Abstract
Recent global mobilisations have been characterised by innovative ways of appropriating public and media spaces, reclaiming them as territories for contestation and resistance. In particular, the various Occupy movements have offered a new configuration of spatial occupation, both as a physical and a virtual socio-political phenomenon, which is deeply connected with the meaning-making processes of the protest messages. Occupy offers a linguistic-semiotic lens that contributes directly to the development of a multidisciplinary and discursively oriented approach to the identification and classification of the means of resistance in specific political and iconic spaces, as well as the complex interplay of social, spatial and communicative practices conducted in them.
The book comprises seven chapters. The Introduction, by Martín Rojo, discusses the composition, trajectories and objectives of the various Occupy movements analysed in the following chapters, together with the historical, cultural and local variations in occupation patterns. Martín Rojo draws on the ideas of Henri Lefebvre to provide a common framework for analysis; for example, the distinction between physical and representational spaces is stressed in order to explain how main squares and city centres are experienced and transformed by the demonstrators through occupation, becoming counter-spaces against hegemonic and institutional power. Regarding methods, the author presents the models and techniques applied throughout the book, which are adapted and reframed with an international and situated focus, combining ethnographic participation and retrieval of online data such as photographs, proceedings and recordings of assemblies, YouTube videos, and posts and comments on Facebook. Chapters 2–7 are devoted to specific analyses of Occupy movements in five different countries.
In Chapter 2, Aboelezz analyses the 2011 Egyptian Revolution through the Tahrir Square protests in Cairo. A geosemiotics approach is applied in order to explore the relationship between the discourse of protest messages and the square as space, demonstrating how these acted in a mutually reinforcing manner. Six conceptual frames for the space of Tahrir Square are identified: symbolic space, central space, spiritual space, playful counter-space, ‘Arab’ space and glocal space. Chapter 3, by Martín Rojo, discusses the 15-M or Indignados movement that occupied Puerta del Sol in Madrid and analogous spaces in many other Spanish cities. The chapter combines critical sociolinguistics and discourse studies to explore how changes in the conditions of production and circulation of linguistic practices contribute to the processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of space, by means of which protesters replace traditional organisations and ways of doing politics with their own beliefs, ideologies and communicative practices. The author identifies the semiotic and linguistic resources and the communicative strategies present in the encampments, among them the personalisation and individualisation of messages, physical realisations and mobility, multilingualism and polyphony, and resemiotisation and transmedia practices.
In Chapter 4, Chun reviews the Occupy movement in Los Angeles (OLA) in the fall of 2011. The author observes the linguistic landscape constructed by OLA through a multimodal and mediated discourse analysis, arguing that the dissemination of OLA protest signs in blogs and videos extended the physical spaces in which they were presented into the spatial networks and platforms of social media. Steinberg’s Chapter 6 addresses OLA as well, focusing on issues of large-group interaction and participants’ ideologies of horizontalism and egalitarianism, which the author sees as encouraging new means of embodied participation of assembly members within the spatial and political ecology of a public city park. Taking a microethnographic approach, the analysis depicts how this movement developed and adapted specific embodied tools for assembly use, including hand signals and the human (or people’s) mic.
Chapter 5, by Goutsos and Polymeneas, is devoted to the public gatherings of the Greek aganaktismenoi (‘outraged’) movements in Syntagma Square between May and August of 2011. The authors investigate the contextual configurations of discursive and textual practices to understand how participants’ socio-political identities are articulated with socio-political spaces. Through the development of a linguistically informed approach, which unites critical discourse analysis with corpus linguistic methods, the authors demonstrate how Syntagma protests generated a new context in Greek politics by introducing new genres combined with already existing discourses. In the seventh and last chapter, García Agustín and Aguirre Díaz analyse the ‘GenkiDama for Education’ developed by the 2011 Chilean students’ movement in the centre of Santiago de Chile. They show the uses of narrative and enunciative spaces to create an alternative way of interpreting and participating in the struggles between Chilean students and the government. Through a methodology inspired in the sociology of narrative, and highlighting the distinction between hegemonic tales and subversive stories, the authors observe how students emphasised their manga fan identities to act as textual poachers, capable of altering the meanings of the spatial order through creative and transgressive ways of spatial appropriation.
Occupy is an invitation to follow an epistemological and ideological journey from the position of researchers and activists, considering new objects and analytic perspectives for examining the interplay between space and communicative practices of social movements. The studies in this volume promote an in-depth understanding of the voices, actions and representations of the demonstrators on one hand, and on the other the conditions of globalisation and technological mutability that affect the new ways of taking political action in the interconnected physical and virtual spaces. It is a remarkably accurate and up-to-date book, blazing a new trail in the field of discourse studies that presents both theoretical and methodological challenges: opening the language sciences and the social sciences to new approaches; designing multi-semiotic, geospatial and geo-referenced techniques for data collection and analysis; and developing easier ways to transmit and spread findings and to maintain a constant dialogue with citizens.