Introduction: Protests in the Wake of the Great Recession

Abstract

Kumkar argues that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have to be understood and analyzed as symptoms of the current crisis of US class society and that this analysis also helps to understand other current events like the election of Donald Trump as the president of the USA. He shows that a Bourdieu-inspired theory of practice approach allows for investigating how the specific protest-practices of these protest mobilizations are rooted in their participants’ lived experience of the crisis. A hermeneutic-reconstructive interpretation of these protest-practices therefore opens a window onto the changing morphology of the USA’s class structure. After an overview over the book’s structure, the chapter closes with a short summary of the first explosive phase of the two protest mobilizations.