The Occupy Movement and the Politics of Vulnerability

The Occupy movement has generated a significant amount of scholarly literature, most of which has focused on the movement's tactics or goals, or sought to explain its emergence. Nevertheless, we lack an explanation for the movement's broad appeal and mass support. In this article we present original research on Occupy in New York City, Detroit, and Berlin, which demonstrates that the movement's heterogeneous participants coalesced around the concept of vulnerability. Vulnerability is an inability to adapt to shocks and stresses, and it inhibits social reproduction and prohibits social mobility. Rather than specifically discussing the wealth of elites per se, Occupy participants consistently expressed the feeling that the current political economic system safeguards elites and increases the vulnerability of everyone else. We argue that the Occupy movement has reworked the relationship among a range of political struggles that were hitherto disconnected (i.e. ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements) and rendered them complementary through the politics of vulnerability.     

Occupation as refrain: territory and beyond in Occupy London

Emerging with the wider ‘movements of the squares’ of 2011, Occupy London was defined by occupation, and by participants’ negotiation of what occupation meant. Its forms and meanings changed as London’s Occupiers moved between occupied sites, through uprootings by eviction, and into post-eviction attempts to extend Occupy’s territorial politics without the camps. This paper builds on three years of ethnography to consider occupation as an unfolding process, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘refrain’. This describes territory in three ‘moments’: the marking of a fragile centre; the stabilization of a bounded ‘home’; and the breaching of boundaries, extending in progressive directions. This rubric is used to analyze London’s occupations, and their defining tension, between an expansive desire to ‘Occupy Everywhere’ – connecting to the wider ‘99 percent’ – and the tendency to become embedded in the protest camp ‘home’. The features of ‘home’ are analyzed using Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’, highlighting an alterity with ambivalent consequences for Occupy’s project. The paper argues that despite a desire to ‘deterritorialize’ occupation, Occupy London stalled in the moment of ‘home’, a consequence of the camp’s status as the ‘common ground’ of an often disparate movement, and the reduction of productive capacities characterizing Occupy’s terminal downswing.     

Real Politics in Occupy: Transcending the Rules of the Day

Abstract

This paper analyses the Occupy movement in order to explore the mode of its participants' engagement with radical change. It also sketches the framework of real politics within which they were acting. It is a politics that accepts the constitutive lack of the political sphere, irreducibility of social antagonisms and alterity. First, by utilising Lacan and Derrida's theoretical constructions, the article examines ways in which Occupy aimed to transcend the ‘rules of the day’. It then describes the challenges of non-hierarchical organising and radical inclusion that the movement faced. Subsequently, I briefly analyse 2 aporias that were endured in Occupy: between the ideal and non-ideal as well as between unity and singularity. These aporias did not mark a stalemate that paralysed the movement but pointed to the limits that had to be negotiated by Occupy's participants. Occupy demonstrated that, in reality, direct democracy does not work like an ideal of a self-transparent and completely non-alienated form of decision-making; this is perhaps the most important lesson that has to be borne in mind when considering the question of whether it is inevitable that the lacks in the system and in subjects continually re-emerge, and when asking what this can mean for the potential of universalising direct democracy and the future of radical activism. This paper draws on ‘militant ethnographic’ and participatory action research within Occupy in Dublin and semi-structured interviews with participants from Ireland and the USA.     

‘TODOS SOMOS PRESIDENTES/WE ARE ALL PRESIDENTS’

In light of recent discussions of Jacques Rancière's notion of the political in cultural theory and the ‘left turn’ in Latin America, exemplified in the election of Evo Morales as the first indigenous president, this essay discusses concepts of governance elaborated by Bolivian indigenous intellectuals and media activists. It engages in detail with three examples of thinking through what is arguably a broad de-colonial process: the work of the Andean Oral History Workshop (THOA) and the movement to reconstitute the ayllu; Pablo Mamani's analysis of the micro-governments in El Alto; and CEFREC-CAIB's indigenous media activism. Thinking from the perspective of a long-standing struggle against global capitalism and its colonial legacies, the political constitutes – paradoxically – a complex and dynamic process of institutionalized consensus governance. Levels of community, regional, and national governance are bound into a feedback loop where representation gives way to the ideal of ‘mandar obedeciendo’ (governing by obeying). The Bolivian ‘democratic revolution’ is hence not conceptualized merely as a widening of the citizen base – a form of inclusion that Rancière would call ‘police’-but rather as profoundly reshaping the relation between the social, the cultural, and the state, and thus of democracy itself.     

Psychological antecedents and motivational models of collective action: examining the role of perceived effectiveness in political protest participation

The present study examines Hong Kong citizens’ willingness to participate in the Occupy Central/Umbrella Movement. A representative adult survey (N = 816) was conducted before the Occupy Central protest in 2014. Regression analyses showed that the core psychological antecedents of political identity (psychological attachment to pro-democracy parties and Occupy activists), political efficacy (perceived effectiveness of individual and movement agency), ideology (dissatisfaction with the pace of democratization), and emotion (anger with the political environment) were significant predictors of likely participation. Measures of perceived effectiveness of the Occupy movement to achieve successful outcomes (i.e. its ability to influence public opinion, strengthen the pro-democracy cause in Hong Kong, and facilitate opinion expression) explained additional variance even after controlling for demographics and the core antecedents. An integrated motivational model of collective action was then tested using structural equation modeling. Findings are consistent with the extant literature. Moral convictions (democracy as a fundamental human value) served as an antecedent of identity, efficacy, ideology, and anger, while identity exhibited direct and indirect effects on participation through efficacy, ideology and anger. The model also pointed to a role for perceived effectiveness, supporting the idea that individuals are motivated by other potential outcomes of a protest beyond achieving its primary objective.     

Broadening the Land Question in Food Sovereignty to Northern Settings: A Case Study of Occupy the Farm

Abstract

Land access is an accepted corollary to food sovereignty, long promoted by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC). LVC's land access politics have evolved with increased incorporation of diverse perspectives, but remain largely focused on achieving ‘integral agrarian reform’ in the global South. Here, I take a case where food sovereignty activists (‘Occupy the Farm’ (OTF)) occupied land owned by a public university in California, the USA, in order to broaden food sovereignty's land access considerations beyond the South, and to analyze conditions where political actions (including occupations) can help achieve changes in land access regimes. The OTF action was successful in challenging cultural norms about property and achieving access, partly due to the occupation having foregrounded multiple appealing narratives that invited participation and wider support. These narratives included agroecology versus biotechnologies; community/public access versus privatization; participatory versus bureaucratic governance structure; and green space/food production versus urban development. The article tests the use of the ‘land sovereignty’ frame in expanding food sovereignty's land politics, to encompass land contestation contexts globally and deal with the particular conditions surrounding lands. The case indicates that land occupations in the North are potentially useful—but uncertain, and very context-dependent—tactics to promote land and food sovereignty.     

Strategies,Action Repertoires and DIY Activism in the Animal Rights Movement

Following Tilly, this paper argues that a social movement is what it does as much as why it does it. This approach is particularly important in the case of the animal rights movement, which is often demonized as extremist and violent. Critics of the movement claim that animal activists use letter bombs, arson attacks and threats to intimidate those they see as animal abusers and that violent direct action of this kind is typical of the movement as a whole. The present paper argues that the mainstream animal movement – in the USA, the UK and Australia – is overwhelmingly non-violent and that its core strategies and tactics have two broad aims, namely to gain publicity for the movement and to challenge conventional thinking about how we treat non-human animals. This is achieved primarily by the deployment of the key tactical mechanisms of persuasion, protest, non-cooperation and intervention. These tactics may be deployed collectively or as DIY (Do-It-Yourself) activism which many grassroots animal activists – ‘caring sleuths’ to use Shapiro's apt term – seem to prefer. The paper focuses on demonstrations and pamphleteering as examples of publicity strategies or liberal governance strategies as well as critical governance strategies or interference strategies such as the hunger strike, ethical vegetarianism and undercover surveillance.     

Open networks and secret Facebook groups: exploring cycle effects on activists’ social media use in the 2010/11 UK student protests

Abstract

Much has been written in recent years about the growing impact of social media on social movements. While authors have extolled the virtues of Facebook and Twitter as organisational and informational tools for a range of movements from the Arab Spring to Occupy, evidence remains patchy as to under what conditions social media is most effective at engaging and mobilising the wider public. Drawing on the work of Tarrow, this article considers the impact of cycle effects on the effectiveness of social media as a mobilising and organising tool for the 2010/11 U.K. student protests. Although preceding the broader ‘movement of the squares’ contention cycle, the protests made similar use of social media for generating mass participation. Yet, its mobilising power was dependent on a number of temporal factors, including amplification through mainstream media and the urgency of its initial campaign goal. Moreover, towards the end of the cycle, activists were found to be using social media – via ‘secret’ Facebook groups – in ways that reinforced emerging group hierarchies, arguably contradicting their initial commitment to open-access networks and participatory democracy.     

‘Goldman-Sachs doesn’t care if you raise chicken’: the challenges of resistant prefiguration

This article addresses debates in the ‘post-Occupy movement’ over the resistant potential of prefigurative politics, and asks how prefiguration can be conceptualized as resistance in relation to activists’ understanding of politics, power and social change. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with activists in New York City, it looks at anarchist politics after Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Here, the absence of spectacular moments of confrontation and the removal of OWS’s space of mobilization and organizing challenged activists to adjust their prefigurative politics to the shifting spaces post-Occupy. This paper advances our understanding of prefigurative politics by conceptualizing prefiguration as resistance in consideration of the elements of ‘intent’, ‘recognition’, ‘opposition/confrontation’ and ‘creation’. Following this, it introduces the ‘logic of subtraction’ as a concept to understand the resistant potential of prefiguration. Here, I argue that rather than being in an antagonistic relationship with dominant power, resistant prefiguration aims for the creation of alternatives while subtracting power from the state, capital or any other external authority in order to render it obsolete. This understanding allows for a nuanced consideration of the proactive and creative potential of prefiguration, as well as of the difficulties of prefigurative practices in shifting movement spaces.     

This Is What Democracy Sounds Like: Protest Performances of the Citizenship Movement in Wisconsin and Beyond

This article is a case study of an ongoing singing protest in Wisconsin, the group that calls itself Solidarity Sing Along (SSA). An offshoot of the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising, for the first 15 months of its existence SSA was an important nexus of local activists working to recall Republican state senators and the governor. After the recall's failure the group not only continued to carry on but quite effortlessly reoriented its claim making and centered its protests on the freedom to assemble and petition the government, which had been an important cause from early on. Maintaining its pro-labor orientation, SSA has become part of a broader movement for democratic citizenship rights. Situating the group in musical practices of the Wisconsin protests and social movements more generally, I show that how SSA makes and performs its music makes it a part of the citizenship movement. This case study reveals a novel form of claim making within the repertoire of contention practiced by social movements: SSA is a ‘part-time occupation’ and as such has potential to be more resilient and durable than ‘permanent’ occupations à la Occupy Wall Street.     

Creating the collective: social media,the Occupy Movement and its constitution as a collective actor

This paper examines the process through which Occupy activists came to constitute themselves as a collective actor and the role of social media in this process. The theoretical framework combines Melucci's (1996 Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) theory of collective identity with insights from the field of organizational communication and particularly from the ‘CCO’ strand – short for ‘Communication is Constitutive of Organizing’. This allows us to conceptualize collective identity as an open-ended and dynamic process that is constructed in conversations and codified in texts. Based on interviews with Occupy activists in New York, London and other cities, I then discuss the communication processes through which the movement was drawing the boundaries with its environment, creating codes and foundational documents, as well as speaking in a collective voice. The findings show that social media tended to blur the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the movement in a way that suited its values of inclusiveness and direct participation. Social media users could also follow remotely the meetings of the general assembly where the foundational documents were ratified, but their voices were not included in the process. The presence of the movement on social media also led to conflicts and negotiations around Occupy's collective voice as constructed on these platforms. Thus, viewing the movement as a phenomenon emerging in communication allows us an insight into the efforts of Occupy activists to create a collective that was both inclusive of the 99% and a distinctive actor with its own identity.     

The political is the personal: women’s participation in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

This article examines women’s lived experiences as new activists in social movements. Taiwanese women – many of them housewives – joined the Sunflower Movement, a large-scale protest against a trade pact with China, and a related anti-nuclear movement in 2014. This study demonstrates how new women activists’ everyday political practices mutually construct the public and private spheres in the Taiwanese context. By ‘making private public’, these new activists use discourses of citizenship and maternalism to connect politics to social issues and daily life. Public participation makes these women feel empowered, and their daily actions transform politics from a set of formal, institutionalized practices to a practical fact of everyday life. This research also challenges the reproduction of a rigid private/public division in previous feminist scholarship that regards family and childcare as a separate realm that hinders women’s public participation. In a marked break from past accounts, these women don’t separate their caring responsibilities from their political actions. By focusing on new activists’ political action in and through their family and childcare, this research calls into question scholarly discussions that view maternalism primarily as a public discourse for mobilizing women or a visual strategy for collective protest. By considering the disruptive potential of all acts of mothering, this study paints a more complex and nuanced picture of women and mothers as protesters and reveals how activist women’s actions in the family and private social networks can be a central part of maternalist strategies’ radical potential.     

Clothing and social movements: Tibet and the politics of dress

The ‘cultural turn’ in social movement studies has brought a renewed outlook on new social movements and lifestyle movements. In this development on the symbolic challenge of contemporary movements, research has expanded to both music and art. However, little is known about the role of clothing in movements and how activists use it for social change. In making the case for a greater consideration of clothing’s tactical use in identity work, this paper explores the case of the Tibetan Lhakar movement. I argue that for Lhakar activists, clothing is the materialization of the political consciousness of the movement and symbolically acts as a mechanism of communication in shaping its political goals. By using social media to observe individualized collective actions of wearing Tibetan clothing, the paper demonstrates how activists frame and create new political opportunity structures for civic participation in a one party state that controls all speech and movement.     

The Globality of Whiteness in Post-Racial Visual Culture

This essay examines the spatial contours of post-racial visual culture. It argues that the ‘post-racial’ names the conditions under which racism operates flexibly within and beyond the logics of the colour line, while routinely disavowing its properly racial character through the symbolic deployment of multicultural humanitarianism. Even as it works through the figure of the ‘post-racial’ to bracket an engagement with the racialized rationale for the ‘nongeneralizability of human value’, the current US racial order has renovated the social structures that shore up whiteness as the privileged form humanity takes. The essay's point of departure is the iconic HOPE poster, produced by Shepard Fairey in 2008. It locates the poster's public display within a visual field subjected to neoliberal processes central to the constitution of a post-racial whiteness. It identifies two key moments in these processes. The first moment abstracts historical practices of materialist antiracism, such that racism becomes visualized as a manifestly individual subjective affair. In the second moment, post-racial visual culture repackages the visual logic of racial reference by displacing anti-black racism into morally benevolent categories suitable for humanitarian intervention, whose additional dematerialization is propped up by its migration to a digital terrain. To make this argument, the essay first offers a genealogy of the HOPE poster as it emerges from street art practices of commodity activism that obscure the structures of racial capitalism. It then treats the poster's central role in the ‘KONY 2012’ campaign, which redeployed this abstraction to recode the power of sight as a privileged form of US humanitarian violence. It concludes by considering the refusals by activists in the Occupy Wall Street movement to countenance a revised HOPE poster, even as the post-racial figure of ‘the protestor’ was lauded in corporate media.     

Transnational politics at the edges of sovereignty: social movements,crossings and the state at the US–Mexico border

This article documents the history of border crossings among a group of social movement activists located in southern Arizona. By comparing two types of US–Mexico border crossings separated ten years apart, the article explores how political groups become ‘transnationalized’ and in relation to what kinds of ‘states’. By contrasting the shift from a state‐centric movement to a transnational coalition, the case study analyses why, in the later period, political activists were no longer able to identify the same kind of state. In chronicling the disappearance of one kind of state formation and the emergence of a transnational one, this research argues that globalization—rather than simply reflecting a decline of the nation state—is a process entailing not only new forms of transnational political activism but also new forms of the state.     

‘The outraged young’: young Europeans,civic engagement and the new media in a time of crisis

Public involvement in traditional political institutions has declined significantly over the past few decades, leading to what some have seen as a crisis in citizenship. This trend is most striking amongst young people, who have become increasingly alienated from mainstream electoral politics in Europe. Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence to show that younger citizens are not apathetic about ‘politics’ – they have their own views and engage in democracy in a wide variety of ways that seem relevant to their everyday lives. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, young Europeans have borne the brunt of austerity in public spending: from spiralling youth unemployment, to cuts in youth services, to increased university tuition fees. In this context, the rise and proliferation of youth protest in Europe is hardly surprising. Indeed, youth activism has become a major feature of the European political landscape: from mass demonstrations of the ‘outraged young’ against political corruption and youth unemployment, to the Occupy movement against the excesses of global capitalism, to the emergence of new political parties. This article examines the role that the new media has played in the development of these protest movements across the continent. It argues that ‘digitally networked action’ has enabled a ‘quickening’ of youth participation – an intensification of political participation amongst young, highly educated citizens in search of a mouthpiece for their ‘indignation’.     

Gendered and classed activist identity in the Russian oppositional youth movement

This article examines how activist identity is constructed in the Russian opposition youth movement Oborona. The research is based on fieldwork among youth activists in Moscow and St Petersburg. The author analyses how activist identity is classed and gendered, as well as its relations to the Russian civic field. The article suggests, first, that the activist identity is marked by an affiliation with the intelligentsia: activists have grown up in intelligentsia families and articulate their activities through the intelligentsia's ‘markers’, such as intelligence, discussion skills and education. Secondly, activists follow a dissidents' cultural model, by emphasizing the importance of non‐conformism and traditional dissident values, and draw parallels between the contemporary government and the totalitarian Soviet state. Thirdly, this traditional intellectual dissident identity is associated with cosmopolitanism through the movement's international connections and appropriation of the forms of action of global social movements. Sometimes the activist practices and aspirations conflict with the group's ideals. Furthermore, the activist identity is gendered and embodied in the right activist ‘look’, which is defined by masculinity. Regardless of the movement's liberal ideals in regards to democracy, questions of gender and sexuality are not discussed, and activists do not question traditional understandings of gendered divisions of labour.     

Trust and technology: the social foundations of aviation regulation

This paper looks at the dilemmas posed by ‘expertise’ in high‐technology regulation by examining the US Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) ‘type‐certification’ process, through which they evaluate new designs of civil aircraft. It observes that the FAA delegate a large amount of this work to the manufacturers themselves, and discusses why they do this by invoking arguments from the sociology of science and technology. It suggests that – contrary to popular portrayal – regulators of high technologies face an inevitable epistemic barrier when making technological assessments, which forces them to delegate technical questions to people with more tacit knowledge, and hence to ‘regulate’ at a distance by evaluating ‘trust’ rather than ‘technology’. It then unravels some of the implications of this and its relation to our theories of regulation and ‘regulatory capture’.     

The Animal Rights Movement in Theory and Practice: A Review of the Sociological Literature

Traditionally, philosophers have had most to say about the ethics of our treatment of non‐human animals (hereafter animals); it is only in recent years that social scientists have engaged with issues concerning humans and other animals. However, in the sociological literature and more generally in the emerging field of Human–Animal Studies (HAS), evidence of interest in the animal protection movement is slight. This review of Eliasian theory, Marxist realism, feminism, ecofeminism, and social constructionist theory – along with key activist approaches to animal activism and advocacy – indicates the theoretical richness of the topic that is nonetheless empirically poor. The animal protection movement is referred to here simply as the animal movement or where appropriate, as one of its three strands – animal welfare, animal liberation and animal rights. The article concludes with a discussion of how social movement theory (the ‘why’) and practice (the ‘how’) might be enhanced by social movement scholars working in collaboration with animal activists.     

Student union ‘political anti-politics’ in post-conflict Nepal

In contrast to rhizomatic youth movements that inspired the ‘Arab spring’ uprisings and the ‘Occupy’ movements, youth political activism in Nepal was orchestrated by hierarchical political parties in part through political student unions. The ability of parties to deploy youth into the streets to enforce general strikes and force election participation has been critical to their success, but focus groups conducted with Nepali students in the spring of 2013 suggest that many youth are withdrawing from party activism. Youth disengagement in Nepal is the product of years of political instability and conflict that has impeded peace and development, rather than a globalizing individualism that is fragmenting traditional institutions. In this paper, I argue that the ability of political parties to mobilize youth in post-conflict Nepal is being challenged by two related conditions. First, the demands of political parties on students for personal sacrifice are weighed by students against their own personal aspirations and, secondly, the inability of the party hierarchies to sacrifice their priorities for greater political stability, development and peace – exemplified by the repeated failure to resolve constitutional issues – made this commitment to personal sacrifice harder to justify.