Occupy, Black Lives Matter and Suspended Mediation

Abstract

Following popular youth-led uprisings around the world a large body of literature has emerged focusing on how social media and digital spaces have reinvigorated young people’s engagements with political and social issues. In this article, I explore the ways in which young people’s expressive political practices are given shape through their movement in/between digital and non-digital spaces. Focusing, in particular, on the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, I suggest that a suspended self emerges from the interstices of digital and non-digital spaces, from young people’s movement in/between digital and non-digital spaces. This movement has consequences for self-shaping which young people involved in the Black Lives Matter movement and Occupy movement are not only aware of, but are utilizing in everyday ways to challenge the rules and regulations they encounter and to shift frames of recognition.