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This dissertation addresses the question of how contemporary social movements use protest media strategically in creative and productive ways that go beyond representation. Mediated repertoires of contention are brought into play to create new political subjectivities, establish credible political actors, and circulate struggles across regional and national borders. However, media need to be aligned with specific cultural settings to unfold their performative power. Despite increasing interest for protest media in social movement-and media studies, their culturality has received little theoretical and methodological attention. This dissertation develops a cultural approach to protest media, drawing on critical anthropology, European ethnology, cultural studies, and theories of practice. The research is situated on the micro-political level, while post-operaism, governmentality studies and regulation theory provide a macro-perspective. The study offers a comparative cultural analysis of a trans-urban labour-related movement which mobilised around precarity throughout the 2000s. The most visible public performances were simultaneous Euromayday Parades on International Workers’ Day in over 40 European cities. Using complex media arrangements, activists circulated plurivocal imageries of precarity. Methodologically, the research is based on a processual, flexible multi-sited ethnography. It traces imageries circulating in the network and reconstructs their historical and contemporary contexts through participant observation, interviews and extensive online ethnography. This is complemented by visual and textual analysis of selected media products …