Mapping the Plural Yellow Vests Constituency. Sociography and Evolving Worldviews in Motion: A localized and processual Approach

Over the past decade, a resurgence of mobilizations-from the Arab Spring and the Indignados to Occupy and France’s Yellow Vests (YV)-has renewed debates on how to define and study protests summoned through social media and sustained by occupations of public space. Often portrayed as “leaderless”, these mobilizations are better understood as leaderful: leadership is collective, distributed, and situational. This fluid ecology makes it hard to delimit the object of study and to capture worldviews that crystallize during action. Drawing on a localized and longitudinal research program launched in November 2018, this chapter focuses on the Var department in south-east France, a site of YV activism shaped by far-right electoral strength and a base of modest homeowners and precarious workers. We examine how early stigmatization by officials and major media, securitarian framing, and police and judicial repression structured mobilization trajectories and external assignations. Methodologically, we combine three datasets in a concomitant manner: life history calendars, Facebook digital traces, and fieldwork based on participant observation and repeated biographical interviews. By treating time and place as key variables, we track how roundabouts functioned as logistical bases and political social spaces, and how meanings, leadership configurations, and social bases shifted across sites and phases.