Occupy Movement Research Articles

Queering solidarity: trans-sectional feminism from ‘babe theory’ to trans-masculine protest

ABSTRACT Women and revolutions have always had a thorny relationship. Women’s mere presence in the revolutionary public sphere and within protest culture has been the site of much controversy. More recently, from the Occupy Movement to the Women’s Marches, from Black Lives Matter to Femen, women protests have turned to performative practices to bring to light the material conditions of resistance within a framework informed by queer and trans. theories, transnational feminism, Indigenous resistance, and eco-critical struggles. This article looks at these performative and queering strategies within progressive revolutions today. It also analyses how decolonising solidarity amplifies or deepens our understanding of intersectional feminism.

A Values-Complementarity Model of Social Movement Influence on Entrepreneurship

Social movements have long held noteworthy effects on organizations and industries by deliberately seeking to alter firms’ actions to align with the movements’ values. In the present research, we examine the possibility of nondeliberative effects of social movements on entrepreneurial activities. We posit that social movements elevate values that enhance market conditions and encourage entrepreneurship in unexpected ways. We examine this values-complementarity process in the context of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement. Although the movement intended to delegitimize large corporations, we find evidence that it also had the complementary effect of increasing small-scale, people-centered, and community-oriented values. As such, this enhanced congruent forms of entrepreneurship. We find consistent effects of Occupy on startup growth across a range of industries. Moreover, using brewing as an illustrative setting, we identify distinctive emergent themes confirming the shift and alignment of microbreweries toward stronger community values after Occupy protests. We discuss implications for the social movement and organization literatures.

Embodied Infrastructures

Infidel to academic disciplinarity, and employing a poetic, feminist reading of two vignettes and a case study, this paper presents “embodied infrastructures” as a fundamental grammar of prefigurative politics through which a redirected society rehearses an “otherwise” political future. Embodied infrastructures are identified in the people’s mic of the Occupy movement (2011), and the human chain and “home thrown in the mud” in the women’s antinuclear protest practices at the Greenham Common Peace Camp (1982-early 2000s). Acknowledging the interdependence of bodies, materiality, and democracy, and rejecting delegating their beliefs, morality, and intentionality to technologies, participants in prefigurative political movements are determined to become infrastructure themselves. Infrastructures of embodied resource circulation are seen in continuity with “corporeal infrastructures” found in communities of scarcity during which bodies are activated as social actants—evident in Chandigarh’s appropriation of autochthonous capacities of auto-construction, and a cautionary tale of the inherent vulnerability of bodily employment when co-opted by conditions of alienated social relations. Embodied infrastructures are radical in their transgression of the boundaries between collectivity and individuality, users and designers, labor and work, privacy and publicity, futures and presents. They bring “life making” and “thing making” together as entangled, mutually constitutive paths to collective emancipation.

Habermas and the mutations of the public sphere

In this article, I argue that concern with the public sphere and the necessary conditions for a genuine democracy can be seen as a central theme of Jurgen Habermas's work that deserves respect and critical scrutiny in the contemporary moment, when throughout the world liberal democracies are in crisis. My study intends to point to the continuing importance of Habermas' problematic of the public sphere and its relevance for debates over democratic politics and social and cultural life in the present age, in an era in which the Occupy Movements, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Trump Resistance Movement, and Ukraine and Palestine Solidarity groups use social media to struggle against multiple forms of oppression. At stake is delineating a concept of the public sphere which facilitates maximum public participation and debate over the key issues of the contemporary era and which consequently promotes the cause of radical democracy and social transformation.

THE EMERGENT R/ANTIWORK REVOLUTION AND MANAGERIAL ALLIES

The subreddit r/Antiwork and the eponymous movement it launched has introduced phrases like ‘Quiet Quitting’ and ‘Act your Wage’ into the media lexicon and garnered the attention of businesses from Goldman Sachs to Kellogg’s for its threat to labor force participation. Heralded by some as the successor to #OccupyWallSt, Antiwork is the other side of the Great Resignation for those who cannot afford to leave their livelihood. Yet it differs from #OccupyWallSt in its scope, which critiques capitalism as a whole rather than money in politics; its scale, with 2.7M members globally on Reddit alone; its longevity, ongoing for ten years; and its varied demographics whereas Occupy protesters tended to be educated white men. As Occupy sought collective mobilizations at government buildings, Antiwork fosters individual, less public forms of resistance to capitalism. James Scott referred to such ‘infrapolitics’ as weapons of the weak, as the lack of capital of the oppressed in all its forms often precludes more direct forms of protest. In this paper, drawing from digital ethnography and interviews, I examine the potency of r/Antiwork for impacting workplace behaviors among community members who are managers in their professional lives. In doing so, I explore the possibility of a broader class consciousness with an historically unlikely ally that transcends the traditional Marxist proletariat-capitalist binary and portends greater efficacy for the American labor movement than in the past 50 years.

Theatre and Capital Once Again: An Essay on an Informal Archive

Abstract: This essay reviews Theatre Journal articles that examine the intersections of theatre and capital, to highlight the challenge of analyzing neoliberal transformations of global and glocal economies, in particular, the trend to financial speculation to the detriment of investment in public resources, and the impact on theatre and performance. Commentators in the “global” North can better understand the scale of transformation—the concentration of wealth for a few and the loss of public revenue for the precarious majority—by examining strategies deployed by this majority in the South, especially Africa, to deal with extreme inequality exacerbated since the 1990s by structural adjustment and reduced aid from the North. The essay briefly notes a critical response to the impact of capital on performance by an African scholar, and a performative illumination of its US impact by an American practitioner. In the first case, David Donkor’s Spiders of the Market analyzes the glocal pressure of financialization on social welfare and performative practices in Ghana while offering critical insights that apply to increasing inequality in the North. In the second, Paul Durica and Pocket Guide to Hell’s site-responsive reenactments illuminate historic conflicts between U.S. capital and labor from the 1886-7 Haymarket Trial to the 2011 Occupy Movement and attempt to clarify the obscure workings of capital as an economic and cultural force in contemporary Chicago, whose nineteenth-century markets were the first to develop derivatives and other instruments that have spawned financial speculation to the present time.

For What and For Whom is Camping in America?: A Review of Camping Grounds

Phoebe S. K. Young’s Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement offers a history of the varied, at times conflicting reasons that Americans have set up camp and what their practices reflect about their evolving relationships to the natural world, their society and their government. With sections covering topics from the Grand Army of the Republic and John Muir, tramping and the loop campground, the National Outdoor Leadership School and activism, her work considers the economic, cultural, and political forces that have given rise to many of the major reasons and ways that diverse groups of Americans have pitched tents and set up camp. She challenges practitioners and scholars to consider more how the identities of who is camping and their motivations have mattered a great deal to how their practice has been perceived by the public, the government, and other campers.

Teorihistorisk skitsering af den nye protestcyklus

The article proposes a reading of the new cycle of protests that erupted in 2011 with the so-called Arab Spring and the square occupation movements in Souther Europe before moving on to the US with the Occupy movement. The years since 2011 have been marked by a significant rise in the numer of protests, riots and revolts across the world with the years 2011, 2014 and 2019 as preliminary high points. The pandemic and the repressive anti-rebellion measures put in place during the pandemic does not seem to have stopped protests from continuing to take place. The article challenges readings of the contemporary protests that fault them for being desperate, defensive and unpolitical proposing a reading using the notion of refusal put forth by Maurice Blanchot and Dionys Mascolo in 1958 as a prims for understanding the emergence of a new anti-political protest culture.

Reinventing democracy in Paris and Madrid: Sylvain George’s Benjaminian urban montage

Sylvain George is one of the most interesting French filmmakers working today. He has made a series of poetic, experimental documentaries about migrants and refugees around Calais and has brought together migrant figures and Occupy movements in his two ‘city symphonies’, Vers Madrid (The Burning Bright) (2012) and Paris est une fête (2018). The principal theoretical influence on George's cinema is the work of Walter Benjamin. This article shows how certain essential Benjaminian concepts can help us understand George's films as they seek productive alignments and collisions between contemporary mobilisations and the history embedded in urban spaces. But it also argues that, even as they point towards a renewal of fundamental European political traditions, they show that a politics no longer limited by national belonging remains to be found.

Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement. By Phoebe S. K. Young

Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement. By Phoebe S. K. Young

Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement

Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement

Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property: Capitalism and Class Conflict in American History

Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property: Capitalism and Class Conflict in American History

Iconic 21st Century Activist "T-Shirt and Tote-Bag" Combination Is Hard to Miss These Days!

Iconic 21st Century Activist "T-Shirt and Tote-Bag" Combination Is Hard to Miss These Days!

Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement by Phoebe S. K. Young

Reviewed by: Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement by Phoebe S. K. Young Aaron Sachs (bio) Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement. By Phoebe S. K. Young. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 414. Cloth, $34.95.) When I think of the overlap between Civil War history and environmental history, I conjure destructive thoughts. I think of industrialism and Native dispossession and barren fields. I think of the excellent chapter "Battle Logs: Ruined Forests" in Megan Kate Nelson's book Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (2012). Yes: I think of stumps. Happily, Phoebe S. K. Young offers an alternative framework for us to consider. In her new study, Camping Grounds, Young uses a broad-minded version of cultural history to offer a sweeping view of the politics of camping out in the United States over the last 160 years. Her history's origin story constitutes a fresh take on the significance of soldiers' experience in the Civil War. While the men in blue and gray may have ravaged any number of forests, they also imprinted on comradely campfires under the forest canopy. The nature of encampment in American history turns out to be thought-provokingly complex. Readers of this journal will be most drawn to the compelling first chapter of Camping Grounds, which covers both wartime camp experiences [End Page 419] and the ways in which the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) used nostalgic campouts to build membership and stake its claims in the postbellum period. During the war, encampment usually signaled a break from battle that offered welcome comforts, as well as its fair share of challenges (tedium, pests, social hierarchies, weather). Camping was mostly just another military obligation: it was, in Young's useful terminology, functional, just as it had been in the antebellum period, when migrants camped out on the Overland Trail, gold miners camped out in California, and potential converts attended spirit-moving camp meetings. What the GAR accomplished in the 1880s was the transformation of camping into something that could be both recreational and political. The GAR had started lobbying the federal government on behalf of veterans almost immediately after the war. But of course most Americans—and even most veterans—were initially inclined to forget the recent unpleasantness at all costs, and GAR membership was so low in the mid-1870s that the organization almost folded. It was only when GAR leaders invested more seriously in reunion encampments that veterans started joining in significant numbers, such that during the 1880s camping started to define the GAR's identity, and the GAR began to determine the new meanings of camping. Far more than the occasional hunting camp established in, say, the Adirondacks, the GAR's massive campouts in highly visible public spaces shaped national perceptions of the value of sleeping under the stars. In the 1880s, camping was less about individualism and wilderness and more about solidarity and citizenship. Civil War veterans camped out to lobby for pensions and health care. They were successful, because their encampments embodied patriotic brotherhood, manly virtue, and even modern progress, thanks to their commercial sponsorships, tourism packages, and, in some cases, electric lighting. Camping appeared an all-American pursuit. Like the other chapters in this book, the opening one carefully balances close readings of a few key primary sources with broader analysis and thorough contextualization. It homes in on a Union veteran named John Mead Gould, who not only kept a diary of his military experiences of outdoor camaraderie, but also wrote a guidebook called How to Camp Out: Hints for Camping and Walking (1877). Overall, I found that the case studies in Camping Grounds, like most academic case studies, got a little too detailed and repetitive, but Gould is an engagingly cranky New Englander who proves an admirable anchor for Young's opening argument. Gould's writings suggest quite powerfully that when we think about environmental history and Civil War history, we ought to remember, in Young's cogent phrase, "the shared etymological roots of 'camp' and 'campaign'" (20). [End Page 420] Of course, there...

Broadband internet and protests: Evidence from the Occupy movement

This paper investigates the influence of broadband internet availability in the occurrence of events of civil unrest. Using collected data on 2011’s Occupy Movement in the U.S., we find that each new Internet Service Provider (which is associated to an increase in broadband penetration) accounts for an increase between 1 and 3 p.p. in the probability of observing protests in a given location. Results are consistent when analyzing county-level data for the contiguous U.S., for each different U.S. region separately (Northeast, Midwest, South and West), and when analyzing city-level data for California.

Archiving in Twilight

Archiving in Twilight

Publics forums in the Algerian and Lebanese hiraks or autonomy in the making

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the public forums created during the 2019 Algerian and Lebanese hiraks (popular protests). These forums were organized to reclaim forbidden or inaccessible public spaces, to discuss problems and offer alternatives in the political and economic arenas. The article investigates the relations of these forums to the hiraks’ general claims by focusing on the dynamics of the forums and on their constitutive dimension in and contribution to the hiraks. It analyses two hallmarks of the forums: connectivity and reflexivity. The first shows the networking of actors and exchange relations between the various levels and dimensions that form the hiraks, while the second constitutes the locus of critique that takes the hirak as its object, as well as the initiatives implemented in its wake. With this analysis, we demonstrate that the Algerian and Lebanese popular forums are particular form of assembly, different from the Occupy movements’ assemblies, ones that represent unique spaces of observation that shows both the organic ties between the forums and the hiraks, and, more importantly, the emergence in action of associative life and its autonomization, a crucial democratizing process in both countries.

When we can’t handle the truth: Occupy, “dangerous speech,” and public administration

The Occupy Movement (“Occupy”) was largely ignored by public administration scholars. In this paper we argue that letting Occupy pass by without substantive analysis is unfortunate because it represented an opportunity for public administration to learn and reflect on critically important issues. Occupy was an important moment of truth-telling in US politics and prefiguring of a different way of life, yet it revealed the field’s inability to hear and constructively engage with the “truth” of contemporary social movements. We elaborate these matters and contend that Occupy should be read as a moment of what the ancient Greeks and, more recently, Michel Foucault, call parrhēsia, or frank, direct, truthful speech. We consider Occupy within the broader context of public administration as a field of practice that engages with particular forms of truth-telling and use this as a fulcrum to theorize the particular ways in which public administration could or could not “handle” Occupy’s truth-telling. The final sections of the paper outline concrete lessons about how public administration may respond differently to the truth-telling of current and future social movements.

Performance, Politics, and Historiography in and out of Time: American Responses to the Paris Commune

American echoes of the Paris Commune have been muffled by the nation’s obsession with freedom at the expense of solidarity, but performative responses to social upheaval, including drama, parades, and protests, have tested the boundaries of public space and multiple temporalities from 1871 to 2021. This article notes traces of the Commune in the writings and performances of nineteenth century American anarchists but analyzes this legacy primarily in the 2012 performance of Brecht’s The Days of the Commune (1949) at New York sites claimed by the Occupy Movement in 2011. It also uses the argument of Brecht’s contemporary Ernst Bloch for cultural action grounded in an understanding of historical disappointment to anticipates setbacks while maintaining hope for future revolution. The paper delineates five theses on the politics of time: 1) the dramatic appeal of the clean break hides the tension between gradual evolution and a sudden event that ruptures the long span of history (Badiou); 2) historiography, the narrative that turns data into evidence, challenges the illusion of objectivity and thus a simple split between timely intervention and untimely interference with the established order (Nietzsche); 3) ana-chronology, the logic of untimeliness reads contemporaneity as companionship between events and agents across different times and places (Barthes); 4) recollecting history requires acts of forgetting, which shatter the constraints of the past to meet demands of the present (Renan, Nietzsche); 5) the politics of time entails the politics of place and thus requires the analysis of multiple temporalitieslayered on one site as well as political acts and performance in distinct places.

Under the Weight of the Soviet Legacy and Political Repressions: The Radical Left in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract Mass protest movements of the early 2010s, particularly the Occupy movement, stimulated the rise of radical left organizations globally. In Southern Europe, radical left parties celebrated their first electoral successes. In Russia, radical left organizations were also influenced by this upsurge of social protest movements and participated in the Bolotnaya protests in 2011–2012 but were marginalized and disintegrated shortly after, resuming their activities only by 2019. This article explores the radical left movements and groups in Russia and offers projections for their future. The Russian radical left is divided into three sub-groups: fundamentalist communists who identify with Stalin and the Soviet Union, libertarian socialists and communists (subdivided into neo-anarchists, autonomists, and neo-Trotskyists), and hybrid organizations (e.g., the Left Front). These organizations face two major constraints unknown to their Western counterparts. First, Russia’s authoritarian regime blocks opportunities for independent, particularly electoral, politics. This reveals itself in targeted repressions against left radicals and anarchists. Second, the dominance of the CPRF blocks any potential of strong left opposition. Unless these restrictions are lifted, radical left organizations in Russia will not be able to overcome their current crisis.