City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, Dec 21, 2016
The occupation of public urban space is a prominent feature in most descriptions of the global wa... more The occupation of public urban space is a prominent feature in most descriptions of the global wave of protests after 2011. This paper examines the occupation of one significant space, New York’s Zuccotti Park, to investigate how first, ‘occupying’ became the central form of practice of what later was called Occupy Wall Street. By reconstructing the habitus of the movement’s core constituency and its resonance with the practice of the occupation, this investigation also explains why it was so difficult for the movement to evolve into other forms. It sketches out how the practice of occupying influenced the cooperation between members of different social classes participating in the protest and compares the development of this occupation to the very different trajectory of the Occupy movement in Germany. It is argued that the US occupation only temporarily overcame obstacles to mobilizing the discontent of those young adults that found themselves biographically blocked from joining the new petty bourgeoisie and to building alliances with other social groups in the USA of the post-recession era. Since the eviction from the park reinforced these obstacles, it triggered a de-mobilizing dynamic.
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First, qualitative approaches have become institutionalized and canonized and have been increasingly translated into English. Second, in conjunction with a heightened interest in theories of practice, constructivism, and post-structuralism, other methods have also gained ground in German-speaking countries, in particular ethnographic
approaches, grounded theory, and discourse analysis, which has resulted in a much broader and diverse qualitative field. Third, this broader spectrum also encompasses the inclusion of new data types, specifically visual data and especially images and films. In the last section, we highlight current challenges and directions for future research.
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First, qualitative approaches have become institutionalized and canonized and have been increasingly translated into English. Second, in conjunction with a heightened interest in theories of practice, constructivism, and post-structuralism, other methods have also gained ground in German-speaking countries, in particular ethnographic
approaches, grounded theory, and discourse analysis, which has resulted in a much broader and diverse qualitative field. Third, this broader spectrum also encompasses the inclusion of new data types, specifically visual data and especially images and films. In the last section, we highlight current challenges and directions for future research.
This presentation argues that alienation might be a lens through which this tension can be fruitfully understood: The Tea Party activists' relation to the world around them is determined by a strong affective investment into the socio-symbolic universe or everyday-religion (Claussen) of the free market capitalism of small producers. This everyday-religion, however, proves to be less and less compatible with the development of their empirical environment, a development that escalated in the Great Recession. However, while the affective (and material) investment of the Tea Party’s core-constituency into this everyday-religion is too strong to be given up or even substantially adjusted, their relative powerlessness and social isolation also prevents its members from formulating a coherent critique of the social developments. Instead, the everyday-religion is stabilized by decoupling it from the empirical environment. The integrity of this symbolic universe is guaranteed by identification with a symbolic authority with which one can align in condemning the whole of the existing as more or less devoid of true meaning. In this world of the conformist rebellion (Adorno), especially an empirically obviously false statement can become, paradoxically, a sign of one’s dedication to the truth.
The presentation illustrates this theoretical perspective with the results of the hermeneutic analysis of a short passage of a discussion conducted with Tea Party activists, and of an image used on a propaganda-pamphlet distributed by the group.
supposedly followed after the ebbing of the last wave, which is associated with the global justice movement.
The stark differences between these two “waves” but also between the different protests of each respective “wave” bring to the forefront
a number of questions concerning the identification of such a transnational wave of contention: Is a wave to be defined by a shared similarity of protests that set them apart from earlier waves of protests? Or is it defined by mutual interconnections, maybe even a shared goal or opponent? And how are these protests to be located in the changing trans- and inter-national landscapes of power? This session welcomes submissions addressing, for example, the following fields of inquiry:
Inter-temporal comparison: differentiating waves of contention.
Inter-local comparison: trans- and inter-national articulation of the
unity of waves of contention.
The eye of the beholder: identification of waves of contention by the
interested observer.
Historical comparison: the changing “transnationality” of waves of
contention.
The paper uses the concept of the socio-spatially determined Habitus, bridging the gap between agency and structure: resonating with the messaging of the respective protest-mobilizations, but in turn also structuring and shaping the development of these very movements. Participant observations in meetings and protests, group discussions and interviews conducted with participants in all four movements are analyzed relying mainly on the hermeneutics of the sociology of knowledge to reconstruct the Habitus as a sedimented body of practical knowledge shared by the participants.
The paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of the development of the movements and the different inner and outer limits they encountered. Why did the Occupy Movement in different parts of the US and other countries follow such different trajectories after 2011? Why did the German counterpart to the Tea Party never gain comparable traction - despite numerous attempts and significant resonance in the media?
The analysis shows that the polarization of the national protests can be understood as resulting from the different ways in which social classes interpret the social contradictions sharpening in the recent years. While this dispositional schism is mirrored on both sides of the Atlantic, the diverging paths the movements took express the different ways in which the crisis affected the national economies.