Abstract
Do uninvolved bystanders care about political protest? If so, how do they become psychologically engaged? Some theories of bystander publics emphasize their disinterest in politics; others stress their potential to be recruited through a resonant framing. Strauss shows that neither model explains the unemployed Californians she interviewed about the Occupy movement. Their positive or negative sentiments drew upon differing, affectively imbued cultural schemas that filled out sketchy media reports of Occupy’s message and tactics. Psychological investment in the Occupy movement also depended upon the identities, beliefs, and memories in individuals’ personal semantic networks, as Strauss illustrates by contrasting the outlooks of two working-class African American men, one of whom distrusted and the other of whom believed in the American political system.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for comments by an anonymous reviewer, as well as Zsuzsa Berend, Nina Eliasoph, Jack Friedman, Ian Hansen, Lee Munroe, Paul Lichterman, Susan Seymour, Peter Stromberg, Yue Yang, the participants in USC’s Politics, Ethnography, Organizations and Theory seminar, and the audience at Pitzer’s Marquis Salon, March 7, 2017. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 1230534 and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
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Strauss, C. (2018). Engaged by the Spectacle of Protest: How Bystanders Became Invested in Occupy Wall Street. In: Strauss, C., Friedman, J. (eds) Political Sentiments and Social Movements. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72341-9_2
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