Occupy Wall Street Research Articles

Prefigurative remembrance: Archiving as activist mnemonic practice

This article explores the role of archives and archiving in the memory–activism nexus with reference to the various ‘movements of the squares’ that started in 2011. The Egyptian Uprising, 15M, Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi Uprising and Nuit Debout each made concerted efforts to ensure their future remembrance by laying down an archive in which their actions and aspirations were ‘sedimented’. The article explores the crossover between the prospective and retrospective orientations of this activist memory work. It argues that there is an affinity between the affordances of archives as a mnemonic medium and the movements’ ‘politics of prefiguration’, both because the participatory character of the archiving is already an exercise in radical democracy and because an archive provides not a single narrative with a prescribed meaning but a resource for future meaning-making by others.

Mobilizing Literature: Social Movements and Post-1945 US Literary Studies

Abstract: This essay proposes a movements-based method for studying the development of US literature after World War II. It argues that the cultural materialist and institutionalist frameworks that have dominated post-1945 US literary studies in recent years have systematically overlooked the role of social movements as catalysts for cultural change. Through readings of the literary magazine n+1, the archival materials of Octavia Butler, and novels by a range of other major postwar US authors, it offers an account of how the collective mobilizations of the past sixty years—from Civil Rights, the New Left, and the Women's Movement to Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo—have decisively shifted the contours of the US literary field.

To what extent did Karl Marx's political thought influence the Occupy Wall Street Movement in the 21st Century?

To what extent did Karl Marx's political thought influence the Occupy Wall Street Movement in the 21st Century?

“We are the 99%”: Exploring the impact of politicized wealth-based identity on the established middle-class

ABSTRACT The Occupy Wall Street movement popularized the slogan “we are the 99%” to highlight economic disparities. In this studies, we investigated the impact of the 99% identity on middle-class attitudes and collective action intentions. Conducting two correlational studies (Study 1, N = 374; Study 2, N = 344) and two experimental studies (Study 3, N = 336; Study 4, N = 127), we found that 99% identity correlated with greater intolerance of economic inequality and stronger intentions for collective action than middle-class identity. These findings were replicated and extended in Studies 3–4 by two experiments. Indirectly, social norms were associated with inequality intolerance and collective actions through identification with the 99%, but no direct effect was found, Overall, identifying with the 99% is associated with middle-class mobilisation against economic inequality.

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.

Beyond the Dark Sides of the Web: For an Ethical Model of Digital Solidarity

ABSTRACT In this article, I intend to propose an ethical model for digital solidarity. On the one hand, it emphasises the importance of adopting a solidarity model to escape the logic of surveillance capitalism and the race for profits typical of the digital giants’ business model. On the other, it is intended to point out that a model of solidarity embodied in the digital network may instead offer a more universalistic alternative to the types of solidarity that have often imposed themselves in our contemporary political landscape, namely solidarity limited to groups in opposition to others. In order to show what economic and political characteristics this model should respect, two case studies will be examined, namely Wikipedia and Occupy Wall Street.

Small Acts of Kindness in an Unequal World: Picture Books During and After the Great Recession

Abstract: The 2007–2008 financial crisis caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs, homes, and health insurance. From the encampments of Occupy Wall Street to the historic campaign of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, the crisis also spawned a wave of progressive movements. To paraphrase the opening remarks of the inaugural issue of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy , economic inequality is again up for debate. However, it is not up for debate in the pages of picture books. With picture books published between 2007 and 2019 as the reference point, this article argues that most of these books depoliticize economic inequality. Building on the work of other scholars, this article also argues that, despite other changes in the landscape of children's publishing, most of these books resemble books written before the recession.

Social Movements in Europe, from the Past to the Present

Abstract Over time, the concept of social movement has evolved as society has changed, but has always implied collective action in the public space. The form of social contestation has changed, according to the conjuncture of each historical period. In 18th century, the transition from the Old Regime to Liberalism provoked movements considered by some authors as “primitive” or “premodern”, as they were spontaneous, sporadic and depoliticized. Industrial society of the 19th century gave rise to the labor movement and trade unionism, which from then on organized the social movements. In the 20th century there were changes and innovation in the collective way of acting, there was the emergence of a series of social movements that differ from the traditional in terms of the objectives and actors involved, such as the pacifist, ecologist, feminist movements, acting on the fringes of parties and unions. The 21st century has witnessed a set of movements that begin on social networks, such as Generation Scratch, Outraged, Occupy Wall Street, Screw the Troika, and quickly outgrow local scales to become global. Through the use of a theoretical and conceptual framework derived from the theories of social movements and taking into account the current transformation of collective action that has been witnessed in the 21st century, we intend to verify if we are facing a new social phenomenon or another phase of “repertoire” change.

The tension between connective action and platformisation: Disconnected action in the GameStop short squeeze

Although the Reddit-led short squeeze of GameStop shares in 2021 drew comparisons with Occupy Wall Street, this article focuses on one key area of difference: where Occupy exemplified the theoretical model of connective action through its discursive and technological openness, mobilisation around the short squeeze followed a different pattern characterised by discursive and technological disconnections, which we argue partly reflects the intervening decade of platformisation. Our case shows how platforms can establish boundaries as well as brokerage points in contentious politics, with particular regard to repertoires of action, collective identities and discourses. We show how in our case, these boundaries impeded discursive and technological connections, instead organising users into relatively disconnected zones and ultimately reducing their power and impact over broader discursive systems. Our argument is explored using three data sets from Reddit, Twitter and legacy news media outlets, using a combination of non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) topic modelling and manual content analysis.

Poland as Gilead. Pop culture fiction and performative protests in the era of the pandemic

The use of iconic popular culture symbols is an increasingly common strategy applied by social protest organizers. The Guy Fawkes mask from the ‘V for Vendetta’ comic book became a symbol of the Anonymous group, and later of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Salvador Dalí mask, popularized in the ‘La casa de papel’ Netflix series, was used in street protests in Spain and Italy. Motifs taken from the HBO adaptation of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ novel gained high visibility in thousands of women’s protests against the introduction of the de facto abortion ban in Poland. Basing on images documenting the Polish protests published in social media, we demonstrate how popular culture symbols are transformed into cultural codes which bridge on-street and online protest actions. This connection has become crucial in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using qualitative visual content analysis, we prepared a classification of the symbols employed. Our contribution to the theory of performative protests is to reveal the importance of analogies with the political series that Polish protesters have used by means of the general connotation: Poland is Gilead.

Criticising Capitalism in the City and on the Stage: The City Street Movement Occupy Wall Street and Tim Price’s Protest Song

Abstract Following the 2022 CDE conference’s concern regarding “how theatre and the city are productively embroiled and [. . .] how contemporary Anglophone theatre has redefined [. . .] [and blurred the] borders between centre and periphery, street and stage, performer and spectator” (Garson et al.), I will focus on Tim Price’s Protest Song, which was commissioned by the National Theatre and was staged there in December 2013. Setting the play in the streets of London in front of the iconic urban space of St Paul’s Cathedral, starring a homeless main character, and transgressing the boundaries between theatrical and actual spaces, Price arguably questions conventional urban and social binaries as well as economic and social hierarchies. With the help of experimental and critical strategies, he examines the city street movement Occupy Wall Street and its repercussions. The present article analyses these strategies and asks how they represent, perform, question, and assess urban hierarchies, city street activism, and the financial sector, as they are symbolised by the (urban and mental) spaces of London as capital and London as city of capital. I will furthermore look into how Price’s strategies reframe social inequality and turbo-capitalism as well as to what extent they redefine the borders between centre and periphery, street and stage, performer and spectator.

Entre antifascismo e antifa: uma conversa com Mark Bray, autor de Antifa

ABSTRACT Antifa, by Mark Bray, innovated in a field of study with wide coverage: fascism. Bray dared to look at the other and forgotten side: anti-fascism. In his book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Bray deals not with anti-fascism as mere opposition to fascism, but with a tradition of political combat that dates back to the beginnings of Mussolini’s Fascism. It is noticeable in Antifa, and even in the interview that follows, the combination between the two universes of the author. Bray, an academic historian at Dartmouth College, analyzes historical and contemporary fascisms, as well as the evolution of the concept of fascism over the last century and the equally secular struggle of anti-fascists. But this is not just a book of academic or historiographical analysis. The militant side of the author (one of the organizers of Occupy Wall Street) emerges, especially in the dozens of interviews with anti-fascists around the world.

In, Of, and For the City: Acknowledging the 2022 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology

In, Of, and For the City: Acknowledging the 2022 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology

Alienation and Activism

Does alienation draw individuals toward social movements? Midcentury sociologists argued this to be the case, but scholars from the 1970s onward broke from this consensus. The evidentiary basis for this turn was sparse, however, with research seldom measuring different forms of alienation or addressing stages before mobilization. The current study uses four-wave panel data from the National Study of Youth and Religion (2003–13) to examine how alienation and social relationships during the transition from adolescence into young adulthood predict eventual social movement participation. The analysis finds that, while powerlessness dissuades individuals from movements, alienation in the forms of meaninglessness and social isolation is a strong predictor of participation in movements across the political spectrum (Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party Movement). Group involvement is not found to distinguish participants until stages proximal to mobilization. The study underscores the importance of early life socialization for understanding who protests.

Mapping the protest. Static, dynamic, and spatial qualities of Occupy and Indignados movements protests in Spain and the United States of America in 2011-2012

This article examines the topic of protest mapping during the rise of Occupy Wall Street in the United States in 2011–2012. It focuses on various practices of protest mapping, including a con­sideration of how space (public, urban, or of the protest camp) is represented in the visual sources discussed. It also addresses the qualitative difference between protest mapping and other mapping practices, as well as the categorization of protest mapping terms. Using the method of source analysis and online research, the article adopts, as its key concept for studying protest as a multi-threaded phenomenon, the notion of détournement. This concept was first described in 1957 by Gil Wolman and Guy Debord, and from the early 1960s was used as a creative method and also a revolutionary strategy by the avant-garde artistic group, the Situationist International. The categories of stasis, dynamism, and spatiality will also be important points of reference.

Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank

Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank

Little Amal’s New York Journey: The Big Puppet in the Big Apple

Little Amal’s New York Journey: The Big Puppet in the Big Apple

ЗАРУБЕЖНАЯ «КАРНАВАЛЬНАЯ» КУЛЬТУРА: МЕЖДУ ИДИОМОЙ И ВИРУСНЫМ КОНЦЕПТОМ

the article continues the series of studies by the author of modern carnival culture, in the theory and practice of which serious discrepancies are noticeable. The text focuses on the little-studied linguistic and cultural side of the common terms Laughtivism, Laughter resistance, Strategic humor, Humorous protest, Protestival, Clownfrontation, Tactical Carnival, Intentional carnival, Carnivalesque Protest, Carnivalized politics, the framework of which is built on the fusion of the nominations of laughterand seriousness. The practical subject of analysis is the communities, events and practices in relation to which this terminology is used. The movement “Carnival against capital” is considered; actions of the group “Rebel Army of Clowns”, the action “Occupy Wall Street”, actions of the movements “Reclaim the Streets”, creation of "Bread and puppet" theater etc. According to the first hypothesis, the above foreign terms used to characterize foreign carnival culture are idioms in which semantics cannot be derived from external construction of the lexeme itself. In the second hypothesis, these concepts can withstand verification if the theory of exaptation is applied to them, in line with which such hybrids of laughter and seriousness can act as a by-product of the development of carnival culture. As a result of the study, both hypotheses were partially confirmed. Foreign conceptual lexemes that claim the status of theoretical concepts of carnival culture do not stand up to verification, since they completely characterize a decarnivalized world, comparable to a viral formation on the body of the theory and practice of carnival.

Impact of Various Social Movements in Advocating for Change in the 21st Century

The following study has been focused on evaluating the impact of social movements on driving social changes in the 21st century. Social movements involve conducting public campaigns with the common aim of leading a change in society or the implementation of a new policy or rule associated with social interest. In short, social movements are closely connected to achieving some determined social goals. Therefore, a secondary data collection method has been followed and relevant data has been collected from different journals, newspaper articles and websites. The findings suggest that social movements have become vital for driving a new change in society and the changing social, industrial and business contexts have led to several destructive impacts which are encouraging to conduct these social campaigns. These movements have been identified to be vital for society as well as for protecting public rights, environmental sustainability and inclusion in society. Several vital social movements of the 21st century have been explored, including “Black Lives Matter”, “Occupy Wall Street” and “MeToo Movement”. Additionally, their potential impact on contemporary society has been addressed and the changes brought by these movements have been explained. It has been identified that the “Occupy Wall Street” movement has not brought new changes in society, while the “MeToo” movement has convicted several persons accused of sexual exploitation, mainly in workplaces. The Black Lives Matter movement has changed the perception of racial discrimination, whereas the “MeToo” movement has increased the rate of “sex-crime reporting”. Keyword : 21st Century, Public Campaigns, Social Change, Social Movements.

From Occupy Wall Street to the Gilets Jaunes: On the populist turn in the protest movements of the 2010s

Many recent protest movements, from the 2011 square occupation movements to the Gilets Jaunes display typical populist features, starting from an appeal to the people vs the elites. Drawing on my work on social movements in the 2010s in this article, I discuss the different components and implications of this ‘populist turn’ and its differences vis-à-vis other forms of populism, and in particular right-wing populism. I claim that social movements’ populism involves the adoption of a ‘popular identity’ as a unifying notion as a means to compensate for identity fragmentation; an identification with social majorities evident in Occupy Wall Street’s famous ‘we are the 99%’ slogan, which departs from the minoritarian identification of previous movements; and an appeal to common sense and the nation vis-à-vis the militant antagonism and cosmopolitanism prevalent in many previous social movement waves. This cultural transformation within social movements is, on the one hand, an indication of changing political opportunities and the unlocking of new areas of support for protest movements and, on the other hand, the product of social movements’ self-reflection and the attempt to escape the self-ghettoising tendencies of previous protest waves. However, this populist turn has also raised concerns among some activists, especially concerning the association of the ‘popular’ with the ‘national’ and a perception that popular identity involves undermining internal diversity and pluralism.