Visual Media and Culture of ‘Occupy’
Visual Media and Culture of ‘Occupy’

Author: Pamela Odih

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-10-17

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1443870064

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On 15th October 2011, hundreds of anti-capitalist protestors assembled into a spectacular carnivalesque procession towards Paternoster Square; the heartland of London’s banking district. Beginning with Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’, this book examines Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral in relation to media spectacle. Initially focusing on arrival narratives, it asks the question: were the 15th October 2011 anti-capitalist protestors ‘hailed’ into becoming the subjects of Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral? Based on extensive ethnographic interviews and photographic data, this book demonstrates the complex ways in which Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral ‘interpolated’ (Ashcroft 2001) and subverted media spectacle. Kairos exemplifies the longue durée of the art and ethics of Occupy. The bifarious dimensions of kairos emphasise an ethics of care and devotion alongside the indeterminate possibilities of the aleatory encounter. Formulated within Marxist aleatory materialism, this book explores the momentous reality of Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral. Instantiated within an extraordinary conjuncture of conflict between capital and labour, Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral manifested formidable expressions of resistance to the disembodied ‘space of flows’; ‘timeless times’; and the ‘real virtualities’ of transnational capitalist accumulation. Empirical case studies are used to engage with the extraordinary strategies that Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral politically cultivated to address: (i) the future of print news media, The Occupied Times of London; (ii) disjunctures and disruptions within the locality of the ‘space of place’ amidst the harsh reality of neoliberal austerity measures; (iii) the harnessing of multi-modal information communication technologies as part of an imperative to unite the ‘space of place’ with an international environmental citizenship; (iv) critically mobilising market analogues and promotional media integral to the neoliberal market reform of public sector healthcare provision and, in so doing, occupying a radical riposte to the entrepreneurial self and marketized morals of neoliberalism’s homo economicus consumer citizen. In these and many other examples, this book argues that Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral exemplifies the possibilities of kairos as a condition and consequence of the politics, visual media and culture of new social movements.

The Aesthetics of Global Protest
The Aesthetics of Global Protest

Author: Aidan McGarry

Publisher: Protest and Social Movements

Published: 2019-12-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789463724913

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Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative.

The Art of Protest
The Art of Protest

Author: T. V. Reed

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2019-01-22

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 1452958653

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A second edition of the classic introduction to arts in social movements, fully updated and now including Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and new digital and social media forms of cultural resistance The Art of Protest, first published in 2006, was hailed as an “essential” introduction to progressive social movements in the United States and praised for its “fluid writing style” and “well-informed and insightful” contribution (Choice Magazine). Now thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of T. V. Reed’s acclaimed work offers engaging accounts of ten key progressive movements in postwar America, from the African American struggle for civil rights beginning in the 1950s to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century. Reed focuses on the artistic activities of these movements as a lively way to frame progressive social change and its cultural legacies: civil rights freedom songs, the street drama of the Black Panthers, revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, poetry in women’s movements, the American Indian Movement’s use of film and video, anti-apartheid rock music, ACT UP’s visual art, digital arts in #Occupy, Black Lives Matter rap videos, and more. Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic expression, Reed reveals how activism profoundly shapes popular cultural forms. For students and scholars of social change and those seeking to counter reactionary efforts to turn back the clock on social equality and justice, the new edition of The Art of Protest will be both informative and inspiring.

Image operations
Image operations

Author: Jens Eder

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2016-12-14

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1526108658

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Still and moving images are crucial factors in contemporary political conflicts. They not only have representational, expressive or illustrative functions, but also augment and create significant events. Beyond altering states of mind, they affect bodies and often life or death is at stake. Various forms of image operations are currently performed in the contexts of war, insurgency and activism. Photographs, videos, interactive simulations and other kinds of images steer drones to their targets, train soldiers, terrorise the public, celebrate protest icons, uncover injustices, or call for help. They are often parts of complex agential networks and move across different media and cultural environments. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the role and function of images in political life. Balancing theoretical reflections with in-depth case studies, it brings together renowned scholars and activists from different fields to offer a multifaceted critical perspective on a crucial aspect of contemporary visual culture.

Generation Occupy
Generation Occupy

Author: Michael Levitin

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2023-09-19

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 164009556X

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The fight for a $15 minimum wage. Nationwide teacher strikes. Bernie Sanders’s political revolution and the rise of AOC. Black Lives Matter. #MeToo. Read how the Occupy movement helped reshape American politics, culture and the groundbreaking movements to follow. "Fluidly written . . . Levitin’s enthusiasm is infectious . . . It is no exaggeration to say that Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots changed a good deal more of the landscape than Zuccotti Park’s three-quarters of an acre in New York’s financial district." —Tod Gitlin, The New York Times Book Review On the ten-year anniversary of the Occupy movement, Generation Occupy sets the historical record straight about the movement’s lasting impacts. Far from a passing phenomenon, Occupy Wall Street marked a new era of social and political transformation, reigniting the labor movement, remaking the Democratic Party and reviving a culture of protest that has put the fight for social, economic, environmental and racial justice at the forefront of a generation. The movement changed the way Americans see themselves and their role in the economy through the language of the 99 versus the 1 percent. But beyond that, in its demands for fairness and equality, Occupy reinvigorated grassroots activism, inaugurating a decade of youth-led resistance movements that have altered the social fabric, from Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock to March for Our Lives, the Global Climate Strikes and #MeToo. Bookended by the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, Generation Occupy attempts to help us understand how we got to where we are today and how to draw on lessons from Occupy in the future.

The Occupiers
The Occupiers

Author: Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0199313911

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In the fall of 2011, motivated by the lack of a meaningful response to the global financial crisis and a paralysis of democratic politics, a small group of protesters gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York City. The Occupy Wall Street movement would go on to inspire camps in nearly 1,500 towns and cities, all of which were ultimately forcibly evicted by police. Without illusion but with solid evidence, The Occupiers answers fundamental questions about the movement and serves as a corrective to some common myths and misconceptions on both ends of the political spectrum.

Visual Culture
Visual Culture

Author: Margarita Dikovitskaya

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780262042246

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Drawing on interviews, responses to questionnaires, and oral histories by U.S.

Strike Art
Strike Art

Author: Yates McKee

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2016-03-08

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 1784781894

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The collision of activism and contemporary art, from the Seattle protests to Occupy and beyond The collision of activism and contemporary art, from the Seattle protests to Occupy and beyond What is the relation of art to the practice of radical politics today? Strike Art explores this question through the historical lens of Occupy, an event that had artists at its core. Precarious, indebted, and radicalized, artists redirected their creativity from servicing the artworld into an expanded field of organizing in order to construct of a new—if internally fraught—political imaginary set off against the common enemy of the 1%. In the process, they called the bluff of a contemporary art system torn between ideals of radical critique, on the one hand, and an increasing proximity to Wall Street on the other—oftentimes directly targeting major art institutions themselves as sites of action. Tracking the work of groups including MTL, Not an Alternative, the Illuminator, the Rolling Jubilee, and G.U.L.F, Strike Art shows how Occupy ushered in a new era of artistically-oriented direct action that continues to ramify far beyond the initial act of occupation itself into ongoing struggles surrounding labor, debt, and climate justice, concluding with a consideration of the overlaps between such work and the aesthetic practices of the Black Lives Matter movement. Art after Occupy, McKee suggests, contains great potentials of imagination and action for a renewed left project that are still only beginning to ripen, at once shaking up and taking flight from the art system as we know it.

Discard Studies
Discard Studies

Author: Max Liboiron

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-05-24

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0262369516

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An argument that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. Discard studies is an emerging field that looks at waste and wasting broadly construed. Rather than focusing on waste and trash as the primary objects of study, discard studies looks at wider systems of waste and wasting to explore how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued or devalued, becoming dominant or disposable. In this book, Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky argue that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. They show how the theories and methods of discard studies can be applied in a variety of cases, many of which do not involve waste, trash, or pollution. Liboiron and Lepawsky consider the partiality of knowledge and offer a theory of scale, exploring the myth that most waste is municipal solid waste produced by consumers; discuss peripheries, centers, and power, using content moderation as an example of how dominant systems find ways to discard; and use theories of difference to show that universalism, stereotypes, and inclusion all have politics of discard and even purification—as exemplified in “inclusive” efforts to broaden the Black Lives Matter movement. Finally, they develop a theory of change by considering “wasting well,” outlining techniques, methods, and propositions for a justice-oriented discard studies that keeps power in view.

Sensible Politics
Sensible Politics

Author: Meg McLagan

Publisher: Mit Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781935408246

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The interaction of politics and the visual in the activities of nongovernmental activists. Political acts are encoded in medial forms--punch holes on a card, images on a live stream, tweets about events unfolding in real time--that have force, shaping people as subjects and forming the contours of what is sensible, legible, and visible. In doing so they define the terms of political possibility and create terrain for political acts. Sensible Politics considers the constitutive role played by aesthetic and performative techniques in the staging of claims by nongovernmental activists. Attending to political aesthetics means focusing not on a disembodied image that travels under the concept of art or visual culture, nor on a preformed domain of the political that seeks subsequent expression in media form. Instead it requires bringing the two realms together into the same analytic frame. A diverse group of contributors, from art historians, anthropologists, and political theorists to artists, filmmakers, and architects, considers the interaction of politics and the visual in such topics as the political consequences of a photograph taken by an Israeli soldier in a Palestinian house in Ramallah; AIDS activism; images of social suffering in Iran; the "forensic architecture" of claims to truth; and the "Make Poverty History" campaign. Transcending disciplines, they trace a broader image complex whereby politics is brought to visibility through the mediation of specific cultural forms that mix the legal and the visual, the hermeneutic and the technical, the political and the aesthetic. Their contributions offer critical insight into the practices of mediation whereby the political becomes manifest.