Abstract
Late in 2011, the Occupy movement shook the U.S. political landscape with a force not achieved by any protest movement since the 1960s. Drawing inspiration from the Arab Spring and national protest movements opposed to post-recession austerity measures, Occupy Wall Street was initiated by a call from Canadian culture-jammers Adbusters for a peaceful occupation of Wall Street. The subsequent occupation of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park brought a sustained, popular mass protest against neoliberal globalization to world capitalism’s financial center.
The popular convergence soon thereafter became a global protest movement as Occupy-inspired demonstrations sprouted in hundreds of locations in over eighty countries. Among them was Occupy Portland, on America’s west coast, the site of research for Renee Guarriello Heath, Courtney Vail Fletcher, and Ricardo Munoz’s edited collection Understanding Occupy from Wall Street to Portland. Heath is an associate professor of communication studies and Fletcher is an assistant professor of communication studies—both at the University of Portland—and Munoz is a PhD student in communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Organized into three sections, the collection situates Occupy in a global context, interrogates the operation of the movement at the micro level in Portland, and examines local media representations of the protest. The topics addressed by the first of these sections, titled “Situating Occupy Globally: The Cultural and Economic Context,” provide readers with a wide frame through which to understand Occupy Portland’s convergence. However, the chapters in this section restate histories and themes that are likely to be familiar to many readers already. It is in the two subsequent sections, where Occupy Portland itself is examined, that the collection is most compelling.
Over the four chapters of the second section, the various contributors deliver a nicely targeted exploration of the internal operation of Occupy Portland. Munoz’s and Heath’s contributions are particularly compelling: Munoz describes the Occupy movement’s determination to work in a genuinely participatory way, with decision-making occurring horizontally among the people involved, rather than vertically as it would if it were left to a conventional leadership group. But the creation and maintenance of Occupy’s horizontal organizational structure was massively challenging: not only did those present have to develop new communication frameworks to support this way of working, but they also had to do it in an environment charged with emotions, and with the constant threat of intervention by police. The nuanced ethnography Munoz delivers on these matters is the outcome of participant-observation; he researched the movement while fully taking part in Occupy Portland.
Addressing similar themes, Heath’s research explores some of the pitfalls inherent to participatory organizing of the kind in operation: groups that appear to have no hierarchy may actually be masking an unequal distribution of power within them, whereas decision-making through mass assemblies can be chaotic and ineffective, making ever-present the danger that mob rule and not meaningful strategic thinking will take over. However, Heath argues, the communication processes and organizing strategies developed by Occupy Portland largely avoided the pitfalls that could have defeated it. Ultimately, it appears to have taught a “whole new generation of people how to slow down conversation, listen, interact, honor diversity, and make decisions together.”
The third section of the collection explores how Occupy Portland was depicted by local news media, characterized by Portland’s mayor, and how protest participants communicated among themselves using social media. Here, the most compelling contribution is a modest study by Jennette Lovejoy and Keeler Brynteson that explores how the protest was reported by two local newspapers. For their study, the researchers tracked the types of stories generated by the two papers in question, concluding that while one of the papers was more sympathetic to the protest than the other, the majority of articles by both focused on episodic, day-to-day features of the protest rather than exploring the larger issues behind it. This study delivers useful evidence of how the institutional organization and daily routines of news organizations structure and ultimately distort the way protest movements are reported.
Overall, Understanding Occupy from Wall Street to Portland is strongest in chapters where contributors closely follow the contours of Occupy Portland to deliver ethnography-derived insight into the Occupy movement and the immediate environment within which it operated. The collection’s only weakness is that it does not present more contour-following research of this kind. For readers who are unfamiliar with the history of Portland’s activist community, Occupy’s pre-history in the city or its aftermath, or how the occupation evolved over its thirty-eight days, the collection could present a more rounded and thicker description than it does.
Did the Occupy movement die with the clearing of Zuccotti Park and the other Occupy protest sites? Many in this collection argue that it did not. Among them is Doug Tewksbury, who notes that Occupy catalyzed the creation of dozens of still active “smaller collectives and interest groups focused on more narrowly defined goals such as debt, banking reform, community service, or hurricane relief.” For communication, political science, or social movement scholars or students, as for those who are now continuing Occupy’s work in other arenas, Understanding Occupy from Wall Street to Portland presents a useful sociological description of Occupy Portland and its communication and consensus-building successes, as well as a cogent analysis of some of the rewards and challenges that accompany Occupy’s participatory, leaderless model of social movement organizing.