Book Review: Understanding Occupy from Wall Street to Portland, edited by Renee Guarriello Heath, Courtney Vail Fletcher, and Ricardo Munoz

Abstract

Understanding Occupy from Wall Street to Portland. Renee Guarriello Heath, Courtney Vail Fletcher, and Ricardo Munoz, eds. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013. 264 pp. $90 hbk. $89.99 ebook.Late in 2011, the Occupy movement shook the U.S. political landscape with a force not achieved by any protest movement since the 1960s. Drawing inspiration from the Arab Spring and national protest movements opposed to post-recession austerity mea- sures, Occupy Wall Street was initiated by a call from Canadian culture-jammers Adbusters for a peaceful occupation of Wall Street. The subsequent occupation of Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park brought a sustained, popular mass protest against neoliberal globalization to world capitalism's financial center.The popular convergence soon thereafter became a global protest movement as Occupy-inspired demonstrations sprouted in hundreds of locations in over eighty countries. Among them was Occupy Portland, on America's west coast, the site of research for Renee Guarriello Heath, Courtney Vail Fletcher, and Ricardo Munoz's edited collection Understanding Occupy from Wall Street to Portland. Heath is an associate professor of communication studies and Fletcher is an assistant professor of communication studies-both at the University of Portland-and Munoz is a PhD student in communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder.Organized into three sections, the collection situates Occupy in a global context, interrogates the operation of the movement at the micro level in Portland, and examines local media representations of the protest. The topics addressed by the first of these sections, titled Situating Occupy Globally: The Cultural and Economic Context, pro- vide readers with a wide frame through which to understand Occupy Portland's conver- gence. However, the chapters in this section restate histories and themes that are likely to be familiar to many readers already. It is in the two subsequent sections, where Occupy Portland itself is examined, that the collection is most compelling.Over the four chapters of the second section, the various contributors deliver a nicely targeted exploration of the internal operation of Occupy Portland. Munoz's and Heath's contributions are particularly compelling: Munoz describes the Occupy movement's determination to work in a genuinely participatory way, with decision- making occurring horizontally among the people involved, rather than vertically as it would if it were left to a conventional leadership group. But the creation and mainte- nance of Occupy's horizontal organizational structure was massively challenging: not only did those present have to develop new communication frameworks to sup- port this way of working, but they also had to do it in an environment charged with emotions, and with the constant threat of intervention by police. The nuanced ethnog- raphy Munoz delivers on these matters is the outcome of participant-observation; he researched the movement while fully taking part in Occupy Portland.Addressing similar themes, Heath's research explores some of the pitfalls inherent to participatory organizing of the kind in operation: groups that appear to have no hierarchy may actually be masking an unequal distribution of power within them, whereas decision-making through mass assemblies can be chaotic and ineffective, making ever-present the danger that mob rule and not meaningful strategic thinking will take over. …