Encountering Home: A Contemporary Archaeology of Homelessness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Singleton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
Blow Up ◽  
Homeless Population ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Private Institutions ◽  
Public Parks ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Banking Institutions

On 17 September 2011 people flooded Zuccotti Park inManhattan’s Downtown Financial District to protest multinational corporations and major banking institutions. Protestors left their houses and established encampments in public parks in over a hundred cities across America to live in solidarity as the ‘99%’. The 99% were ready for conflict between citizen and state, public and private institutions, but they did not expect the conflict that erupted within the encampments between protestors and local homeless populations. Despite the fact that protestors were living ‘homeless’ for symbolic and political purposes, they had not anticipated how to handle the homeless communities who they actively displaced and engaged in the service of their politics. As they pitched their tents, strung up tarpaulins, established communal kitchens, and inflated blow-up mattresses the 99% encountered the already-present local homeless population: people who were both known and unfamiliar, but who were meant to remain hidden and invisible. Cities where the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) had a strong and quick start had more problems regarding homelessness than cities where the movement started later, but all Occupy protesters realized homelessness was an issue that had to be confronted (Ehrenreich 2011). Austin and Tampa, for example, used homelessness as the central organizing issue, one that could be easily grasped as a human circumstance with universal appeal. This was primarily because these cities were able to anticipate incidents that had arisen in New York, Denver, and Portland (see AP 2011; Nagourney 2011). Conflicts that first occurred in these cities allowed for later responses to be more proactive, and they subsequently positioned homelessness as a universalizing issue that everyone could rally behind (Ehrenreich 2011). In Denver, Portland, Boston, and New York City protestors expressed fear and apprehension towards the homeless, calling them ‘protest imposters’, ‘freeloaders’, and ‘rapists and gropers of females’ (Algar 2011; Huffington Post 2011a, 2011b; Occupy Wall Street 2011). One New York protestor stated that the homeless were ‘mentally ill and out-of-control’ (Algar 2011). The responses of the Occupy protesters at Zuccotti Park were rooted in a belief that there was a fundamental distinction between themselves and the homeless with whom they lived side-by-side and shared the same materials and spaces.

Privatization and Protest: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Toronto, and the Occupation of Public Space in a Democracy

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Kohn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Collective Control ◽  
The People ◽  
Institutional Structures

This article examines the legal and normative debates about the Occupy Toronto movement in order to illuminate the issues raised by Occupy Wall Street. It challenges the view that the occupation of parks and plazas was an illegitimate privatization of public space. In both New York City and Toronto, the courts relied on a theory that Habermas called “German Hobbesianism.” This sovereigntist theory of the public was used to justify removing the protesters and disbanding the encampments. The alternative is what I call the populist model of the public, a term which describes the political mobilization of the people outside the institutional structures of the state. While my focus is on public space, I suggest the appropriation of space was the most visible aspect of a broader call for collective control of the common wealth of society. In other words, we should understand the occupations synecdochally as struggles over the meaning and power of public and private.

scholarly journals The Organizational Trace of an Insurgent Moment

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 237802311770065 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam D. Reich
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
York City ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Formal Organizations ◽  
Movement Organizations ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between social movements and formal organizations has long been a concern to scholars of collective action. Many have argued that social movement organizations (SMOs) provide resources that facilitate movement emergence, while others have highlighted the ways in which SMOs institutionalize or coopt movement goals. Through an examination of the relationship between Occupy Wall Street and the field of SMOs in New York City, this article illustrates a third possibility: that a moment of insurgency becomes a more enduring movement in part through the changes it induces in the relations among the SMOs in its orbit.

Noise-Making, Occupy Wall Street, and the Politics of Amplification

Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-280
Author(s):  
John Vilanova
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
The Status ◽  
Drum Circles ◽  
Acoustic Device

This research explores a set of sound technologies deployed during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. It examines the People’s Microphone, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) sound cannon, the drum circle, and the noise complaint. Deepening understandings of their places within the contemporary urban soundscape and their use during the protests, it uses historical research, textual analysis, and qualitative discourse analysis methods to explore the technologies within a larger framework of the city’s discourses around (in)appropriate sound and action. Its findings suggest that each individual technology was evidence for the nature of its user in a way that presaged how the conflict would play out. The microphone epitomized the ideology (and fragility) of the hyper-democratic Occupiers’ ethos. The LRAD suggested the state’s superlative sonic capability and its “monopoly on the legitimate use of noise.” And the drum circles and noise complaints that followed ultimately showed the ways “noise-making” is better understood as a discursive construction that delegitimizes sound. Together, they suggest the ways the hegemonic soundscape serves the status quo. The essay also elaborates a taxonomy of sonic terms, specifically exploring volume, amplification, and noise-making as terms that explain the dynamics of sound during protest. It offers scholars of media activism a toolkit for sound studies that gets at the dynamics and structures of sonic power and explores the way sound-making is a key battleground of modernity. Sound conventions are a way that contemporary society is codified, legislated, and contested.

New Wind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Cornell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
York City ◽  
College Graduates ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
World War ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
New Generation

Something of a revolution in anarchist thought occurred during the 1940s and early 1950s, much of it centered in New York City. World War II divided the small contingent of U.S. anarchists active during the Depression years, as many movement veterans reluctantly endorsed the Allies as the only viable means of defeating fascism. However, a new generation of activists -- many of them recent college graduates -- established journals and organizations that rejected participation in the war, often on pacifist grounds, and that began to reevaluate central tenets of anarchist theory. This chapter explores the milieu that developed in New York City, Woodstock, NY, and rural New Jersey at mid-century, focusing on three "little magazines" that supported and influenced one another: Politics, Why?, and Retort. Although anarchism was at a numerical nadir during these years, a tight-knit community of artists, theorists, and radical pacifists developed ideas, tactics, and aesthetics that reshaped anarchism so fundamentally that they remain prominent today in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

‘Have a Quiet, Orderly, Polite Revolution’: Framing Political Protest and Protecting the Status Quo

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 733-751
Author(s):  
Tamara J. Lynn ◽  
L. Susan Williams
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Print Media ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
The Status

This paper demonstrates how print media sources frame the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in ways that, consciously or not, support the prevailing status quo – social, economic, and political elites. The study employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the analytic framework, investigating how print media (sometimes referred to as ‘print capitalism’) utilized framing techniques that disparaged the two political organizations but in very different ways. The analysis incorporates articles appearing in the New York Post and the New York Times from the inception of each organization, through six weeks after the 2012 Presidential Inauguration; articles were coded to uncover themes that defined both organizations as ‘outsiders.’ Tea Partiers are characterized as irrational demagogues, while Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activities are criminalized; both are dismissed as irrelevant, leaving the predominant ‘mainstream’ political rule intact. Findings identify tools of discourse used by media to limit the influence of competing movements while essentially protecting the status quo. Revealing these tools provides clues to unreliable discourse in media coverage of presidential candidates, which tends to quash open debate and threaten principles of participatory government.

The Influence of Anarchism in Occupy Wall Street

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Gautney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Party Affiliation ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
Social Wealth ◽  
Primary Form

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a massive protest movement calling for radical social change and an end to unbridled corruption. OWS emerged in September 2011 in New York with highly confrontational demonstrations against the Wall Street banks, and a small encampment in the city’s financial district. Within weeks, hundreds of local camps emerged throughout the U.S., along with ongoing series of vehement, decentralized protest actions. Much to the chagrin of the American political establishment, OWS operates as an elusive and flexible, “leaderless” organization, without a centralized authority or party affiliation, and uses occupation as a primary form of protest. This paper looks at the ways in which the movements’ leaderless organization and egalitarian social vision were/are deeply influenced by anarchist principles like anti-authoritarianism (anti-statism), anti-capitalism, direct action, and prefiguration. It then discusses attempts by Occupy camps, such as those in New York, Philadelphia, and Oakland, to repossess spaces, rights, and other forms of social wealth within different urban contexts. It analyzes how the Occupy camps, as well as innovations like the General Assemblies, spokescouncils, and social media formations, are transforming urban landscapes and creating new forms of social and political engagement based on anarchist praxis.

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