2026 Theses Doctoral

Artivist Geographies for Feminist Worlds. A Cultural Analysis of Social Justice in Contemporary Spain (2010s-2020s)

Blanco Martinez, Miguel Angel

The present dissertation argues that the cultural production of contemporary social justice movements in Spain configures artivist geographies that reimagine politics from feminist standpoints. It conceptualizes contemporary Spain as a liminal South across the Global North and Global South: a Southern European nation-state whose internal and external colonialities continue to be actualized through neoliberalism. Across three chapters devoted to 15M, the International Women's Strike, contemporary Andalusian feminism, and #RegularizaciónYa, it examines the transformations that have shaped Spain's most recent cycle of social justice mobilizations.

Chapter 1 traces the transition from the anti-austerity mobilizations of 15M to the transnational feminist politics of the International Women's Strike. By bringing 15M into dialogue with the International Women’s Strike, the chapter develops Feminisms for the 99% as a conceptual framework for redefining democratic participation through intersectional feminist politics against neoliberalism. This paradigm provides the feminist coordinates that orient the dissertation.

Chapter 2 examines the development of contemporary Andalusian feminism in dialogue with third-wave Andalucism and decolonial Andalusian thought. Centering on the conceptual figure of the Iberian South, the chapter reconceptualizes Andalusia as a critical borderland whose internal coloniality provincializes Europe from Southern Iberian perspectives. In doing so, it demonstrates how Andalusian feminism vernacularizes Feminisms for the 99% through its own political agendas and cultural imaginaries.

Chapter 3 focuses on the migrant-led movement #RegularizaciónYa from sociological and cultural perspectives. Building on the conceptual figure of Irregularity, it develops arts of citizenship as an original theoretical model for analyzing migrant social movements and articulates a migrant political South that reimagines citizenship beyond its formal prescriptions. The movement’s organizational, protesting, and artivist archive, in turn, provides a cultural historicization of Spain’s most significant migrant-led struggle for the regularization of undocumented migrants.

Drawing on Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Performance Studies, and the Sociology of Migration, the dissertation engages a multilocal and multimodal archive comprising performances, music videos, protest banners, rap, essays, graphic illustrations, fanzines, poetry, manifestos, and graffiti. These materials are approached as pedagogical, performative, and ephemeral cultural artifacts whose artivist operability enables both historical inquiry and political interpretation.

Throughout the dissertation, artivism thus functions as a methodological, archival, and historical lens for historicizing Spain’s recent socio-political cycle across anti-austerity mobilizations, transnational and vernacular feminisms, and migrant activism against the coloniality of citizenship. Read together, these movements articulate alternative cultural and political territorializations that challenge progressive neoliberalism and the contemporary far-right politicization of gender and race while illuminating feminist worlds in the making.