Citation:
Date Presented:
February 7, 2013Abstract:
Occupy is the continuing leftist protest movement characterized by tent encampments in city centers in over 1500 cities since the first call of the Movimiento 15-M, or the Indignados, began May 15, 2011. While the movement self-identifies as an international movement inspired by the Arab Spring and especially the demonstrations in Tahir Square, it lacks strong intra-national let alone international organizing networks. Occupations are linked by statements of solidarity and shared complaints, rhetoric, designs, and tactics. One aim of my project is to map and analyze these decentralized international knowledge and resource sharing networks.
A key aim is to write a comprehensive history of OWS, drawing from my own fieldwork interviews, surveys, and collected materials and media from September 2011 through August 2012. From this and similar data collected in Madrid, I build a case study of NYC and Madrid (the first and largest Occupations) and compare the movements’ demographics, structure, relationships with the police and civic authorities, use of media, and evolution of tactics and aims. I argue that the internal politics of the movements and their relationships with the established institutional left in NYC and Madrid played a greater role in the trajectory and of the movements than did international networks. I build a theory of Occupy operating on two levels: first as a core activist group with strong ties to the institutional left, and secondly as an embodied public sphere that amplified local concerns framed in the context of the global economic crisis.