Occupy Wall Street Protests Research Articles

The grey matter of decolonial activism, or, socially engaged art as professional-managerial class

According to Yates McKee, socially engaged art reached its Situationist moment of sublation when the participants at the 2011 Creative Time Summit joined the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters in Zuccotti Park. However, like the ‘Bernie Bro’ left and the Corbynistas, OWS was criticized for its ‘class reductionist’ focus on economic inequality. Through various affinity groups like Decolonize This Place (DTP) and actions like Strike MoMA, post-Occupy artists have increased their commitment to intersectional demands and the effort to decolonize museums. Making use of the Barbara and John Ehrenreich concept of the professional-managerial class (PMC), this article extends the PMC critique from the social democratic left to the realm of activist art, where the question of political representation is both assumed and avoided in calls for Black reparations and Indigenous restitution.

BEETHOVEN THE EUROPEAN LUCCA, 4–6 DECEMBER 2020

Whilst Covid prevented so many of the year's promised commemorative activities, one positive outcome was the delay of the original ‘live’ Lucca event scheduled for March and its transformation into an online event in Beethoven's birth month. (Edited by his daughter Margaret O'Sullivan, this was part of his project ‘Beethoven's Irish Songs Revisited’, which sought to reconstruct those folksongs for which George Thomson never got around to supplying texts.) In his stimulating address, ‘Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as a Disputed Symbol of Community: From Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus to the Brexiteers of 2019’, William Kinderman cast a wide intellectual net, developing themes from the final chapter of his most recent book, Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). After this ingenious analysis we were then taken on a whirlwind video tour of performances of the ‘Ode to Joy’ in political events spanning almost a century, showing how – despite the movement's misappropriation by the Nazi regime and racist Rhodesia, and the way it is associated with aggression in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange – Schiller's text was reinterpreted to suit each different historical context, whilst remaining ‘an untainted symbol’ of affirmation and resistance. The examples of performances included those given by Germans held in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in June 1918, the annual December ritual of massed choirs and orchestras in Japan, the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York in 2011, the struggle of Chilean opponents of Pinochet, the playing of cassette recordings with makeshift amplification by students protesting against martial law in China at Tiananmen Square in 1989, right up to Tan Dun's 2021 work Sound Pagoda – composed to be performed alongside the ‘Ode to Joy’ – for a concert dedicated to Wuhan's Covid victims.

Twitris v3: From Citizen Sensing to Analysis, Coordination and Action

Citizen sensing, with a billion plus active users and billion plus tweets/week, is complemented by shared information from contextually relevant Web of Data (blogs, news, and media objects) and background knowledge. How can these enable us in informing, understanding and managing a broad variety of activities and events locally and around the world? Twitris, currently in version 3, is a scalable and interactive platform which continuously collects, aggregates, integrates, and analyzes the above forms of data and knowledge to give deeper insights, as well as facilitate research and development on coordination and targeted actions related to any event. In this demonstration, we will show Twitris’ comprehensive capabilities in spatio-temporal-thematic, people-contentnetwork, and sentiment-emotion-subjectivity analyses, with examples from business intelligence including brand tracking and advertising campaigns, social/political unrests, and disaster events such as U.S. Election 2012, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest, Hurricane Sandy, etc. Visitors from diverse backgrounds will be able to play with the system for analyses of archived as well as live events during the demo.

Social Accountability, Ethics, and the Occupy Wall Street Protests

This study examines the 3.5 m+ English-language original tweets that occurred during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. Starting from previous research, we analyze how character terms such as “the banker,” “politician,” “the teaparty,” “GOP,” and “the corporation,” as well as concept terms such as “ethics,” “fairness,” “morals,” “justice,” and “democracy” were used by individual participants to respond to the Occupy Wall Street events. These character and concept terms not only allowed individuals to take an ethical stance but also accumulated into a citizen’s narrative about social accountability. The analysis illustrates how the centrality of the different concepts and characters in the conversation changed over time as well as how the concepts ethics, morals, fairness, justice, and democracy participated within the conversation, helping to amplify the ethical attributes of different characters. These findings contribute to our understanding of how demands for social accountability are articulated and change over time.

Noise-Making, Occupy Wall Street, and the Politics of Amplification

This research explores a set of sound technologies deployed during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. It examines the People’s Microphone, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) sound cannon, the drum circle, and the noise complaint. Deepening understandings of their places within the contemporary urban soundscape and their use during the protests, it uses historical research, textual analysis, and qualitative discourse analysis methods to explore the technologies within a larger framework of the city’s discourses around (in)appropriate sound and action. Its findings suggest that each individual technology was evidence for the nature of its user in a way that presaged how the conflict would play out. The microphone epitomized the ideology (and fragility) of the hyper-democratic Occupiers’ ethos. The LRAD suggested the state’s superlative sonic capability and its “monopoly on the legitimate use of noise.” And the drum circles and noise complaints that followed ultimately showed the ways “noise-making” is better understood as a discursive construction that delegitimizes sound. Together, they suggest the ways the hegemonic soundscape serves the status quo. The essay also elaborates a taxonomy of sonic terms, specifically exploring volume, amplification, and noise-making as terms that explain the dynamics of sound during protest. It offers scholars of media activism a toolkit for sound studies that gets at the dynamics and structures of sonic power and explores the way sound-making is a key battleground of modernity. Sound conventions are a way that contemporary society is codified, legislated, and contested.

Capitalism’s revenge: critique, response and the third wave of capitalism

ABSTRACT In this paper I will sketch a theory of how normative demands for freedom emerging from the lifeworld both serve to provide new bases of legitimation for capitalism by drawing on underlying normative orders in the lifeworld while simultaneously giving rise to precarity on the part of new classes of workers. I argue that such a theory can provide a means of theorizing recent protests against capitalism (including, for instance, the events of the Occupy Wall Street movement and protests against the so-called sharing or gig economy). My thesis is that the phenomenon Standing identifies as the precariat emerges out of the reaction of the capitalist system to the events of the 1960s, and to available normative potentials contained therein.

Just(ice) Smiling? Masks and Masking in the Occupy-Wall Street Protests

The essay analyzes concepts of social justice, which were influential during the US-American Occupy protests of 2011. It discusses the recent genealogy of notions of social justice in the alter-globalization movements of the 1990s and argues that constitutive elements of Occupy’s tactics, like carnivalesque frivolity, recurred to protest forms of that decade. The essay investigates how the usage of the Guy Fawkes-mask, later associated with the comic superhero V, complicates binary logics of good and evil, arguing that such binary narratives helped in the organizational phase of the protests, but turned out to be inimical to further discussions of what constitutes social justice in the 21st century.

The Mobilizing Effects of Economic Threats and Resources on the Formation of Local Occupy Wall Street Protest Groups in 2011

This paper examines how threatening economic conditions and preexisting community resources facilitated the spread of Occupy Wall Street protest groups to more than 600 counties in the continental United States in 2011. Using a generalized linear mixed model, we find that economic threats and accessible resources are complementary facilitators of movement mobilization. But contrary to the expectations based on earlier media and scholarly accounts, the “disruptive threats” caused by the Great Recession failed to predict the formation of Occupy groups. Instead, groups were more likely to mobilize in counties that had the “positional threats” of relatively higher income inequality and relatively lower median incomes in comparison to state norms. However, the effect of positional economic threats was nuanced as counties with lower than average unemployment more likely had groups mobilized. In addition, resources continue to demonstrate empirical importance in explanations of social movement mobilization, as Occupy groups were more likely to form in counties with greater access to social-organizational and human resources. Combined, these findings suggest that scholars can strengthen their analyses by considering threats and resources as complementary facilitators of local protest mobilization and by focusing greater attention on how differing types of threats may influence the mobilization of social movements.

Occupy Wall Street:

This article traces the various forms and roles of intellectuals and intellectualism in the Occupy Wall Street protest camp in Zuccotti Park in New York in 2011 while simultaneously serving as an introduction to the movement. It shows how the movement was formed by a range of intellectual ideas, both in terms of the political questions it posed and the tactics it employed. It also shows how Occupy affected the intellectual and political climate insofar as it became a phenomenon that everyone with an interest in public debate (and space!) had to take a stand on. The article argues that Occupy, with its experiment in alternative social and democratic structures, was an exercise in a form of organic and collective intelligence that attempted to guide American society in a more democratic and equal direction. By way of conclusion, the article discusses the aftermath of the protest camp and the effects of the movement.

The Strength of Peripheral Networks: Negotiating Attention and Meaning in Complex Media Ecologies

Networked content flows that focus or fragment public attention are key communication processes in multimedia ecologies. Understandings of events may differ widely, as networked attention and framing processes move from core participants to more distant spectator publics. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street protests, peripheral social media networks of public figures and media organizations focused public attention on economic inequality. Although inequality was among many issues discussed by the activists, it was far less central to the protest core than problems with banks or democracy. Results showed how public attention to inequality was constructed through pulling and pushing interpretive frames between the core and periphery of dense communication networks. Various indicators of public attention—such as search trends, Wikipedia article edits, and legacy media coverage—all credited the protests with raising public awareness of inequality, even as attention to problems with banks grew at the protest core.

The effects of procedural injustice on the use of violence against police by Occupy Wall Street protesters

While a large, cross-disciplinary literature exists on crowd dynamics and protester behavior, few studies have tested the effects of perceived injustice on protester behavior. Based on data from a survey of Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York City, we explore the influence of perceptions of unjust police behavior on the use of violent resistance by protesters. We test the direct effects of two perceptual measures of procedural injustice and four control variables on self-reported use of violence against police. We also test the indirect effects of these variables on protester use of violence through an attitudinal measure of support for the use of violence against police. Findings reveal that the dominant predictor of protester violence against police is the perception that police use force unjustly against protesters. Level of participation in OWS and attitudes toward violence also exert significant effects on self-reported use of violence against police among protesters.

Attitudes towards the Use of Violence against Police among Occupy Wall Street Protesters

Abstract Although many social movement participants claim to embrace non-violent civil disobedience strategies, protesters tend to have heterogeneous views on the morality and utility of engaging in violence. In particular, protesters sometimes view violence against the police as warranted, especially if they perceive that police have treated them or their peers in a procedurally unjust or excessively forceful manner. This article examines the nature and correlates of attitudes towards the use of violence against police officers among Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters in New York City. Data were drawn from in-person surveys of 302 OWS participants on the 6-month anniversary of the movement in March 2012. Our findings reveal that in this context, respondents who perceive that police use unjust force against protesters are significantly more likely to endorse the use of violence against police.

Review of Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street, edited by Tom Goyens (University of Illinois Press)

Radical Gotham tracks anarchist life and politics in New York City over the last hundred and fifty years, giving a vivid window into an anarchist New York buzzing with saloons, assembly halls, and publishing houses. This anthology asserts anarchism’s endurance as both an idea and a movement as it develops from the working-class, immigrant anarchist communities in the late 19th century into the New Left in the 1950s and 60s and finally the recent Occupy Wall Street protests.

Musical Contention and Contentious Music; or, the Drums of Occupy Wall Street

This paper addresses music’s role in social movements, using work in mediation, assemblage, and actor-network theories to address the complex, contradictory, and contentious status that music often assumes within political protest. Three premises guide the discussion. First, if music is multiply mediated, then it follows that music’s mediation of other activities (including protest) is likewise multiple. Second, this constellation of mediations may be productively conceptualised as an assemblage, with music forming part of movement-assemblages, and movements forming part of musical assemblages. Third, this mutual imbrication of musical and political assemblages—and the reversibility of positions it entails—introduces a source of potential friction. To illustrate these points, the second part of the article examines the controversies surrounding the drum circle that animated Liberty Park during the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011.

Bartleby's Consensual Dysphoria

The 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest movement adopted what on first blush appears to be a peculiar literary mascot: Bartleby the scrivener, one of the two protagonists of the Story of Wall Street penned by Herman Melville in the middle of the nineteenth-century. But this empathic identity of interests between twenty-first-century street protesters pushing back against the dominance of the .01% and a pathetic, melancholic, cadaverous, anorexic, apparently suicidal, and fictional mid-nineteenth-century legal scrivener is decidedly odd. In this paper, I ask and try to answer this question: what did the OWS protesters recognize in Bartleby that sparked their empathic identification? More broadly, what is it, in Bartleby and in his recalcitrance, that is recognizably and deeply human? Ultimately, I argue that Bartleby the man can be understood to suffer from an extreme case of what I call “consensual dysphoria,” a disorienting and disabling consciousness of a radical disjuncture between one’s felt subjective pleasures and pains, and the transactions and states of the world to which one gives one’s free or voluntary consent. Consensual dysphoria, as I will describe it, is an affliction felt by individuals, but it is not a psychological malady. It is, rather, a political malady felt by individuals in liberal states, and brought on by the powers of political rhetoric and influence. I claim that consensual dysphoria has been an acutely felt part of the consciousness of both the classical legal thought of the mid-nineteenth-century and the liberal legalist thought of our own time. Melville’s Bartleby had that condition in extremis, and the twenty-first-century protesters suffer from it as well. That commonality, I suggest, lays the groundwork for the otherwise inexplicable empathic bond between them. The first part of this paper discusses some of the scholarly literature on Bartleby, with an eye toward elucidating why it is that so few scholars have felt the need to understand Bartleby’s political malady – or more generally, to understand his humanity. The second part discusses the jurisprudential background and content of the story, expanding where need be on Brook Thomas’s similarly motivated account from the 1980s. The third and fourth parts introduce the idea of “consensual dysphoria” as an individualized, psychic manifestation of some of the discomforts attendant to liberal and neoliberal markets and state organization, and makes the case that this is the essence of Bartleby’s affliction. I conclude with some observations about the OWS movement informed by some aspects of this analysis.

Occupy this: why some colleges had Occupy Wall Street protests

During autumn 2011, Occupy Wall Street protests began rapidly emerging at college and university campuses across the United States. Many of these student groups developed an agenda based on localized issues at their particular college. Still, nearly all Occupy student protests also followed the common goal of bringing change to a system plagued with an inequality gap between the “99 and 1 percent”, massive financial debt, rising tuition costs, and a poor labour market for students who spend thousands of dollars for their education. While these students are taking aim at large, powerful, “elitist” institutions, data indicate that these protestors belong to institutions similar to those they are opposing. Our data from 191 colleges and universities with an “Occupy” event indicate that protests are more likely to occur at four-year institutions that have a largely white population. Additionally, these protests emerge at institutions with the greatest amount of resources including larger staffs, higher faculty wages, and higher tuition fees.

Mutiny on the Bay: Investigating the Presentation of the Scott Olsen Police Assault on the Websites of San Francisco Bay Area Local Television Stations

In the fall of 2011, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests emerged, becoming a global movement. In the United States, the Occupy Oakland demonstrations witnessed instances of violence, most notably in the injury of Scott Olsen, an Occupy Oakland supporter and former U.S. Marine who was struck by a police projectile. This article investigates the presentation of the Olsen injury on the websites of five major local television stations in the San Francisco Bay area, as a way to illustrate the negative coverage of dissident social movement activists, even when they are former military veterans, a group treated respectfully in the media. In this case, Olsen’s presence created a conflict in the application of the themes and devices composing the “protest paradigm.” The findings of this study suggest the existence of a “patriotism paradigm,” a news treatment that neutralizes the credibility of individuals or groups seeking a claim to the positive associations of patriotism and military service of the post-9/11 United States, and can allow news treatments such as the “protest paradigm” to exist without being contradicted.

The transformation of the Occusphere

ABSTRACTBetween September and November 2011, the Occupy Wall Street protest encampment in New York captured the public imagination worldwide and generated similar events in hundreds of urban spaces. Even after riot police evicted the occupations, the Occupy social movement continued to confront political authority over questions of inequality, and it remains active both online and at diverse protest events. However, beyond the social movement there has been a growth of related anti-capitalist politics. The Occusphere is constituted by the totality of Occupy-inspired activity on the internet and in social networks, and in the larger area of political ideas. This study explores the Occusphere as an expanding zone of densely interlinked anti-capitalist politics with three modes of existence – urban spaces, virtual electronic spaces, and intellectual spaces.

Precarious Theatre

In 2011 I staged Waiting for Godot at the Occupy Wall Street Protest as part of my research into the performance history of this play in real-world crisis settings. The production resonated with earlier productions of the play in prisons, during wars, and after floods and raises the question: how does this classic text metamorphose when staged in non-traditional performance spaces? How does this performance illuminate something new about the play, and something new about the Occupy protest?

Web 2.0 user knowledge and the limits of individual and collective power

This paper revisits and builds upon a prominent theme in First Monday’s 2008 “Critical perspectives on Web 2.0” special issue: exploration and critique of the claim that Web 2.0 “... provides novel opportunities for the articulation of individual and collective social power by enhancing participation in media production and cultural expression” (Zimmer, 2008). This article refreshes the critique by examining how impediments to users’ technical knowledge about how Web 2.0 platforms function affect user power.After reviewing how the scholarly literature on Web 2.0 accounts for the user knowledge/user power connection, this paper suggests Braman’s (2006) concept of “informational power” as a useful heuristic for exploring how access to information about how Web 2.0 platforms function operates as a “genetic” facet of user power. Then, using Braman’s framework, the article reviews two cases of struggle over informational power in regards to the Twitter platform: controversy over the Library of Congress Twitter archive and Occupy Wall Street protesters inaccurately accusing Twitter of censorship because of a misunderstanding about “Trending Topics.” Through the application of Braman’s framework to these cases, it becomes clear how users’ prospects for developing technical knowledge about the platforms shape the limits and horizons of individual and collective power.