The power dynamics of the gaze have been examined from different perspectives, from the use of surveillance for safety purposes and the monitoring of citizens, to concepts that study how alternative gazes impact in society and its actors.  One of these alternative gazes has been described as sousveillance (Mann, 1998). While surveillance refers to watching from above, sousveillance is its direct opposite, watching from below. Based on this dynamic, and using a Brazilian group of activists that practices sousveillance as a case study, this thesis proposes a new term called Citizen Sousveillance. This term highlights the particular, protective role that sousveillance can play in protest contexts, preventing police brutality and other forms of injustice, as well as its capacity to change the reality of protest as a whole.
Citizen Sousveillance encompasses five dimensions: 1. a nonviolence dimension—it can act as a nonviolent form of resistance and as protection against violent repression; 2. a raw reality dimension—it can work to spread, if not an unmediated version of reality, a more raw reality of protest than we would see in coverage produced by corporate mainstream media; 3. a counternarrative dimension—it provides material that can be used to create narratives that act as counterpoints to corporate, mainstream media coverage of protest; 4. an archival dimension—it can help accumulate media that records and preserves records of protest for historical purposes; and 5. a virtual dimension—it can work as a channel for those not involved in protests to still follow its developments. These dimensions — and the concept of Citizen Sousveillance itself —were discerned through an empirically-grounded analysis of the activities of a Brazilian activist group called Mídia NINJA. The social media work of this group, as well as interviews with five members, make up the case-study around which this thesis is organized.