I went to be a witness to whatever was about to transpire. Many people like me were committed to not engaging the police at all. … We only desired to be there, to protect others with our presence and to carefully record as incidents unfolded.
OccupyMovement
Our inaugural digital forum on the Occupy Movement features critical essays by Craig Calhoun, Michael Kennedy, Saskia Sassen and a number of other leading scholars, ethnographic dispatches from multiple sites of occupation and ongoing activism, and a curated digest of perspectives on Occupy that have appeared on other sites and in other publications.
Pollsters on the Occupy Movement
Polling data on the Occupy Movement has come a long way since New York Magazine’s early October survey of 100 “inMore…
| December 14, 2011
The Limitations of Protest
First there was the “Tea Party” and now there are the various “Occupy Wall Street” movements. The former was from its start better organized and financed than the latter, and one is on the right while the other is on the left, but both are responses to similar frustrations and fears besetting America. Analogous movements, some of them already heading toward more violent confrontations, are springing up in Europe as well.
Why Occupy Harvard?
Why set up a protest camp at the richest university in the nation? One answer is presented on a signMore…
| December 14, 2011
Occupying Harvard Yard
Since the evening of November 9th, when an encampment of thirty some odd colorful tents were set up in frontMore…
| December 13, 2011
Occupy Wall Street Goes Home
Introduction: OWS Forecloses on the Foreclosers At long last, Occupy Wall Street has gone home. Yet it does not appearMore…
| December 12, 2011
No Confidence
On Monday, November 28, 2011 the academic Senate at the University of California, Berkeley met to consider resolutions condemning theMore…
| December 8, 2011
#OccupyDemocracy
On November 3rd occupiers amassed in an Oakland “general strike,” shutting down the entire port of Oakland for several hours. Over 3,000 people have been arrested in association with the Occupy protests since they began in New York on September 17th. Inspired by the citizen revolutions that unfolded this past spring across the Middle East and North Africa, occupations have spread to nearly every state in the United States, and gained traction in cities across the globe from London to Athens to Madrid to Bogotá. The occupations have succeeded in galvanizing a conversation—unseen since the 1970s—about equity, inequality, opportunity, the influence of money in politics, and the outsized power of corporations and financial institutions.
| December 8, 2011
Occupying Ambiguity
Penn Occupy. Occupy Penn. Penn Occupy Philly. All of these names have been used to designate a collectivity at the University of Pennsylvania that has formed in the wake of the Occupy movement.
| December 7, 2011
Occupy the Opera
Since the eviction of the Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park, occupiers in New York have twice taken over space at Lincoln Center in conjunction with some fortuitously timed operas.
