ABSTRACT
Despite the emergence of new technologies and widespread scholarly interest in their function as a space for convening and mobilization, urban public places continue to serve as important protest sites. And, as argued elsewhere in this volume, television should be treated as ‘new’ hybrid media as well as ‘old’ analogue, not least because it disseminates news online. In light of this, the chapter considers the work of the journalist-as-curator, who tells stories by collecting and captioning photographs from various sources and publishing them online as photo essays. Specifically, it explores how place can be seen as acting rhetorically in photo essays about protest published on the Al Jazeera English website in 2011. If the protest square is seen in terms of Bhabha’s ‘third space’, the analysis yields ample evidence of ‘oppressor and oppressed’ encountering each other, but rare examples of them ‘coming together’: it is heavily policed and largely a place of conflict, often violent.
