, I need to attend to the palpable force of the political, the cultural, the narrative, and the psychological in the experiential lives of my informants so as to appreciate the complicated constructions and spectrum of consciousness in careful and informed ways. It is precisely a careful attention to descriptive and analytic detail to capture the broader historical, social, economic and political processes that hinge on young people lives nowadays (Desjarlais and Throop 2011: 88) that makes this study possible. “Indeed, a central goal of phenomenological description is to destabilize those unexamined assumptions that organize our prepreflective engagements with reality” (ibid.: 88). By comparing my autoethnography with the experiential lives of my informants I intend to better understand myself through understanding others, which has been one of the main goals of anthropology since its inception.

It is time now to present the techniques chosen for data gathering, and to take the opportunity to make a call to the reader in regard to the way of writing, as this is not a customary academic research. It is rather an example of the tendency to dwell reflexively on the self. As such, this thesis heavily relies on autonoetic or episodic memory, that is, the ability to recall personal experiences -from past times before and after my academic anthropological training- that is associated with introspection, reflexivity and anticipation (Collins and Gallinat 2010: 11). In order to avoid the problem of bias and subjectivity that this technique might entail, I plan to give the reader detailed and reflexive representations of my personal experience that can help them to critically engage the subjective aspects (Collins and Gallinat 2010).

Whether taken from my autoethnography or from the lives of my informants, data will be presented in excerpts of remembered narratives aiming to create contrasting tales of struggle imbued with individual feelings, live experiences and the external socio-political-economic conditions. Concretely, by relying on a reflexive and truthfully aware autoethnographical narrative based on how I remember my way of being-in-the-world prior to and after the crisis, I hope to

(14)

offer cogent insights into an individual experience within the whole generation to throw light on the uncertainty of our common present and future lives as well as the influence of emotional understandings upon certain individuals. This will help me therapeutically “to explore my past through the ancient way of telling, testifying, and developing knowledge through narrative inquiry” (DeLeon 2010: 398) whereas the narratives of my informants will allow me to contrast our ways of being-in-the-world, moral breakdowns, and feeling-thinking processes.

Importantly, my informant’s narratives are taken mainly from alternative media outlets on the Internet, which contrast the official story spread through mass media institutions and apparatuses of governmental force. “Just like memories, narratives are culturally and contextually bound… [N]arratives are reactions not only to social contexts but simultaneously serve to shape these contexts. They do so not least because they are also grounded in the experiences of the narrator” (Collins and Gallinat 2010: 14). Presenting my informant’s alternative narratives is a conscious decision adopted to highlight the heavy weight of these apparatuses on the configuration of knowledge and ideologies of the whole population as well as to argue that mass media is helping to widen the breach among generations and the society itself. This way, as a journalist who has never worked as such, I also hope to expose the decay of journalism or, better said, today’s business of communications.

I will employ narrative analysis to develop an understanding of the meanings that those from my generation give to their lives, feelings, beliefs, actions, and struggles within the narrow context of the economic crisis as well as the wider context of the transition to democracy (Cortazzi 2001: 388). Although narrative analysis does not yield absolute truth, it demonstrates that multiple realities exit and that knowledge must be built from lived experiences of ordinary people, and not from the generalizations made by experts, governmental institutions and the media (Ochs and Capps 1996: 23).

Finally, I find it paramount to address some of the ethical matters inherently related to the methodological choices of this research. First of all, using autoethnography is a conscious strategy aimed to critically reflect upon my life and feelings as well as to infer in which ways of being-in-the-world of both ‘generational assemblages’ can morality and ethics be found. I do not intend to theoretically indoctrinate anyone, nor do I want to fall into any kind of naïve objectivism. My only purpose is to offer an anecdotal account of my own process of self-reflection as a human being [as a part of my generation and as Spanish citizen] while hoping to be able to help others through the telling of my experience. Stories and tales help us to empathize with unknown people or worlds, in my opinion. Thus, my tale may provide others with an alternative structure to think of their own ways of being-in-the-world, feelings, and even

(15)

ideologies that can encourage them to critically reflect upon their lives consequently. Furthermore, exercises of narrative inquiry and self-criticism such as this one should be encouraged, if not made compulsory, by the educational system and governmental forces in order to develop a critical and moral thinking. Secondly, whereas my family and friends have all my respect and love, I believe it is time to expose some of the dangers of taking-for-granted the reality of our familiar world and how exposed we are to influence by labels, ideologies or ways of looking at the world that might not correspond with those we render ethical. Lastly, I find my experience to be relevant for this research because I have always been an extreme self-conscious and emotional person. As such, my social circles have always defined me as an irrational being, and for them my problems were only consequences of my way of being-in-the-world, i.e. individual problems. But the anthropological discipline has given me strength and knowledge to see my life from a different perspective, a vantage point that differs from theirs.

In the next section, I will argue for the critical role of anthropology in current times and, particularly, for the need to further develop the anthropology of morality and ethics.

Role of anthropology

Awakened by my own experience, I truly believe this research might contribute to several discussions within the field of anthropology, sociology and, more generally, social sciences. The wide range of issues treated on this study - from youth to social change, from emotions to ideologies, from social movements to politics, from corruption to democracy - determines the urge to render attention to social sciences to help not only academics but also ordinary people comprehend our current challenges within the context of a global capitalistic political economy and democratic system. “[A]nthropologists at home have an important role to play in making the doing and writing of ethnographic research more transparent, honest and illuminating about the nature of humanity” (Collins and Gallinat 2010: 40). If anthropology is well known for its capacious and ever-expanding framework for understanding human nature (Rapp and Ginsburg 2010), the current global crisis and rapidly changing times urge anthropologists on to be creative and to self-consciously engage with other social disciplines not to only to understand this crisis and its consequences for society at the individual and collective level but to deconstruct expert generalizations and stereotypes that many people take for granted nowadays, i.e. the moral superiority of the white man. This is especially pertinent, as some countries like Spain want to eliminate philosophy, sociology or anthropology from the educational system, for instance, which jeopardizes the development of a critical thinking prompted by these disciplines that is required to understand human nature.

(16)

Consequently, this research engages in the discussion of the reflexive/literary turn movement of late sixties eighties (Collins and Gallinat 2010: 11). It offers renewed views about the necessity not so much of how anthropological writings can affect their subject of study but, contrarily, on how much anthropologists could prompt a reflexive thinking on the readers of their writings. For that reason, anthropological knowledge should abandon the confines of academia and be spread amongst ordinary people to help them make sense of their lives from a different perspective. “Like all literature, the ethnography of emotion is concerned with providing a sense of possible ways of feeling, accessible yet distinct from those to which the reader is accustomed” (Leavitt 1996: 531). Hence, this research makes use of literary modes of writing and genres of critique while engaging in two main trends that have emerged over the past thirty years, that is narrative autoethnography and the shift toward ethnographers studying their own people or places. This research is therefore intended to popularize anthropological writing.

Likewise, I hope this research helps shedding some light upon the importance of emotions in some people's lives and endeavors, on matters such as social justice and equality, and how these are related to politics and economy at a local, national and global scale. In other words, it requires a careful and critical attention on how the ways of the political, economic and cultural transformations are changing the realm of the social. For that reason, it also engages with the affective turn of the nineties as it renders essential to attend to the affect to theorize the social. The current social, political and economic situation in my home country, which I am totally convinced could be applicable to some extent to other Western countries and capitalistic democratic systems, requires a great dose of social critique, a new creative way of looking at it, so as to offer new perspectives to help change the current course of history.

Last but not least, I intend to demonstrate the potential of anthropology of morality and ethics by elaborating a comparative research (Faubion 2013) to defend my position against Zigon. An ‘existential anthropology’ in which ethnographic and phenomenological methods attuned toward a radical empiricism has the potential, and obligation, to pay heed to everyday experiences, contingencies, dilemmas, constraints, potentialities, uncertainties and the struggle of being that figure into what it means to be human and what, in turn, weights so heavily on people’s lives, especially in times of uncertainty that complicate so much the social and political realities surrounding us (Zigon 2007; Throop and Desjarlais 2011: 93). Nowadays, the struggle of being in Western societies is inherently shaped by the economic, financial and political forces that tend to favor the capital above the people. Therefore, developing anthropology of morality and ethics might help the discipline become the watchdog of future generations and political powers, especially given that journalism, or today’s business of communication, has sadly succumbed to

(17)

these powerful forces. Whereas Zigon (2014a: 17) believes that injustices found during fieldwork should not be revealed I consider it of major importance since we are heading towards critical times as a global community, with only a few truly aware of what it is at stake. Injustices must be revealed especially if they are related to the political and economic system given their mutually interdependence in today’s world.

(18)

1. My generation back home, in Oviedo (Asturias-Spain)

Are we really ‘lost’?

“We are identified with the ‘lost’ generation but we are not really lost”, Daniel Ripa plainly answered me during our first encounter when I explained him that I was doing an anthropological study about the so-called ‘lost’ generation. Daniel is one of my main informants as forefather of the Indignados movement in Asturias and current Secretary General of Podemos Asturies. With a friendly smile and showing great understanding towards my motivation to carry out this research he automatically denied his belonging to the ‘lost’ generation as well as the existence of such generation. This made me wonder about the reasons that led me to identify myself with it.

In order to understand why I felt lost I need to tell a little bit of my background and my life experience. I was born Oviedo, the capital city of the Principality of Asturias, northern Spain. Asturias has slightly more than one million inhabitants; its economy is mainly based on agriculture, stockbreeding, fishing and the coat mining industry2_{. A low rate of fertility has} progressively led the region to become one of the oldest in Europe. Consequently, young people have little possibilities to develop a future at home and many are forced to migrate. It was during my first visit to Madrid at the age of eleven when I told my father what I wanted to study and where. I left home at the age of eighteen to study journalism in Madrid. Since then I have gone back to Oviedo frequently but I have never got to discover it to its fullest. One of the things that surprised me the most during the course of fieldwork was to discover the amount of cultural activities that are taking place in my hometown at the moment. What I remembered from my childhood is a high-class city where young people only go out for shopping, drinks or the cinema. Luckily, this research gave me the opportunity to explore a new side of Oviedo that I had never experienced before.

Although my parents are not originally from Oviedo, they still live there. Both are now retired. My mother, a civil servant, was a pharmacist in the old hospital of Asturias. My father worked many years for a big real-state agency but ended up his professional life as self-employed on his own agency. The possibility of working with him was always on the table but the building industry had no appeal to me due to the amount of crisis I had seen him overcoming. They both come from humble families and only my father had the opportunity to study but he wasted it. So their whole lives they worked really hard their whole lives to give me what they used to say it was the “best possible education” to the extent that we could never go on holidays together due to a

2_{Retrieved from Wikipedia}_{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asturias}_{and my own ‘indigenous ethnographer’}

(19)

lack of time or money. I attended a private school on the outskirts of Oviedo where I had the opportunity to travel to UK to learn English, for instance. I was not a brilliant kid but I always felt the obligation to make my parents proud with my grades. Since I am an only child and most of my friends at that time did not live in Oviedo, I used to spend a lot of hours alone studying, doing homework and getting ready for exams. Nonetheless, I did not develop a critical thinking because I was never encouraged to question and dispute what I was being taught.

Consequently I realized I was not prepared to face the real world when I finished university. I had done everything I was asked to –“work hard, go to the university, learn English, and you will get your dreamed job”- but I finished my bachelor right after the 2008 financial and economic crisis hit hard Spain. In addition, the communication sector was going through its own crisis due to the decline of newspaper and the rise of digital ones. Instead of getting ready to make my dream of becoming a writer true, I spent my adolescence years caring about issues such as body weight, clothes or boys. Thus, the 2008 crisis led me to wander aimlessly and hopeless from Madrid to Oviedo. My generation was promised a dignified future if we followed all the steps marked by the normative social conventions. But, as a matter of fact, my future started to seem very dark in the aftermath of the crisis. We were called the ‘lost’ generation.

This chapter seeks to introduce the sociological concept of generations in anthropological studies as an analytical category and heuristic device. First, I will try to demonstrate the importance of the concept as a label within the power struggle and later on I will consider the concept only as referring to a social process. Then, I can explain the uprising of the Indignados movement in Asturias and the effect it has had upon my generation and myself. To finalize the chapter, with the help of the concept of ‘assemblage’ taken from anthropological studies of morality and ethics, I will argue the existence of two different ‘generational assemblages’ that could be described as an ‘asleep generational assemblage’ and an ‘awaken generational assemblage’ in order to present some generational differences that would be essential to understand and answer research questions in the next sections of this study.

From the ‘lost’ generation to the ‘precarious’ generation

Although confusing and problematic, the study of sociological phenomenon of generations still needs to be critically tackled in academia to understand “the accelerated pace of social change” (Mannheim 1952: 287). Karl Mannheim, one of the most influential scholars of generation studies, urges social scientists not to merely provide an overview of past contributions to the problem of generations but to attempt to give a critical evaluation of the present discussion to help in the analysis of the problem (ibid.: 276).

(20)

My attempt is to follow Mannheim who considers “that members of a generation are held together by the experience of historical events from the same or similar vantange-point” (Mannheim 1997, cited in Edmunds & Turner 2005: 560). His tripartite definition of generation is embedded in a theory of social change and his broader interest in the sociology of knowledge. First of all, generations share a social and historical location within the social structure. “To share a generational location…, individuals must be born within the same historical and cultural context and to be exposed to experiences that occur during their formative adult years” (Pilcher 1994: 490). Added to this, Mannheim (1952: 291) goes on to say that each location shares possible modes of thought, experience, feeling and behavior [ways of ‘being-in-the-world’] and leaves others out, what Aboim and Vasconcelos (2014: 168) refer to as ‘mental order’ or worldview. Secondly, Pilcher (1994: 490) clarifies, this inactive and unconscious location is opposed “to a ‘generation as actuality’, whereby members have a ‘concrete bond’ through their exposure to and participation in” the social and intellectual currents of their society and time. And lastly, a generation as actuality might be divided in differing and opposing ‘generation units’ whose response to the particular location is also different and opposed (ibid.: 490). “They express their particular location through articulated structures of knowledge and explicit consciousness” (Aboim and Vasconcelos 2014: 168).

In order to solve some problems rooted in Mannheim’s understanding of generations, some of his critics propose to build on from his tripartite conceptualization to a broader global, social, cultural and psychological understanding of generations (Pilcher 1994; Edmunds and Turner 2004; Aboim and Vasconcelos 2014). The solution offered by Aboim and Vasconcelos (2014: 175) is to take a discursive approach. They propose to analyze generations as labels and narratives because “[i]ndividuals are not only molded by their historical locations - which… produce, through embodiment, a generational habitus - they also have to deal with labels designed to describe their generational identity. These narratives would thus endow people with some sort of collective cultural subjectivity”. In sum, generations are a cultural construct and/or a system of meaning because of its discursive reality designed to characterize specific historical locations (ibid.: 176-177).

First and foremost, my attempt is to explore the discursive reality of the ‘lost’ generation. The report Future without lost generation: a review of the situation of young people in Spain (2011) points out that youth constitute a blurred entity with undefined needs and preferences. Indeed, the ‘lost’ generation is made up of an internally divided group of people that constitutes the first

(21)

generation born in democracy from 1980s to 1990s3_{. Broadly speaking, the Spanish youth live} with increasingly precarious jobs; have troubles to enter the labor market or suffer unemployment; the Spanish youth unemployment rate doubles the European average (Demographic and Labor Market Observatory: the Lost Generation 2013). It is worth noting that the youth unemployment rate (from 18 to 24) has peaked up to 50% since the beginning of the crisis. Particularly in Asturias, the rate was 51,80% at the end of 2014. Furthermore, the age of financial independence is going up and many young people return to live with their families. An increased feeling of fear, anxiety and apathy is characteristic to all of them as well as a belated achievement of markers of ‘young adulthood’ (Jeffrey Arnett 2000) such as a first job, house or marriage (The transition from youth to adulthood: economic crisis and late emancipation 2012).

It should be noted that the funding parties of the three reports above-mentioned are the European Social Fund, the Spanish Government, a Consulting and People Management Private Firm, or a Banking Foundation respectively. As a means to grasp the meaning of the ‘lost’ generation and its symbolic reality, Aboim and Vasconcelos (2014: 176-179) recommend to take into account not only the recipients of the label but also its multiple producers, which might vary from political to economic institutions, from academia to the media to the same recipients, since the discursive formation of a generation is inherently related to the institutions, their apparatus of knowledge and their ways of establishing orders and truth. In this case, the description of the ‘lost’ generation aims to portray a homogenized identity regardless of the varying and even contradictory statements made within my generation. This proves that the label ‘lost’ generation is a cultural construct created and imposed by governmental and non-governmental institutions.

The producers of the label defined my generation as ‘lost’ while the economic disruption provoked by the crisis came to establish the ‘lost’ generation as part of a dominant discourse in the national media and collective imaginary. In 2012 the International Labour Organisation (ILO) predicted not only a ‘lost’ generation in Spain but also a generation without hope derived from the financial and economic crisis. The meaning of the adjective ‘lost’ alludes to problems young people have entering the labor market or lacking resources to find a solution to the situations they are immersed in. It also helps to demarcate my generation from others in relation to the employment possibilities of current times. In an article published in a national newspaper of left tendency, the director of the ILO notes: "We are facing a crisis that can lead to a lost or seriously marked generation. We know that if you have not had a good start in the labor market or if it has

3_{Although I do not render the age-cohort important to contextualize a generation, I am going to focus on this one}

by the obvious reason that I belong to it as well as to highlight the paradoxical contradiction that congeals in the predicament of the ‘lost’ generation, especially for the educated ones, given the troubles experienced in reaching what Jeffrey Arnett (2006) calls ‘young adulthood’.

(22)

taken a long time before getting your first job that this will influence the type of work and income for the rest of your life" (Efe Agency 2012). Thus, it seems that the meaning of ‘lost’ attempts to situate my generational location within the social structure. Additionally, by cataloging my generation as ‘lost’, apathetic or hopeless, the institutions avoid taking responsibility of their management of our society and my generation. Instead of blaming themselves, they contrive to some of us to blame ourselves to paralyze our actions and opinions.

Indeed, my self-identification to the ‘lost’ generation occurred right after finishing my studies of journalism in the aftermath of the crisis. The possibilities to find a job in my field were particularly scarce and only the best ones or those with personal networks would achieve it. I do not remember holding any talk with my family or friends about the situation at that time, only to feel the pressure of having to find a job without knowing how or what to do. In a way, acknowledging the existence of the ‘lost’ generation lessened my feelings of unworthiness, loneliness and guilt. Aboim and Vasconcelos (2014: 176) recognize that regardless of sharing or not mental and practical dispositions, individuals in a given historical time-space “must always position themselves in face of the narratives that have become dominant to describe that generation location”.

On the contrary, most of my informants refused at that time and still do today to be identified by the ‘lost’ label. They seek to distance themselves from the dominant discourse through a historical, political and economical narrative that contextualize my generational location from a broader perspective than the official one put forward by governmental and non-governmental institutions. What is more, by publishing articles in alternative media outlets or the Internet mostly but also some in mass media, people like Daniel Ripa are able to question the existence of the ‘lost’ generation and establish his counter narrative against the dominant discourse about our generational historical location:

“I belong to a generation that is now between 20 and 30. We grew up in the age of the democratic consensus maturity and the boom of the brick. We were children of workers who attended the University massively (the best educated generation they said), grew up with the Internet and the possibilities it offered, that had a lot of free time and some money to spend in shops and on leisure […]. We had not been born yet when the Constitution was approved nor had we consciously lived the Transition. A Transition that we were told about placing it on a pedalstall. We didn’t live it but we received an excellent practical lesson to understand how our democracy works. We experienced in our own flesh that it does not matter what program we voted or what our needs and collective goals were because it is all subjected to the interests of the IMF, Brussels, the World Bank, private

(23)

bankers, la prima de un tal riesgo? [risk premium is the translation]… regardless that the interests of that 1% is frontally attacking the other 99%. Political parties of bipartisanship - PSOE and PP with the occasional help of right-wing nationalists- are responsible for this situation remainig like this in exchange of small bribes and even if it meant dismantling the “Welfare State” or urgently reforming a Constitution that until now had been considered utterly sacred” – (Daniel Ripa 2014).

In the biggest newspaper of the region Daniel refuses to embody the subjectivation of the ‘lost’ generation as well as the narrative of the major historical event that my generation has been gone through: the Spanish transition to democracy. Although unconsciously due to our early age, he expresses that the official narrative taught in schools used to present the benefits of the transition but not its drawbacks – there was silence in post-Franco Spain. He refers to this when he alludes to being told a story placing it on a pedestal. This, in turn, provoked that many of my generational peers were not able to develop a critical and reflexive thinking able to question what it was taught. He describes my generation as conformist, consumerist, educated, wealthy and technological. Thus, he illustrates the activities of my generation within that historical location typical of Western modern societies, points out to the age-cohort of my generation and alludes to the middle class position of the majority. He is clearly framing the generational experience as well as an alternative collective memory into a myriad of historical, political, economical and even social aspects that determine our ways of being-in-the-world and our mental and practical disposition towards the way we live.

The power struggle associated to the classification of my generation between governmental and non-governmental institutions, i.e. powerful elites, and the recipients of the label became undeniable during the first weeks in the field. I was having breakfast with my parents when I saw on TV a commercial of Banco Santander in which the discourse of the ‘lost’ generation was replaced by the ‘found’ generation to my surprise and exasperation. The commercial said: “We are a special generation, but not just because we are the most educated generation or because we speak more languages than our parents but because we have the power of youth, the power of wanting to do, to learn, to grow, to fight, to make ourselves heard. Let’s seize the opportunity and demonstrate what we are capable of. They say we’re the Lost Generation. Let’s show with our ideas that we are the Found Generation”. I screamed to the TV full of rage and my parents urged me to calm down. I had spent the time between finishing my bachelor and carrying out this research project away from the Spanish TV and I could not understand why we were being call the ‘found’ generation if nothing had changed. That same morning the first pages of the largest newspapers of Spain were replaced by the same advertisement of Banco Santander. This only

(24)

increased my frustration until I read through Daniel’s Facebook page a blog post in relation to the commercial:

“Yesterday the press dresses as the Banco Santander, which is like Superman’s gesture of changing his clothes leaving his disguise of Clark Kent. […] And, where it might offend the fact of how little the powers and control elements are hidden, a phrase was added as an advertising slogan: Found Generation. With this, the thinking minds that devised and adopted the slogan in question, accept the stigma of the "lost generation". And they brag about the fact of having found it. But my generation is not lost, gentlemen advertisers from large banks. My generation is perfectly located: in London, in Berlin, in Washington, in Minessotta, in Melbourne, in Oslo, in Munich, in Moscow, in Santiago, Chile, in Sofia, in Warsaw, in Freiburg, in Connecticut, in Bristol, in Rabat, in Beijing, in Prague. That someone has stopped looking where you are, that for a moment, or two decades, someone has ceased to pay you attention and lost interest in you and your whereabouts, does not mean that the other party is lost. To call us Lost Generation, besides the connotation of the adjective (wasted, spoiled), is placing the blame upon that generation and not on who lost sight of them. Blaming those who were never lost for someone else’s mistake” – (Sofía Castañón 2015).

The author of this poetic reflection is also involved in Podemos Asturies but I never got to meet her. She draws attention to the fact that the ‘found’ label is clearly a marketing strategy constructed by the institutional apparatus of knowledge so as to sell us the discourse of economic recovery and the ‘official’ improvement of job prospects in 2014. It is striking to see the powerful part played by the media in shaping the collective memory of my generation because as Edmunds and Turner (2005: 566) state this is not only based on own experiences, as Mannheim thought. She goes on to deny the existence of the ‘lost’ generation and points to La Fuga de Cerebros as a consequence of the crisis and job precariousness. She ends by subtlety blaming the whole social scheme of powers of society – political, economical, media.

In a way, my informants’ mental order helped me to no longer identify myself with the ‘lost’ generation. Thanks to them I was able to contextualize my personal situation within the Spanish’ structure. Instead, I started to feel part of what Daniel describes as the precarious generation. That same day, while researching on the ‘lost’ generation, I arrived at a Youtube clip in which Daniel talks about the precarious generation on national television in Telecinco:

“I belong to the precarious generation. We were given a speech where we were told that we had to exert ourselves a little bit with scholarships, with bad jobs, with a little [bit,

(25)

emphasis added by author] of job insecurity; that precariousness would give us a stable job in the future, just as our parents had. This is a sham. I think that most of us know by now that there is no escape from precariousness. Precariousness is our lives. They are robbing our lives. […]. They are condemning us to misery, and not only to young people, that is the worst part: the labor reform has extended precariousness to millions of people around the country. People over 40 are going to be precarious as well. This is the future they are building for us in this country […]. Precariousness did not start two years ago, it has been passing from generation to generation throughout the last 10 or 20 years. During two decades PP and PSOE have agreed on favouring the 1% of the population […]. When we talk about precariousness the main point is that it is not only labor but vital precariousness, that is, the possibility of making or having life plans […]” – (Daniel Ripa 2013)

Daniel refuses to embody the ‘lost’ label for himself as well as for his generation. He is able to create a counter narrative so as to echo a renewed collective memory that better relates to our historical location within the social structure. This excerpt refers to past, present and future conditions of the reality of my generation from the perspective of precariousness provoked by the institutions since the Spanish transition to democracy. I am convinced that this is a generational experience that can objectively rather than symbolically define our generation location as well as the whole Spanish society. Contrarily to me, Daniel is an obvious example of an agent of his own time (Edmunds and Turner 2005).

Now that it has been demonstrated the ‘lost’ generation label is a cultural construct and a symbolic system of meaning intended to hold us responsible of our own location and experiences, I will focus on the understanding of generations purely as social relations or processes (Mannheim 1952; Pilcher 1994; Edmunds and Turner 2005). I now move on to describe some of my informants and analyze the uprising of the Indignados movement in Oviedo and the effects it has had upon my generation.

The precarious generation as a location and as an actuality

In the upcoming pages I intend to focus the analysis of this research to a few informants with whom I share location but not a mental order so as to further explore the concept of generations as social processes in the context of social upheaval. Departing from the precarious location shared by my generation I will explore the different responses to this location.

Once in Oviedo, I gradually met a large number of Indignados who are involved in the formation of Podemos Asturies. Although this is not a study about political activists, I had to become one in order to get their trust and rapport. I turn now to present Daniel Ripa as one of

(26)

the founding fathers of the movement and political party, some of his life story and background. Daniel arrived in Asturias at the age of eighteen to study Psychology and Labour Sciences. Originally from Zaragoza, he is a thirty-three years old expert in Social Inclusion Politics. Nonetheless, at the time of fieldwork he was unemployed, living on his savings and trying to finish his PhD4_{. He was one of the precursors of the Indignados movement in Asturias and he did} not hesitate when he decided to leave Switzerland in 2014 and his internship at United Nations to go back to Oviedo to help in the formation of Podemos Asturias. He has been a political activist from a young age but it was not until their engrossment with the Indignados and Podemos that he became public figure and a leader, although he continuously rejects this position.

At the same time Daniel is involved with several alternative media outlets at a regional and national level that allows him to earn some money to survive and to share his experience and worldviews. Given Daniel’s busy schedule, he usually called me at the end of the day to grab a beer and to disconnect from political issues. Unfortunately to him but not to me, we could never totally disconnect. During one of our first encounters he told me that he had written some articles about the upsurge of the Indignados in a national newspaper, Diagonal, that is not supported by economic powers but by subscribers. I had never read such newspaper and did not hesitate in doing so after discovering his journalistic facet:

“Organized through various social networks, people who in many cases had not met until then, outraged, gathered in the first assembly of the movement. People defined as "unemployed, evicted, autonomous, workers, housewives, students and retired workers, united against the abuse that the political class has tolerated and that is hindering even more the overcoming of this crisis." The fight against unemployment, corruption, growing economic impoverishment of society, loss of social rights and job insecurity are reasons to protest. Compared to… traditional social movements, and mimicking the recent riots in the Arab world, its [social movement] gestation (state and local) and early stages of development have taken place over the Internet. Democracia Real is in line with previous citizen initiatives like No Les Votes [Don’t Vote Them], [State of Unrest], Juventud Sin Futuro [Youth Without Future] or [Entropy Citizen]. Democracia Real Asturias, against voter apathy, and advocating full autonomy of political parties and trade unions, aims to bring the public voice to the center of political debate. "We have a political class that we don’t deserve" and "we do not want to be one more item data in their profits" are some of their collective complaints […]” – (Daniel Ripa 2011).

4_{As I was finalizing my thesis (autumn 2016), Daniel Ripa had already finished his PhD thesis and received the}

major academic grade: cum-laude. Indeed, he was sued by a conservative union-Manos Limpias (Clean Hands)- for receiving an allowance for his doctoral thesis. This charge was finally dropped but is evidence of a mediatized campaign of discredit towards some of Podemos heads.

(27)

In this passage Daniel describes with certain partiality the heterogeneity of the Indignados, from students to retired workers, and the wide range of issues to protest, which are fundamentally related to the political and economic system as some of the final complains that Daniel collects on his article demonstrates. He relates the upsurge of the Indignados with national citizen initiatives as well as with international ones such as the Arab Spring. Moreover, he explains that the Indignados development is made possible thanks to the Internet. As a matter of fact it is thanks to social networks that individuals get together, unite their voices and try to be heard by the rest of the society. What follows now is Daniel’s personal account of the generational experience of the Indignados in Asturias at the moment of taking the square:

“I have just got back from Gijón, where after many hesitations, the post 15-M Assembly decides to stay in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento [City Hall Square]. The news has spread and Uviéu [Oviedo] does not want to be less. 200 people participate in the Assembly and here there is less debate. It is agreed that the Plaza de la Escandalera [Escandalera Square] must be taken. To take turns and stay there until we can. We do not know if we're going to get evicted or if there will be enough people. But come on. The square is ours. We started a new assembly at 1 am. There is debate, proposals, collective illusion. Do we want to change society? The system? Can we? Are we not in a dynamic consumption from birth that leaves us little room for maneuver? After some time of joint reflection, we focus. We talk about proposals. How to recover the square for the city. What can we do there these days? We think of different actions to take […]. We plan a round table about the causes and consequences of the crisis: urban speculation in Oviedo and Asturias (Villa Magdalena, Calatrava, …) as well as racism and xenophobia that try to blame immigrants for the crisis […]. The square must be an open space for each person that can contribute something interesting […]” – (Daniel Ripa 2011).

This passage is centered around the actions of the Indignados in relation to urban space and the uncertainty of the first moments of the occupation. In Oviedo, the Plaza de la Escandalera, which is situated nearby the building of the regional parliament, is the space opened up by the Indignados, what Manuel Castells (2015) calls ‘a new form of space’ both physical and imaginative. This space allowed them to find a new way of being-in-the-world. Its gave them the opportunity to meet, to share experiences, memories and knowledge as well as to create new habits of assemblies, reflection and discussion, breaking thus the social individualistic inertia imprinted in our modern society, especially in Spain. Additionally, it was also a space for joint critical thinking and reflection about the relation between the corrupted political system with the crisis as well as