Abstract
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a sudden irruption of otherness into the mundane hustle and bustle of our downtown academic lives. We will use many clashing metaphors in this book as we struggle to understand what happened, but our first is that OWS represented a kind of kairos moment—a quickening, a turning upside down, a heterochronos, a time of difference. A bland, colorless, sparse park, just blocks from our campus, became a festival of vitality, difference, conflict, discourse, friction, art, music, culture. Pace University became part of the landscape of Occupation, part of the terrain of contestation. We marched with our colleagues through the surrounding streets, plazas, and bridges that had long seemed quiet, unremarkable. Police positioned themselves on our steps, looked out from our rooftops, and stationed their horses along our street. Students snapped photos of Occupiers marching across the Brooklyn Bridge from high up in their freshman dormitory, Maria’s Tower. They visited Zuccotti Park—now Liberty Square—with trepidation, exhilaration, disgust, and excitement. Reporters who had long ignored our research, suddenly wanted to talk to us. Three Pace students ended up on MTV’s Real World Occupy Wall Street.
I have never seen a political or a social movement catch fire this fast … I really want to encourage you to not let this moment slip by … Let’s not lose the moment!
—Michael Moore, at the 2012 Left Forum at Pace University
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Notes
Nathan Schneider, “No Leaders, No Violence: What Diversity of Tactics Means for Occupy Wall Street,” in This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement, eds. Sarah Gelder & YES! Magazine (San Francisco: BerrettKoehler Publishers, 2011), 42–43.
C.f. Mark Hemingway, “Happy Hour: The End of Occupy Wall Street?” The Weekly Standard, October 13, 2011, www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/happy-hour-end-occupy-wall-street—595853.html, accessed June 18, 2011
Guy Horton, “The Death of Occupy Wall Street?” The Huffington Post, November 15, 2011, www.huffingtonpost.com/guy-horton/the-death-of-occupy-wall-_b_1094358.html, accessed June 18, 2012.
Ben Vitelli, “Reports of Occupy’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated,” June 10, 2012, http://occupywallst.org/article/reports-occupys-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerate/, accessed June 18, 2012.
Ezra Klein and David Graeber, “You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature,” The Washington Post, October 3, 2011, www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/youre-creating-a-vision-of-the-sort-of-society-you-want-to-have-in-miniature/2011/08/25/gIQAXVg7HL—blog. html, accessed June 18, 2012.
Walter Russell Mead, “OWS RIP,” The American Interest, May 16, 2012, http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/05/16/ows-rip/, accessed June 18, 2012.
For an excellent overview of OWS’s beginnings, see: Mattathias Schwartz, “Preoccupied: The Origins and Future of Occupy Wall Street,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2011, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128fa_fact_schwartz, accessed June 19, 2012.
NYCGA, “Principles of Solidarity,” September 23, 2011, www.nycga.net/resources/principles-of-solidarity/,accessed May 25, 2012. These principles continued to be discussed and were amended in February 2012.
NYCGA, “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” September 29, 2011, www.nycga.net/resources/declaration, accessed May 25, 2012.
Jeff Mason and Alister Bull, “Obama Chides Banks, Taps Anger over Wall Street” Reuters, October 6, 2011, www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/06/us-obama-idUSN1E7950UK20111006, accessed June 19, 2012.
Charles Rile, “Occupy Wall Street… mansions,” CNNMoney, October 12, 2011, http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/10/news/economy/occupy_wall_street_protest /index.htm, accessed June 19, 2012.
Nikki Waller, “Mayor: Political Pressure Forced Brookfield to Back Down,” The Wall Street Journal, October 14, 201 1,http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2011/10/14/ mayor-political-pressure-forced-brookfield-to-back-down, accessed June 19, 2012.
Credit Union National Association, “Hundreds of Thousands of Consumers, Billions of $$ Move to Credit Unions,” November 3, 2011, http://cuna.org/public/press/press-release/issues/hundreds-thousands-of-consumers-billio nsof-$$-move-credit-unions, accessed June 19, 2012.
Dominique Debucquoy Dodley and Jesse Solomon, “50 Arrested in Occupy Wall Street Demonstration,” CNN, December 18, 2011, www.cnn.com/2011/12/17/us/new-york-occupy-arrests, accessed June 19, 2012.
Sarah van Gelder, and YES! Magazine, eds. This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011).
Carla Blumenkranz et al., eds., Occupy! Scenes from an Occupied America (London: Verso, 2011).
Editors of Time Magazine, What is Occupy?: Inside the Global Movement (New York: Time Books, 2011).
Writers for the 99%, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011).
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© 2013 Emily Welty, Matthew Bolton, Meghana Nayak, and Christopher Malone
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Bolton, M., Welty, E., Nayak, M., Malone, C. (2013). Introduction. In: Welty, E., Bolton, M., Nayak, M., Malone, C. (eds) Occupying Political Science. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137277404_1
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