The Occupy Assembly

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 702-731 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Lila Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Exchange System ◽  
Group Agency ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
The World

A key feature of the Occupy movement has been the General Assembly (GA), in which participants, gathered in outdoor public space, engaged in emergent forms of direct deliberative democratic practice. GAs created opportunities for renewed, co-constructed discourses about human rights, collectivity and autonomy, and the nature of fairness. The physical, durative occupation of public space and establishment of encampments enabled participants to converse and collaborate meaningfully about these matters and their implications for action. An attested ideology of horizontalism was produced and reflected in practices of decision-making within a direct participatory democratic framework. The generation of local intersubjectivity and global solidarity as well as the embodied augmentation of personal and group agency were lodged within face-to-face interactions at Occupy GAs. Participants developed and adapted specific embodied tools for assembly use, including hand signals and the human mic, to facilitate a discursive praxis of egalitarianism within the context of a speech exchange system suited to a large outdoor deliberative body. These practices are central to the Occupy movement, as they constitute the discursive experiments in direct democracy set in motion by a shared recognition of social crisis and systemic injustice felt increasingly around the world. This paper examines how several embodied practices at Occupy Los Angeles attend to participants’ attested ideologies and the practical problems of open, large-group direct democracy.

Mobilities of a linguistic landscape at Los Angeles City Hall Park

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian W. Chun
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
City Hall ◽  
Online Social Media

In this article, I expand a category of linguistic landscapes, the signs by individuals in public spaces, to include another form of linguistic landscape even more transgressive in nature and intent: the panoply of protest signs produced and mobilized by the Occupy Movement during the Fall of 2011 at Los Angeles City Hall Park. My data are drawn from the photographs I took of these signs at the Park and the near vicinity, a YouTube video of a protest sign, a blog commenting on this sign, and a political cartoon using the same image featured on two other signs. I explore how social actors drew upon and mediated specific discourses in their protest signs that became transportable across time and space, the role of these signs in transforming public space, and this linguistic landscape’s ensuing mobilities in its mediated relocations to online social media sites and blogs.

Identity as space

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dionysis Goutsos ◽  
George Polymeneas
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
Corpus Linguistic ◽  
Linguistic Methods

The paper studies the textual, discursive and social practices of the Greek “aganaktismeni” (indignados) movements, which mainly took place in the public gathering of tens of thousands of Greeks in Syntagma Square, outside the Greek parliament from May to August 2011. Data come from multiple sources, including the General Assembly proceedings and resolutions, while a linguistically-informed approach is followed, which combines Critical Discourse Analysis concepts with corpus linguistic methods. It is argued that the Syntagma protests generated a new context in Greek politics, by introducing new genres and the innovative articulation of already existing discourses. It was also found that social/political identities and social/public space were co-articulated, since the identity of the movement was crucially constructed in terms of space.

scholarly journals Credentialism and demand for private supplementary tutoring

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pubali Ghosh ◽  
Mark Bray
Keyword(s):  
Design Methodology ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
On Demand ◽  
The World ◽  
Main Driver ◽  
The Impact ◽  
To Receive

Purpose Private supplementary tutoring is expanding fast around the world. Recognising that examination boards are major shapers of curricular load, the purpose of this paper is to identify the roles of examination boards at Grades 8, 9 and 10 in Bengaluru, India. Two boards were chosen, with one having a heavier perceived curricular load than the other. Design/methodology/approach The study used mixed methods with a questionnaire survey of 687 students in Grades 8, 9 and 10, and 51 face-to-face, semi-structured interviews. Findings Perhaps surprisingly, the findings did not reveal significant differences in tutoring demand by students. Both groups viewed the board examinations as having high stakes, and accordingly invested in extensive private tutoring. Competition emanating from credentialism was the main driver of the decision to receive tutoring among both cohorts. Originality/value Although previous studies have explored various components of demand for tutoring, to the authors’ knowledge, this is the first to explore the impact of examination boards on demand for tutoring. Since the system of schools being affiliated to examination boards is common not only in India but also in many other countries, the study has broad international relevance.

Mobilities of a linguistic landscape at Los Angeles City Hall Park

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-674 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
City Hall ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Mediated Discourse

In this article, I expand a category of linguistic landscapes, the signs by individuals in public spaces, to include another form of linguistic landscape even more transgressive in nature and intent: the panoply of protest signs produced and mobilized by the Occupy Movement during the Fall of 2011 at Los Angeles City Hall Park. My data are drawn from the photographs I took of these signs at the Park and the near vicinity, a YouTube video of a protest sign, a blog commenting on this sign, and a political cartoon using the same image featured on two other signs. I explore how social actors drew upon and mediated specific discourses in their protest signs that became transportable across time and space, the role of these signs in transforming public space, and this linguistic landscape’s ensuing mobilities in its mediated relocations to online social media sites and blogs. Keywords: linguistic landscapes; space; mobility; allusion; social media; mediated discourse analysis; Occupy Movement

scholarly journals Framing Effects in Museum Narratives: Objectivity in Interpretation Revisited

2016 ◽  
Vol 79 ◽  
pp. 295-318
Author(s):  
Anna Bergqvist
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Framing Effects ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Philosophical Significance ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

AbstractMuseums establish specific contexts, framings, which distinguish them from viewing the world face-to-face. One striking aspect of exhibition in so-called participatory museums is that it echoes and transforms the limits of its own frame as a public space. I argue that it is a mistake to think of the meaning of an exhibit as either determined by the individual viewer's narrative or as determined by the conception as presented in the museum's ‘authoritative’ narrative. Instead I deploy the concept of a model of comparison to illuminate the philosophical significance of perspective in understanding the idea of objectivity in museum narratives.

Loss of organizational solidarity in three kibbutz factories

2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (5/6) ◽  
pp. 358-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaffa Moskovich
Keyword(s):  
Working Conditions ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Work Conditions ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Qualitative Investigation ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Flexible Working ◽  
The World ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the loss of solidarity in three kibbutz factories as an outcome of the process of privatization in their kibbutz communities. Design/methodology/approach – The research was a qualitative investigation, including interviews in three factories. Findings – The research found high a sense of vertical and horizontal solidarity before the privatization. The solidarity stemmed from socialistic principles of the kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz) and their factories functioned as an extension of the kibbutz clan: close inter-personal relationships, a devotion to collective needs and democratic decision making in the kibbutz general assembly directly influencing the factories. After the privatization, the organizational solidarity decreased because of formal and procedural issues: the factory became hierarchical, work conditions deteriorated and the familiar spirit of the clan vanished. Research limitations/implications – There are more than 130 kibbutz factories, most of them in privatized kibbutzim. This paper presents only three of those factories, so it can only represent preliminary and partial findings. It is important to extend this research to examine other kibbutz factories. Practical implications – The research suggests how factories, in kibbutzim and throughout the world, could respond to weak organizational solidarity: to increase trust and cooperation between management, to create flexible working conditions and to achieve higher productivity. Originality/value – This is the first study to focus on kibbutz enterprises through the sociological lens of the solidarity theory. Previously, most post-privatization research has focussed on economic questions of profitability.

scholarly journals Face to Facelessness: Imagined Intimacies and Socially Distant Desires

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Fossey
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Text Messages ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Digital Devices ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
Falling In Love

This paper revisits a performance titled Falling in Love Again - and Again which was first performed in 2014 as part of a series of works I created questioning relational intimacy and proximity in public space. During Falling in Love Again - and Again participants were invited to explore public space with the intention of anonymously falling in love with strangers. The details of these encounters were shared with me as the leader of the piece via mobile phone text messages, but never with the subjects of the participants' desires.  Understanding the dynamics of intimacy and proximity in 2014 was a very different experience to how I understand them in 2021. The Covid-19 pandemic, social distancing, and two periods of lockdown has drastically influenced how relationality and physically being in the world with others is performed.  This paper is concerned both with the intimate and proximate dynamics of relational bodies during that performance as I understood it then, and, as a consequence, how we might understand relational proximity and intimacy now.Critical points of departure for the paper include art historian Grant Kester's writing on conversational art practices and his framing of dialogic encounters through the use of Jeffrey T. Nealon's Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (1998).  Models of 'dialogical' experience and 'responsibility', as situated by Mikhail Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas respectively (Nealon, 1998, cited in Kester, 2004, 118) are used in this article to frame a rethinking of the dynamics and ethics of face to face contact and physical proximity, as bodies in space maintain distance from one another, connected only by our digital devices and our imaginations.  The voyeuristic practices of Sophie Calle and Vito Acconci converge with theatre makers Forced Entertainment's 'writing over' of place (Kaye, 2000) to explore imaginary relational connectivity.  The writing of geographer Doreen Massey supports this framing through the use of Massey's thoughts on the fictional poetics of social interactions and 'stories so far' (Massey, 2005).  Ultimately the paper asks what happens when we are required to imagine being with others in physically distant and imaginary ways with only our mobile devices as depositories for our fictional desires. 

Global drug control norms will shift

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Control Policy ◽  
Drug Control ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The World ◽  
Drug Policies ◽  
Un General Assembly

Subject Shift in the global fight against drugs. Significance UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will convene a UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the World Drug Problem in 2016. The last UNGASS on the World Drug Problem was held in 1998. A ten-year review of global drug policies had previously been scheduled for 2019, but insistence by Mexico, Colombia and Nicaragua brought the session forward. Pro-reform countries are pushing to reframe UN drug policy around reducing social and economic harms of drugs, rather than eliminating their use. Impacts UN drug control policy is likely to be re-centred around development, human rights and health, as well as law enforcement. After marijuana legalisation in some states, US authorities may reiterate their call for "flexibility" in interpreting UN drug conventions. Harm reduction programmes that stem HIV/AIDS transmission among injecting drug users will gain increased international acceptance.

Uncountable Matter

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-41
Author(s):  
Jacques Lezra
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Human Hand ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Animal

Humanism returns for the New Materialism in ‘nonhuman’ form as matter. New ‘matter’ and new materialism thus fashion the world to human advantage in the gesture of abjecting us. They commit us to the humanism of masochists. They offer an animistic and paradisiacal realm of immediate transactions, human to human, human to and with nonhuman, face to face, world without end. The impulse is tactically and strategically useful. But ‘matter’ will not help us if we fashion it so that it bears in its concept the signature of a human hand in its making. Can we do otherwise? Only by conceiving matter as what absolutizes what is not-one: matter from which no discipline will normally, normatively, produce an object or take its concept; on which heroical abjection will founder; matter non-human in ways the human animal can neither designate, nor ever count.

Occupy Movement, Religion and Social Formations

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-24
Author(s):  
Matt Sheedy
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Opportunity ◽  
Social Formation ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
Political Opportunity Structures

The Occupy movement was an unprecedented social formation that spread to approximate 82 countries around the globe in the fall of 2011 via social media through the use of myths, symbols and rituals that were performed in public space and quickly drew widespread mainstream attention. In this paper I argue that the movement offers a unique instance of how discourse functions in the construction of society and I show how the shared discourses of Occupy were taken-up and shaped in relation to the political opportunity structures and interests of those involved based on my own fieldwork at Occupy Winnipeg. I also argue that the Occupy movement provides an example of how we might substantively attempt to classify “religion” by looking at how it embodied certain metaphysical claims while contrasting it with the beliefs and practices of more conventionally defined “religious” communities.

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