Suchergebnisse

The Occupy movement in Hong Kong was sustained for about 80 days because of government tolerance, the presence of determined participants, and a weak leadership. The government tolerated the occupation because its initial use of force, in particular teargas, was counterproductive and provoked large-scale participation. Unlike other social movements, such as the 1989 Tiananmen movement, the Occupy movement reached its peak of participation at the very beginning, making it difficult to sustain the momentum. The presence of determined participants who chose to stay until the government responded was crucial to the sustaining of the movement. These self-selected participants were caught in a dilemma between fruitless occupation and reluctance to retreat without a success. The movement lasted also because the weak leadership was unable to force the government to concede or devise approaches for making a "graceful exit." Consequently, site clearance became the common choice of both the government and the protestors. This book develops a new framework to explain the sustaining of decentralized protest in the absence of strong movement organizations and leadership. Sustained protests are worth research because they not only reveal the broad social context in which the protests arise and persist but also point out the dynamics of the escalation or the decline of the protests. In addition, sustained protest may not only lead to more dramatic action, but they also result in the diffusion of protests or lead to significant policy changes

Intro -- Book Title -- Contents -- Preface -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Information Desk -- Media -- Library -- Facilitation -- Safer Spaces -- People of Color -- Arts & Culture -- Sustainability -- Direct action -- Town planning -- Elsewhere -- Onward -- Index.

Scholars and activists have hotly debated the relationship between social media and social movement activity during the current global cycle of protest. This article investigates media practices in the Occupy movement and develops the concept of social movement media cultures: the set of tools, skills, social practices and norms that movement participants deploy to create, circulate, curate and amplify movement media across all available platforms. The article posits three key areas of inquiry into social movement media cultures, and explores them through the lens of the Occupy movement: (1) What media platforms, tools and skills are used most widely by movement participants? (Practices); (2) What role do experienced practitioners play in movement media practices? (Expertise); and (3) In what ways does the movement media culture lean toward open or participatory, and in what ways toward closed or top-down? (Open/Closed). Insight into the media culture of the Occupy movement is based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, visual research and participation in Occupy Hackathons, as well as the Occupy Research General Demographic and Political Participation Survey, a database of approximately 1200 local Occupy sites, and a dataset of more than 13 million Occupy-related tweets. The findings will be of interest to both scholars and movement participants.

How can we conceive of practices of counter-conduct within spaces of resistance? This article examines practices of counter-conduct in the context of Occupy movements that were keen to emphasise their openness, inclusivity, and their manifestation of processes which facilitate non-hierarchical and radically democratic social relations. As they criti- cised and work to unmake a global order marked by privilege, violence, alienation and extraordinary deprivation, they claimed to embody and explore alternatives rooted in soli- darity and empathy. However, such grand narratives can serve to obscure the more con- tested or ambiguous practices of these movements. In the face of stories and (proclaimed) subjects of emancipation, we explore those instances where resistance breaks down, excludes, ignores, privileges, and where subjects attempt to resist resistance. We do this by mobilising Foucault's concept of counter-conduct, which allows for power to be conceptualised as dispersed, networked, and as predicated on unstable and multiplicitous subjectivities. In this context, exploring the processes of counter-conduct of those challen- ging other forms of counter-conduct does not fall back into a dichotomous position which legitimates the status quo, but both complicates the picture and asks important ethical questions about the form, nature and practice of contemporary resistance movements.

This paper argues that Karl Polanyi's theory of the 'double movement' reasonably explains the development of the Occupy Movement in the context of post-financial crisis America. I argue that the 2008 financial crisis precipitated the collapse of an economy that, in Polanyian terms, was significantly disembedded from social institutions, and that the consequent social dislocation laid the foundations for a Polanyian 'countermovement' by society against market fundamentalism. In explaining the disembedding of the economy prior to the financial crisis, I explore the neoliberal turn of the 1970s � specifically financial deregulation and innovation. Following this, the paper finds that the movement's substantive success in imposing social constraints on markets was limited, but that it successfully created a new socially-oriented political-economic dialogue. Furthermore, the paper investigates the movement in the South African political context and finds that its applicability is limited in different political environments.

While Christian involvement in progressive social movements and activism is increasingly recognized, this literature has rarely gone beyond conceptualising religion as a resource to consider instead the ways in which individual activists may articulate their religious identity and how this intersects with the political. Based on ten in-depth interviews with Christian supporters of the London Occupy movement, this study offers an opportunity to respond to this gap by exploring the rich meaning-making processes of these activists. The article suggests that the location of the Occupy camp outside St Paul's Cathedral was of central importance in bringing the Christian Occupiers' religio-political identities to the foreground, their Christianity being defined in opposition to that represented by St Paul's. The article then explores the religio-political meaning-making of the Christian Occupiers and introduces the term 'activist religiosity' as a way of understanding how religion and politics were articulated, and enacted, in similar ways. Indeed, religion and politics became considerably entangled and intertwined, rendering theoretical frameworks that conceptualise religion as a resource increasingly inappropriate. The features of this activist religiosity include post-institutional identities, a dislike of categorisation, and, centrally, the notion of 'doings'—a predominant focus on engaged, active involvement.