Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

This article investigates the possible geographies generated in Occupy Wall Street’s emergence and subsequent evictions from multiple sites of occupation. As Occupy Wall Street (OWS) moves into other spaces, most notably the home, we counter the application of a priori analytics of traditional social movement studies, through which OWS would be seen as unified (with leaders, corresponding constituencies, and clearly crafted demands). Instead, we argue for a relational conception of spaces of politics, and emphasize the indeterminate multiplicity that we believe is crucial for ensuring continued critique and agitation. The argument is advanced, first, by considering the theoretical disjuncture between OWS and social movements, and second, by turning to OWS’s geographies of movement and settlement. We conclude by suggesting that, when OWS goes home, it does not retreat from politics. From a relational perspective, the home is itself a space of politics and not a secure, enclosed site to which one returns when the political is left behind.

Part 1 of this manuscript is a dramatization of five rhetorical scenes that take the Occupy phenomenon as a moment to explore features of contemporary social protest and change. Drawing on rhetorical field notes collected over the first two weeks of Occupy Lincoln in Nebraska, we identify how historical tensions between activism and deliberation were both complicated and reasserted as the Occupy moment became a movement. The rhetorical scenes partially replicate actual conversations, though they are remediated through three composite figures:   Anda, a longtime social activist; John, an advocate of democratic deliberation; and Dajuan, an undergraduate organizer of the local Occupy Movement. The footnotes throughout the dramatization anchor scholarly observations in Part 2 of the manuscript, a “footnote essay” which develops the concept of “networked public screens.”

In this brief essay, I describe the right-wiheadingng agenda that comes forward day after day, comes forward as a political assault. Isolating just five arbitrary days, I specify what I see as problematic claims by the right wing and offer alternative counter-narratives. I end by identifying actions I feel I should take to speak back to their agenda.

This essay offers a vision for higher education based on two convergent ideas: (a) that progressives lost the war on education by failing to adequately engage, much less counter, the existing right-wing narrative; and (b) this narrative loss opens the possibility of a creative revolution capable of transforming education. I forward the idea that what is needed in this bleak time of political fear and economic austerity is a rethinking, and reworking, of the role of education and learning through new collaborations, cooperation, and communication between and among academics and practitioners. I offer some existing models of programs modeled on this rethinking, each one designed to address real-world problems and community challenges. I conclude by suggesting that such a creative revolution is not only practical but also perhaps offers us the only real hope for higher education in the foreseeable future.

This article provides an overview of U.S. exceptionalism, the rhetorical habit of portraying the United States as God’s chosen city upon a hill, and thus as a nation better than, stronger than, and more righteous than all others. Linking post-World War II reactions to Communism to post-9/11 reactions to terrorism–with a detour through Mark Twain’s critique of the Spanish-American War and John L. O’Sullivan’s celebration of the Mexican-American War–the essay argues that the habit of invoking U.S. exceptionalism encourages a dangerous form of rhetorical absolutism in which political disagreements are escalated into eschatological threats to life itself, thus justifying a recurring pattern of waging war in the name of nation and God. Despite his promises of Hope and Change, the article finds President Barack Obama particularly susceptible to this rhetorical dynamic. The essay closes with common-sense suggestions for how to begin debunking exceptionalism, hopefully creating space for re-thinking America’s role in the world.