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Contentious Places: Rome’s Transcripts of Lived Space and Popular Resistance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2025
Abstract
The relationship between Rome’s built environment and the spatial practices of its inhabitants was always inherently political. Performative political protest was an integral part of the Roman psyche, and it was embedded in the dynamic interactions between actors and the spaces in which they protested. Multiple spatialities are co-implicated in contentious politics, and the Roman populace engaged with their civic spaces strategically to both legitimise and challenge existing power relations. The boundary between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces and discourses was a permeable one, and when the hitherto unobserved collective strands of identity and informal communication were realised in the open, it was the tip of an iceberg of formed resistance. This article will explore the connectivity between neighbourhood spaces and discourses, with the discourses of the spectacle spaces and protest repertoires. This complex relationship between spatial practice, collective identity, and political action will be explored by integrating the sociological theory of contentious politics with Henri Lefebvre’s triad of socially produced space, with James C. Scott’s concept of ‘hidden transcripts’, which provides insight into the invisible discourses that underpinned popular resistance and participation in Roman contentious politics.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies.
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