Occupy Movement Research Articles

Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age by Edward T. O’Donnell

Reviewed by: Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age by Edward T. O’Donnell Victoria M. Breting-Garcia Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age. By Edward T. O’Donnell. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, 378 pages, $26.00 Cloth. On May 23, 2014, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) distributed a special edition of their weekly magazine, Science. Published in the wake of global protest following the economic malaise of the early twenty-first century, “Haves and have-nots: The Science of Inequality” presented a series of essays exploring the origins and impacts of global economic inequality, synthesizing the ongoing efforts of archaeologists, ethnographers, and economists to understand the dynamics that create and sustain the stark relationship of material progress and rising rates of poverty within societies all over the world. In his book, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age, Edward O’Donnell presents a vivid panorama of events that ushered in the modern era in America. With an eye on the striking similarities of the late nineteenth-century Gilded Age with contemporary socioeconomic rifts, full-blown during the economic turndown of 2008 and the Occupy movements in 2011, he returns the reader to America’s industrial beginnings in the nineteenth century to deconstruct the origins and underlying dynamics of rising poverty and income inequality. His narrative provides a unique and compelling forum for understanding the depth of the nation’s on-going ideological struggle with “wealth inequality, labor unions, immigration, terrorism, women’s rights, family values, money in politics, [and] voter eligibility” (xxv). [End Page 227] Like rivers running through the narrative of post-revolutionary American history, the rise of global cities and their impacts on international commerce have had a compelling influence on the quality of human life worldwide. Rising standards of living and upward social mobility usher in new sets of cultural tradeoffs. Today, the ethics of gentrification are no longer taken for granted in cities where alarming numbers of homeless people living on the streets have prompted new calls for progressive reform. In the week of May 20, 2018, the New York Times published Unsheltered, an investigative series of essays exploring the breakdown of the city’s affordable housing system. That same day CNBC Jeff Daniels posted an article, “As California’s homelessness grows, the crisis emerges as a major issue in state’s gubernatorial race.” It is estimated that one-fourth of the nation’s homeless population are unable to find affordable housing in California, one of the wealthiest states in the nation. Set alongside contemporary compilations of statistics and income datasets accumulated over more than two centuries, O’Donnell’s narrative of the life and teachings of Henry George is a timely counterpoint to emerging analytical models of absolute poverty and its affects on economic growth, in developing and wealthy countries alike. The canon of George’s economic theories and policy recommendations trace antecedents in the great political revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Deeper still are the values of common law and the economic rights of the individual as they evolved over centuries, buried in the lives and souls of the streams of settlers who came to America. O’Donnell begins his story here, honoring the values and traditions of the early colonial Anglo-American social contract and commercial industry. George’s ancestors took pride in their familial ties to the city of Philadelphia, home of the Continental Congresses where the rights and duties of citizens, states, and a federal government were bitterly argued. Born in 1839, scarcely fifty years after the signing of the Articles of Confederation, young Henry’s character was forged within the fiery freedoms and social mores of the early colonial republic, a legacy he never forgot. George’s rise to prominence as a political economist and labor organizer was grounded in his experiences at the cutting edges of nineteenth-century America, east to west. During his lifetime, the number of states admitted to the United States grew from twenty-six to forty-five. In 1893 Frederick [End Page 228] Jackson...

The Silent Red Thing: Self-Censorship in the Hyper-Networked Hypermarket Arts

The Silent Red Thing:Self-Censorship in the Hyper-Networked Hypermarket Arts Noah Fischer (bio) I can't forget the puzzling silence of Mark di Suvero. During the Occupy Movement, Joie De Vivre, his seventy-foot-tall sculpture flanking [End Page 233] the east side of Zuccotti Park (Fig. 1), was simply known as "The Red Thing."1 General Assem bly facilitators would announce, "Food, Outreach, Direct Action, People of Color working group, meet in one hour under the red thing!" because there was substantial gathering space beneath it and the populist renaming signaled that we had invited it into the commons (Fig. 2). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Noah Fischer, View from Zuccotti Park (2018). Photograph courtesy of the artist. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Noah Fischer, The Red Thing (2018). Watercolor. Image courtesy of the artist. However, the red thing turned out instead to be a kind of Trojan horse. It was the first piece of liberated Zuccotti Park to be clawed back into Mayor Bloomberg's New York. On October 26, 2011, the New York City Police Department surrounded it with barricades (which were inexplicably marked with the logo of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (Fig. 3),2 and thereafter patrolled it on threat of arrest (Fig. 4). The significance of this art-cage was recognized by the artists from the Arts & Culture Committee, who penned a common letter to the artist: OWS is now in Day 52. This movement will only continue to grow and evolve. It is our wish, and we believe yours as well, that the sculpture be integrated spatially with the activities taking place at Liberty Plaza. [End Page 234] Therefore, we ask you to make a public statement urging city authorities to keep all barricades away from this and other public sculptures in the area, allowing free access to the area under and around public sculptures.3 The letter wasn't a shot in the dark. In 1971, di Suvero had self-exiled in response to the Vietnam War. Five years earlier, in 1966, he had been approached to build the monumental Peace Tower by Irving Petlin and the Los Angeles-based Artists' Protest Committee: a work that monumentalized a collection of smaller anti-war paintings later auctioned off to support the anti-war efforts. Installed in a vacant lot, Peace Tower became a site of confrontation where anti-war demonstrators were harassed by Marines and pro-war counter-protestors, who beat up an artist during the tower's installation.4 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Naeem Mohaiemen, Zuccotti Park (2011). Photograph courtesy of the artist. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. Naeem Mohaiemen, Zuccotti Park (2011). Photograph courtesy of the artist. Jailed twice for anti-war demonstrations in the 1960s and again outside the Republican National Convention in 2004, di Suvero became something of an art world anti-war icon. His work Peace Tower was remade at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, where it was placed by the curators directly outside the museum in public view, perhaps to compensate for the 2004 Biennial's stunning silence on America's two overseas wars.5 It wasn't a stretch to recognize di Suvero's aesthetics (quotidian industrial materials, strong linear formed geometry, red color) and social ideas (sculpture used in mass [End Page 235] movements) as a progeny of the monumental Leftist sculptural tradition stretching back to Vladimir Tatlin (Fig. 5). As such, the chance to speak up for OWS, a movement that had accepted his sculpture into its political constellation, seemed more a gift to the artist than an unwanted pressure. The letter was sent by trusted couriers, and it was confirmed that he received and read the letter. But di Suvero never spoke up, and a month later, the barricades that had initially encircled his sculpture expanded to encircle the entire park, while activists nursed NYPD-inflicted wounds marking their violent eviction. The issue of silenced voices has recently drifted into political discourse as the far-right media cries out accusations of censorship, often the result of traps planted by the racist and xenophobic alt...

The Zombi/e Diaspora: Urban Manifestations and Dany Laferrière’s Pays Sans Chapeau

Zombies are not new additions to our cultural horror imaginary, and yet it would seem that in recent years their presence has become even more pervasive. Where they might once have been confined to the cinematic or literary monsters that drool and stagger their way across our screens and through our texts, the capitalist, globalised landscape has become populated with these creatures. They have come to occupy urban landscapes, whether in the form of protesters at the various Occupy movements throughout the West in the autumn of 2011, through advertising campaigns or the popular ‘zombie walks.’ Their presence in our cities is curious and problematic, as the contemporary zombie is an adaptation of the Haitian Voodoo zombi, which is itself of West African traditions. The scope of this article is less to trace the ontological origins of the zombie than it is to question the possible implications of its re-appropriation in North American and globalised landscapes coming, as it does, from the Haïtian representation of both slave and slave rebellion. As a way of focusing this exploration of zombie lore, the present article will turn to Dany Laferrière’s novel Pays Sans Chapeau (1996) [Down Among the Dead Men, 1997]. Laferrière’s own migration, as an exile and immigrant, from Port-au-Prince to Montreal to Miami, informs this semi-autobiographical novel in which he returns to Haiti after 20 years abroad and encounters a landscape full of zombies. By teasing out the meaning of the beings Laferrière finds when he returns to his home, and their possible relationship to the monsters present in North American culture, this paper will come to a better understanding of the metamorphosis of the zombie in its travels from West African tradition through the Caribbean and into the nightmares of contemporary consumers.

Occupy and TEA Party's Attention Support Current Relevance of Smith, Hamilton, and Keynes Economic Views President Obama's Economic Influences

This article aims to address the relevance of current public and political movements in relationship to America's economic philosophical views and outcomes as reaction to President Obama's Economic Recovery Plan. The discussions take into account the views of varying segments of the population as expressed through the actions and opinions of the Occupy and Tea Party Movements. Connections between economic views and theories of Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, And John Keynes and economic principles of these two movements in relationship to the President's theoretical plan are presented. A look into the roles of liberalism, conservatism, and plutocracy are considered as part of the ideological discourse of various segments of the American populous. Views of the government bailout and other stimulus plans introduced by the Administration are explored in relationship to the views held by the two competing movements and the competing political ideologies. The outcome of which is that the President's plan is more closely aligned with the concerns of the occupy movement, Keynesian economic policy theory, and liberalism.

Role of social media in politics

Social Media today is an interface between society and individual. The digital platform has changed the traditional view of engaging with politics. Anybody possessing a digital gadget today is content consumer and creator as well. This act of consumption and creation impacts our day-to-day politics. Movements like Occupy Movement in U.S.A., Brexit in UK show digital arena is becoming a new space for public discourse and political struggles. There is more to social media shaping politics i.e., usage of social media generated data of an individual or group by political parties to target voters. In this context ‘likes generated’ content is extracted without consent and big tech algorithms’ surround user with echo chamber information, thereby creating recipe for misinformation and sow seed of a polarized society.

“Reservoir of rage swamps Wall St”

AbstractOriginating on New York’s Wall Street, the Occupy movement was “an international network of protests against social and economic inequality that began in [September] 2011 in response to the downturn of 2008” (Thorson et al. 2013, 427). Whilst there has been research on online activity in relation to Occupy, the scope of linguistic analysis to date has been somewhat narrow. Furthermore, the focus on new media has indirectly led to an absence of analysis of institutionally-endorsed traditional media texts. We adopt a mixed-method approach of corpus analysis and discourse analysis of national newspaper articles to answer questions such as ‘Is Occupy associated with a semantic field of violence and aggression?’ and ‘Who is represented as having agency?’ Our results indicate that, in our small corpus of media texts, Occupy and its supporters were predominantly portrayed negatively at the movement’s height; even though protesters are reported to have been peaceful in their majority, the English-speaking media we analysed still aligns them with language suggestive of aggression, conflict and even violence.

‘A warning in the shape of the novel’ – the relevance of lessons contained in F. Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed for twenty-first-century United States

Abstract The Possessed (1872) by F. Dostoyevsky is a key text for comprehending the mechanisms behind the emergence and development of public disorder in an enclosed urban setting. Dubbed a ‘roman-preduprezhdenie’ or ‘a warning in the shape of a novel’ for the generations to come, it can easily be described as one of the author’s most political and complex works that retains specific relevance for the present-day world. This article attempts to collect and analyse several major lessons regarding the origins and development of urban violence and rioting to be gleaned from Dostoyevsky’s text, and apply them to the modern-day American case studies of social protesting and public unrest (namely, the Ferguson riots and the Occupy movement, 2011 onward). By doing so, I will draw a conclusion relevant for the modern leaders, scholars and thinkers preoccupied with the notions of urban rioting and violence.

Jason Y. Ng, Umbrellas in Bloom: Hong Kong's Occupy Movement Uncovered. Richard C. Bush, Hong Kong in the Shadow of China – Living with the Leviathan.

A en juger par la couverture mediatique, tant locale qu’internationale, dont il fit alors l’objet, le « mouvement des parapluies », qui pendant 79 jours secoua Hong Kong a la fin de l’annee 2014, etait voue a etre meticuleusement examine et analyse. En raison de la portee du mouvement lui-meme, ainsi que de leur vertu hautement symbolique et o combien visuelle, les parapluies jaunes utilises afin de repousser les jets de bombes au poivre et le gaz des grenades lacrymogenes devinrent l’incarna...

Occupy, Black Lives Matter and Suspended Mediation

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.

The Relationship Between Cyberbalkanization and Opinion Polarization: Time-Series Analysis on Facebook Pages and Opinion Polls During the Hong Kong Occupy Movement and the Associated Debate on Political Reform

Online activity is often cyberbalkanized, but it remains unclear whether this phenomenon leads to polarization of public opinion or if the relationship works in the reverse direction. This study tested the temporal association between cyberbalkanization and opinion polarization during the debate on political reform in Hong Kong. Online communities were constructed by a post-sharing network of 1,644 Facebook pages (101,410 shares); the differences between intra- and inter-community shares were derived, and a cyberbalkanization index was computed. A time-series analysis showed that the index temporally preceded the opinion polarization, i.e., most of the opinion poll's respondents gave extreme ratings to government leaders, but not vice versa. The index was particularly predictive of polarization among youth.

“Before Occupy Central, I Wasn’t Concerned”: Examining Participatory Visual Research for Social Change with Hong Kong-based Filipina Youth

This article describes a participatory visual research project with two Hong Kong-based Filipina young women, and explores their understandings of citizenship and civic engagement through cellphilm-making (cellphone + filmmaking), collaborating on the writing of an academic article, and co-presenting research findings at an academic conference in Calgary, Canada. The study finds that Hong Kong’s Occupy Movement encouraged the participants to see themselves as engaged citizens, participate politically in the territory, and work toward social change for ethnic minorities by engaging different audiences through multiliteracy practices in a research for social change framework.

At the Interface of Social Media Analytics, Big Data and Social Movements: Research Challenges

Social media is being employed to build support for social, economic, and political justice (Selander et al. 2016; Vaast et al. 2014) in movements such as occupy Wall Street, violence against women's movement and global sustainability movement. These movements have used social media in ways that goes beyond simple communications. As social media allows people to produce and share user generated content, they enable a certain set of affordances of these technologies (Bharati et al 2015; Bharati et al 2014). The social media affordances, available to both collective and individual actors, translate into capabilities afforded to social movements (Tufecki 2014). Research on connective action has examined the effects of digital action repertoires on interaction and engagement such as in the Tea Party and Occupy movements (Agarwal et al. 2014; Selander et al. 2016). Social media can also facilitate mobilization of movement and participation by new volunteers and oftentimes provides a transnational character by diffusing actions beyond the virtual (Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010). Conversation, an essential part of social movements, shapes “social life by altering individual and collective understandings, by creating and transforming social ties, by generating cultural materials that are then available for subsequent social interchange, and by establishing, obliterating, or shifting commitments on the part of participants&x201D; (Tilly 2002, p. 122). In a personal interaction that involves repeated organized interactions between individuals, typically, leads to shared values and trust. The role of social media technologies in furthering this conversation has to be studied and its' influence on social movement ascertained. A few scholars have started to investigate social media affordances and capabilities, especially focused on discourse, during contentious collective action. Still the research has been limited to studying mechanisms of participation, development of a sense of collective identity, creation of community, and framing of political discourse (Farrell 2012; Garrett 2006). Social media data on social movements can involve impersonal “like&x201D; and “share&x201D; to more engaged conversations. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube offer a wide communicative and discourse reach in networks with text, image, audio, and video data. This social media based big data, consisting mostly of unstructured data, comes in the form of social media posts, digital pictures and videos. The symposium will discuss how formal organizational structures and practices might be integrated with social media capabilities to reinforce and enhance social movement organizations as leaders in social change movements. It will explore the characteristics of social media discourse and assess the dynamics of social movements and, subsequent, impact on real-world protests. The symposium will also demonstrate how discourse analysis can be applied visually in order to understand communication patterns. The panel symposium will focus on theoretical and methodological challenges of social media analytics, big data and social movements. Panelists will engage the audience in an interactive discussion on: 1) Theoretical challenges: a. How and why are social movement recruitment and engagement mechanisms being impacted as a result of social media? b. How do we advance theory on social media and social movements when we are overwhelmed with social media based big data? c. What approach should we undertake if big data analysis contradicts most theories on social media and social movements? d. How do we address the issue of generalizability of social media and social movement research when data collection was limited to one social media platform, albeit involving big data? 2) Methodological challenges: a. What methodological approaches have worked in the analysis of social media, big data and social movements? b. How can discourse analysis be applied visually in order to understand communication patterns evident in social media-based big data? c. How can we employ social media analytics to investigate image and video data? d. What combinations of qualitative and quantitative methodologies be employed for big data and social media analytics in the context of social movements? e. What are the limitations of quantitative data analysis techniques, such as structural equation modeling, because of an extremely large sample size? f. What are the limitations of qualitative data analysis techniques as they become extremely labor intensive and, maybe even, impractical because of big data?

New Asymmetries in the New Authoritarianism: Research in Egypt in the Age of Post-Revolution

Egypt was at the center of a wave of uprisings and revolutions that swept the region between 2011 and 2013, the common denominator of which was demands for a radical democratic alternative to authoritarian regimes variously formulated around social justice and political rights. While the Middle East was a major theater of these events, with Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen sharing the headlines, the processes that informed these uprisings were also deeply global. The year 2011 was a revolutionary year, maybe the last in history, when actors differently positioned in the neoliberal social landscape mobilized in different ways, from the Occupy Movement to the London riots. The demise, or better, defeat, of these movements has reverberated profoundly around the globe, highlighting the postdemocratic nature of governance in contemporary states. One of the effects of the rise of new authoritarianism across Europe and the United States is a palpable transformation in the asymmetry between outside observer and the local observed. Researchers now face a reshaping, in some ways a leveling, of differences between “us” and “them” and the distinct temporality used to underpin this asymmetry. Nothing could illustrate this better than the fact that as I write, Egypt's president ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi is enjoying a warm welcome in the White House. The narrative is no longer framed through the worn-out trope of an Arab leader aspiring to modernize his country through pledging allegiance to the leader of the Free World in exchange for aid and armaments; now the man in the White House implicitly pledges to learn from the Arab dictator. Egypt is the pioneer; the United States is the relative latecomer to the Age of New Authoritarianism.

Occupy the government: Analyzing presidential and congressional discursive response to movement repression

I examine the role of Occupy Wall Street in shifting presidential and congressional discourse on economic fairness and inequality. Using data from 4646 presidential speeches and 1256 congressional records from 2009 to 2015, I test different mechanisms, including repression, media coverage, public opinion, and presidential agenda-setting by applying a novel combination of web scraping, natural language processing, and time series models. I suggest that movement success can be measured in its ability to shape discursive opportunity structures, and I argue that the role of the president should be at the forefront of social movements research. Ultimately, I demonstrate (1) that the repression of Occupy protesters not only predicts media coverage but also increases discursive opportunities through President Obama and Congress, (2) that media coverage of Occupy predicts presidential discourse, (3) that the president's rhetorical shift increases congressional response, and (4) that this change persists after the movement faltered.

Essay: Rethinking Global Civil Society and the Public Sphere in the Age of Pro-democracy Movements

ABSTRACTPro-democracy movements have recently emerged in various places worldwide. The Pots and Pans Revolution (Iceland), Arab Spring, 15M and the Occupy movement, Yo Soy132, and the Gezi Park, Hong Kong, and Nuit Debout protests are all movements which, despite their differences, share a number of dynamics, links, frames, and repertoires. Paradoxically, in the academic field, we have witnessed a strong critical positioning against the concept ‘global civil society’. The objective of this article is to reflect on the utility of this concept once again in light of recent developments and to respond to some sceptical positions. To meet this objective, a dialogue is established between civil society theories and progress made in the study of social movements. The public sphere notion (particularly its transnational dimension) becomes especially relevant for our discussion.

Understanding the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement: A critical discourse historiographical approach

Within the context of a critical discourse historiographical (CDH) approach to critical discourse studies (CDS), this article applies a range of theories to the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, or Hong Kong Occupy Movement, to understand it as a discursive event. The CDH approach argues that a diachronic, historiographical approach can contribute to historiography, the writing of history, in that it can create first readings and interpretations of important events. The approach focuses on critical moments in discourse, of which the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement is considered an important one in the context of Hong Kong’s ongoing socio-historical development. Four theories are applied, in addition to the historical analysis, to further interpret the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement phenomenon: social movement theory, performance theory, identity theory and social action as text theory. It is concluded that the CDH approach to CDS and findings of the study may be useful in the consideration of other social movements and Occupy movements globally.

Advances in social movement theory since the global financial crisis

The social movement literature in Western Europe and North America has oriented much of its theoretical work towards micro-, meso-, and macro-level examinations of its subject of study but has rarely integrated these levels of analysis. This review article broadly documents the leading theoretical perspectives on social movements, while highlighting the contributions made in recent years with regard to the wave of protests across the globe – typified by the Occupy Movement and the ‘Arab Spring’ – and grievances that are relatively novel in qualitative or quantitative form such as austerity, precarity, and a sense of democratic deficiency. While these novel social processes have invigorated the specialized arena of ‘social movement studies’ and generated a resurgence of work on social movements beyond the field, this article argues for the need to interconnect levels of analysis in order to develop a more insightful account of contemporary contentious politics.

Hong Kong protests: A quantitative and bottom-up account of resistance against Chinese social media (sina weibo) censorship

Chinese online censorship, though has been deeply explored by many scholars from a top-down perspective and has mostly concentrated on the macro level, it appears that there are few, if any, existing studies that features a bottom-up perspective and explores the micro-level aspects of online media censorship. To fill this research gap, this article uses the Occupy movement in Hong Kong as a research case to analyze social media users’ resistance under conditions of heavy censorship from a bottom-up perspective. That is, the research questions seek to uncover what novel ways Weibo users use to try and circumvent Weibo censorship. It is confirmed that the microbloggers tend to use embedded pictures and user ID names, instead of using text messages to camouflage the sensitive information to share with other users; that Weibo users tend to create new accounts once their original ones have been closed or monitored.

After the Riot? Rancière, Hamilton, and Radical Politics

Abstract In recent years, political forces from the Occupy movement in North America to the #FeesMustFall student protest in South Africa have attempted to disrupt the political order in the name of democratic equality. Inspired by radical theorists like Rancière, this politics promises a model of social change through the combination of the disruption of institutions and the reinvention of daily life and political subjectivities. I argue that this radical politics comes with significant limits if it ignores the requirement to build more inclusive policies and new institutions too. This is because disruption alone may extend exclusion by prompting more elite coercion and popular backlash. This claim is illustrated through the example of the #FeesMustFall movement. What is needed instead is a radical politics that also includes a clear theoretical focus on policy and institutional change, such as is contained in Hamilton's account of freedom as power through representation.

Occupy and the Temporal Politics of Prefigurative Democracy

This article sheds new light on the Occupy movement by foregrounding its temporal dimensions, particularly in relation to a previous major cycle of transnational contention, the alter-globalization movement (AGM). The discussion engages three temporal considerations in particular: 1) the centrality of instantaneous digital media to both movements’ rapid rise and diffusion 2) the pervasiveness – especially within Occupy – of the temporal ethos of prefigurative politics, and 3) the sustainability and longer term legacy of the Occupy cycle, from the temporal vantage point of the year 2016, i.e. five years since the movement’s rise and prompt demise, and fifteen years since the peak of the AGM. The article’s conclusion insists on the importance of a long term vision when it comes to evaluating the outcomes of collective action.